20 minute read
"A Part of Something That's a Part of Us"
“A Part of Something That’s a Part of Us”
The new generation of Cajun music is woman
Story by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot • Photos by Olivia Perillo
On a recent Monday afternoon, I found mmyself sitting in a circle, jam-session-style, wwith five emerging Cajun musicians— all of them under twenty-five, all of them women. I’d just asked about their influences, their personal superstars. Growing up immersed in the world of Cajun music, who did they model themselves after?
They answered with the classics, of course—the forebears of what we call Cajun and Creole music: Dennis McGee, Canray Fontenot. There were the exciting, Grammy-nominated bands of today: Lost Bayou Ramblers, Corey Ledet, the late Courtney Granger. Adeline Miller, the fiddler among us, cited Mamou Playboy David Greely as an inspiration. There were the talents who taught these women all they know: Brazos Huval, Blake Miller. And there were the icons within their own families: Amelia Powell shared that she can’t help but be partial to the sound of her grandfather’s band The Balfa Brothers; while Renée Reed indicated she instinctively turns to the accordion songs of her grandfather, Harry Trahan. Julie Babineaux smiled as she responded, “My sister,” looking at Gracie just across the circle.
But when Gracie brought up Bonsoir, Catin, everyone started nodding emphatically, releasing “yes!”s and hums of affirmation. “Oh my God, I remember listening to that shit and being like ‘Ohhh!’ It’s this band of women … I mean Christy Guillory on that freaking accordion! Being able to see that … they’re all these beautiful women just throwing it down.”
“Bad. Ass,” Julie agreed.
“I remember just being, like okay … that’s possible,” Gracie went on. “Like I mean, obviously we’re playing music and having a good time. But all the cool—like on all the big stages—it’s a lot of men. Which is fine. But just to see the women!”
It’s a funny time to find Cajun music as a calling, as a young person in the twenty-first century—even growing up in the heart of Acadiana. American pop culture is so very inescapable now, the mainstream layered over everything, taking precedence in our language and our lifeways. And our music.
Where it survives, the Cajun culture does so in vibrant, glorious bursts—pockets of passion for the heart of this place’s past. You either find it, or you don’t. But then, it’s up to you to engage: to learn the stories, the language, the songs. In the origin stories of today’s Cajun musicians, there is always a gift, and there is then always a choice.
For Renée Reed, the gift came entwined in her genes. Hers is a heritage dedicated to the spirit of the Cajun prairie: her great uncle was preservationist Revon Reed, who we have to thank for much of what we remember about what it means to be Cajun. Her grandfather was the legendary accordionist Harry Trahan, who taught his craft to Renée’s mother Lisa, L’esprit Cadien’s accordion player; and her father is multi-instrumentalist and renowned fiddle teacher Mitch Reed, from the Grammy-winning band BeauSoleil.
Reed’s childhood was anchored by her parents’ Saturday jam sessions and busy gig schedules. “And I just remember being kind of bored all the time,” she laughed. “They were like, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I was like, ‘Not a musician.’”
Reed chose music before she chose Cajun music, falling in love with British folk and at age ten pulling her father’s guitar off the wall, spending hours teaching herself to play the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”. Once she could play, to join in on the Cajun jams all around her was inevitable—and today Reed, twenty-four, has cultivated an ethereal musical style all her own, swirling with the influences of Cajun folklore, style, and dialect. Creating something altogether new, sung in a language of old—Reed’s choice to embrace her Cajun identity has resulted in dual degrees in Traditional Music and French from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and a vocation as an internationally-touring singer-songwriter and local music educator, culminating in a full-length album and companion EP that has attracted the attention of NPR, Pitchfork, Guitar.com, and others.
Similarly born into an established musical legacy, Amelia Powell, twenty-one, said that her earliest memories were of hearing Cajun music. “I remember falling asleep on stage, on like the big dance stand when my parents were playing one Saturday night for a festival,” she said. “Sophie, my little sister, and I would set up a little palette and fall asleep in the back corner of the stage.” Powell’s parents are old-time Appalachian-turned-Cajun fiddler and banjo icon Dirk Powell and Christine Balfa—the youngest daughter of Cajun music legend Dewey Balfa, of the Balfa Brothers—and a Grammy-nominated musician in her own right. When Powell was a child, her parents both played in the band Balfa Toujours, which translates to “Balfa Forever”.
People have always told Powell of her responsibility to carry on her parents’ legacy. “I get told that very often, you know, that you’ve got to keep it going, you have to do this. Like a sort of obligation,” she said. “Which used to make me not want to.”
On stages across Acadiana and beyond, these women have been making waves as the leaders of their generation of Cajun musicians. From left to right: Julie Babineaux, Gracie Babineaux, Amelia Powell, Adeline Miller, and Renée Reed.
Olivia Perillo
She had to make the choice on her own, she said. There were several experiences that ultimately inspired it, but she remembers one specific occasion where she envisioned the future she wanted: “We were at Balfa Week”—the week-long music camps hosted by Louisiana Folk Roots, the nonprofit her mom founded—“at Chicot Park, and I was in one of the bunk beds. And I kept waking up, because I heard my parents and their friends on the porch, jamming, all night. Just yelling and singing and having so much fun, and I just remember being in my bed, can’t sleep. I remember this moment of being like ‘This is really cool … I think I want to do that.’ I could see myself being out there when I was older. I wanted to be on the porch.”
Today, she’s on the porch, and on the stage. A vocalist and guitar player, known to pick up the triangle or the fiddle when called to, Powell has been playing locally and touring internationally with her parents and a collective of other Cajun bands since she was twelve, even sharing the stage on occasion with the likes of Joan Baez and contributing vocals to Rhiannon Giddens’ 2017 album Freedom Highway.
Powell emphasized that she holds her particular gift of Cajun music deep in her soul—“When I play music, I feel connected to my PerPer [Dewey] and to the Balfa Brothers,” she said—but the choice was absolutely hers. “I don’t play Cajun music because I came from it. I don’t just play because my parents played it. It really brings me more joy than anything in the world.”
In recent years, Powell has most often been seen playing with her own band, Amis du Teche, with longtime friend and fiddler, Adeline Miller, and Miller’s brother Robert. Powell and Miller met when they were eight years old, playing music at Bayou Teche Brewing, and have maintained a friendship—enriched in no small part by their shared love of Cajun music—ever since.
Miller, twenty-one, traces her gift back to when she was five years old, and had just moved to Breaux Bridge from Westchester, New York. She didn’t come from a family of famous musicians, but she did come from a family of dancers.
Shortly after settling into their new home, the family attended a Cajun jam at the local coffee shop. “Normally when you’re dancing,” she said, “you’re not like studying the musicians. Most of the time, you’re studying your partner, or I’d be listening to my dad trying to teach me the steps. But that was the first time I studied the fiddle player.” He was an older man, in a wheelchair, and he gave her the gift. “I didn’t realize how much he would change my life, but he told me, ‘You can’t play sports forever, you can’t do so many things forever. But one thing you can have forever is music.”
In short order, Miller and her dad started taking group fiddle lessons with Reed’s father, Mitch. At his advice, she moved on to become a student of master teacher Brazos Huval. In four months, she passed her dad up. “He was like, ‘You got it, I’ll learn how to play the triangle,’” she laughed.
From there, Miller’s never looked back. She has become a familiar face on the local festival and concert series circuit, making cameos in performances with several of the biggest Cajun bands of the day, and has even performed on stages in Maine and Nova Scotia. This year, she, Robert, and Powell will be the closing act at the annual Faquetaique Courir de Mardi Gras—something she “could have never imagined”.
Then there are the Babineaux sisters—Julie, twenty-two, and Gracie, twenty-four. “Our parents weren’t like ‘Cajun,’” explained Gracie. “They weren’t music fanatics. We listened to Van Morrison, lots of country. Old Mickey Gilley.” At age six, a first-grade teacher was introducing to Gracie pieces of the language her grandfather spoke—numbers, colors. And songs. Then came Hurricane Rita, in 2005.
The Babineaux lost their house in Forked Island, and found themselves temporarily living with relatives. At the time, one of their cousins was learning to play the accordion. “We didn’t have any toys, we didn’t have anything to do.”
“You can only play so much pinball on the computer,” Julie added.
One day, Gracie pointed to the accordion and asked her cousin, “What’s that?” He offered to teach her. “Then Julie was like, ‘What’s she doing?’” Gracie laughed. “‘I want to do that too.’”
Guitarist and singer/songwriter Renée Reed, 24, released her debut self-titled album in 2021, and since then has been touring internationally, playing on local stages, and teaching at the Music Academy of Acadiana in Lafayette.
Olivia Perillo
Today, Gracie still plays the accordion as well as lead vocals, while Julie’s taken up the bass. The two have been performing as the Babineaux Sisters Band since they were preteens and have released a handful of independently-produced albums with old tributes and original songs alike—frequently taking the stage at major regional festivals including Festival International de Louisiane, Festival Acadiens, and French Quarter Festival.
“It was almost like an accident,” reflected Gracie. Or a gift.
It’s a small world, the Cajun music community. For a time, Reed’s parents played in Balfa Toujours with Powell’s parents. “And both our moms were Magnolia Sisters,” Powell added. “And your grandfather and my grandfather played together,” noted Reed.
“And I took lessons from your daddy,” Gracie said, pointing at Reed. “And so did Julie. “And,” she pointed at Powell, “I learned songs from your mama.”
“And we both took lessons from Brazos,” said Julie, pointing to Miller—“and Amelia did too!”
“And, like, I’ve been knowing all of them—” Reed gestures around to the group as a whole, “—we all went to Kids Camp together.” At this, the conversation erupted into a glitter of memories from their time at the Louisiana Folk Roots summer camp—an extension of Balfa Week’s musical intensives designed for children. Kids Camp started in 2008, with workshops taught by the emerging class of Cajun and Creole musicians of that time: Courtney Granger, Corey Ledet, Chris Segura, and Kristi Guillory—as well as by Powell’s mother Christine Balfa. Reed, Powell, Miller, and the Babineaux sisters were some of the camp’s first students.
Miller said that she started at the camp a few years younger than most other kids, and remembers so clearly the way she looked up to the “big kids” like Gracie and Reed. “We talk about being inspired by the old men sitting on the porch,” said Powell, “but all of y’all—y’all were so inspiring.”
As they got older, most of them stayed involved with the Kids Camps—work ing as counselors or workshop leaders. “It’s funny, like this past summer, to be sitting with them—you know like Braz and Chad Huval,” said Powell. “Like Braz was teaching me when I was like eight, and to be on the other side of it now and be teaching … it’s cool. All of a sudden, you’re in the same category or considered peers with these people we all grew up watching.”
Adeline Miller, fiddler and vocalist, and Amelia Powell, guitarist and vocalist, both 21, are two parts of the trio Amis du Teche, which includes Miller’s brother Robert. The band plays frequently on stages around Acadiana and on the Louisiana festival circuit. Miller also teaches Cajun dance classes, as well as music at the Music Academy of Acadiana. In addition to Amis du Teche, Powell frequently plays shows locally and internationally with her parents, Christine Balfa and Dirk Powell.
Olivia Perillo
There’s a pressure that comes with that, said Gracie. “When we were all starting to play music, you remember the older people who come up to you, who give you the time of day. And so now we’re older, there’s these younger people coming in and it’s like ‘Crap, okay now I have to make sure that I do that, too. I want those people to continue playing music. What can we do to make sure they feel encouraged and safe?”
Passing down the gift is a common aspiration between all five of these women, who have each engaged in teaching on some level. Powell hopes to someday spend her time performing and teaching music workshops across the country. Julie, with her degree from ULL’s Traditional Music Program, is actively working on getting her teaching certification—“I want to teach other young people to feel the way that
I do about their culture.” And Reed and Miller are both currently teaching music classes at the Music Academy of Acadiana, where one of Miller’s students recently told her the lessons were showing her how to be “a part of something that was a part of her.”
One of the biggest challenges of committing to Cajun music is an essentially practical one, simultaneously spiritual as an act of cultural preservation: learning the language. All five women grew up in families where someone still spoke French, a sort of secret code shared only among the few.
For Gracie and Julie, it was their maternal grandfather, “but he never spoke it with us, or around us, ever.” Part of that last generation of native French speakers in Louisiana who were told their language was inferior to English—he carried the collective shame that halted the passing down of the Cajun tongue.
“Because it was so intentionally killed off, it feels even more important for us to learn the way that they spoke,” said Powell.
Gracie said that once she had started playing the accordion, her parents would bring her and Julie to local jams taking place around their home in Cow Island. “I remember I had an old man at one of the jams that told me, ‘If you’re gonna play a song, you better know how to sing the words.’”
Gracie took it to heart, meticulously pausing and rewinding her CDs of Cajun music, writing out the words phonetically, until she could imitate the sounds perfectly. “But eventually, you want to know what you’re singing.”
At age fifteen, she traveled to Nova Scotia to attend the Université SainteAnne Immersion Program in Church Point, Canada—a Francophone pilgrimage taken by a growing cadre of today’s Cajun culture bearers and musicians, including Miller and Reed. The five-week immersion course put them on the fast track, but each of them still hesitates to call themselves fluent. “I came back and have been trying to keep it up,” said Gracie. “But it can be hard.”
Even Reed, who in addition to her experience at Sainte-Anne’s, has been part of French immersion in schools, and majored in French at ULL, said it’s an ongoing process. “I’m getting there,” she said. “But I think it’s so important because the language brings so much meaning to the music, and to the stories, and to the jokes, and the food. It’s just so important. It like holds it all together.”
Miller agreed, speaking to the way learning the language motivated her to improve her singing. “I always loved the melodies and the fiddle, but learning French and diving into the stories told, usually in a place that is so familiar. It made me love the lyrics so much more.”
Julie, who is planning on attending Sainte Anne’s in the coming summer, has usually left the singing to her sister, and “hid behind her bass”. These days, though, she is taking more intentional steps to improve her grasp of the language—inspired by her experience as a host alongside T’Monde guitarist Megan Constantin for the KRVS radio show “Encore,” which plays music pulled from ULL’s Center for Louisiana Studies Cajun and Creole Music archives. “That was just the most incredible time of my life,” she said. “I learned that singing in French doesn’t have to be perfect. Listening to those old recordings, they’re not perfect. So, there’s no pressure. You just sing it. You tell the story. And you just keep it going.” One of her favorite parts of those old recordings, she said, are listening to the musicians talk before and after their performance. “They’re just hanging out,” she said.
“Just like we do!” said Powell.
“It’s true,” said Gracie, “hearing the language and knowing what they are actually saying in those moments, it adds another layer.”
Reed and Powell both said that they grew up in families where French was spoken more often than in most households of the early twenty-first century. “Both of my grandparents, their first language is French,” said Reed. “So it was just kind of all over the place. But storytelling is a big thing in my family, especially on my dad’s side, and a lot of those stories are told in French. So I don’t know, I kind of grew up speaking Franglish.”
Powell said that her mother intentionally tried to introduce her to French while she was first learning English, “but then you don’t speak it every day, and you go to school and nobody’s speaking French at school, so I lost a little bit of it.” She’s compensated by using language-learning apps like Duolingo and Babbel, and hopes to attend Sainte Anne’s someday too. “But I really really want to speak Cajun French,” she said. Listening to old interviews of her PerPer Dewey, she’s marveled at the particular beauty of the Cajun dialect.
Julie, 22, and Gracie, 24, Babineaux have been playing as The Babineaux Sisters for over a decade now, performing on local and national stages and at some of the biggest festivals around the state and beyond. Julie has hosted KRVS’s “Encore” Radio Show, which features music pulled from the Center for Louisiana Studies archives, and Gracie is currently completing her PhD in Geology at ULL.
Olivia Perillo
At this, Reed interjected: “One of the beautiful things about it is how funny it can be. It’s the way that it sounds, like this sharp …”
“The word for it is ‘brut’” said Powell. Everyone laughed, each inserting their own exaggerated “Brut” into the circle. “See?” said Reed. “Even the word ‘brut’ just makes me laugh.”
In her effort to learn the particularities of Cajun French, Powell has turned to her closest resource, her
mom. “We’ll have nights where my sister and I go to her house and cook dinner together,” she said. “She’s like teaching us how to make a rice and gravy, and we eat dinner, and we speak French.”
Over the past five to ten years, as they have transitioned into the contemporary Cajun music scene as young adults, this class of musicians has at times had to contend with their own novelty as young women in Cajun music—to show people they are not just cutesy girls playing folksongs, but serious musicians and culture bearers in their own right.
“I have this one memory of when Adeline really inspired me,” said Powell. “We were playing with some grand culotte band, some hot shot—you know—men. And good people, good musicians, friends who I look up to. But we must have been like seventeen, and we had just gone to hear them, and got called up on stage. And everybody was like ‘Oh I can’t believe these two beautiful women on stage, oh these beautiful women, these young girls playing music. That’s so awesome, wow.’ It was just, in between every song, the chatter onstage was that. And finally Adeline just looked over at me, this man was standing between us, and she looked behind him at me and was like—and Adeline does not curse— ‘How about some badass, talented musicians?’ And I was like ‘Okay I’m done with this bullshit.’ I was just like, done with being a cute pretty girl whose gonna, like, play and sing for you. I’m a musician. That’s it.”
When I ask them what distinguishes their generation of musicians from those that have preceded them, they each have their own answers—but all speak to a shouldering of the responsibility to ensure this music tradition lives on, which ironically might be best achieved, they said, by exploring new ways of expressing it.
“I’m really interested in using the language in different ways,” said Reed. “Taking the Cajun dialect of French, Cajun/Creole and putting it into original songs, that don’t necessarily have to be that traditional in style.”
Julie agreed, saying that she originally decided to pick up the bass because she wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll and funk. “I wanted to incorporate that, but still keep who I was, culturally … and in a way, we get other listeners to come in, and they think ‘Oh my God that’s such a cool song, what are they saying?’”
A great example of a band that does this well, they said, is Bonsoir, Catin. “They have a bunch of really cool arrangements,” said Powell, “like really different stuff that’s like ‘Woah I didn’t know Cajun music could sound that way,’—just evolving the tradition. But they can also just throw down a two-step, nothing special, nothing fancy. But God, you can’t help but want to dance.”
This is important, because to authentically push the tradition forward, you have to understand where it came from, the songs that define what we know to be “Cajun music”. “Going back and listening to the old stuff,” said Julie, referring in particular to some of the earliest field recordings made by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in the 1930s, “people are like, ‘What is he doing? That sounds horrible.’ But if you really listen to it, it’s incredible stuff. It’s like the rawest form of Cajun music that you could ever listen to.”
For years, Reed also worked in the Center for Louisiana Studies archives, spending hours with headphones on just saying to her coworker, “Oh my God, listen to this.” “You just don’t hear stuff like that on the radio anymore,” she said. “Listening to it, it’s like ‘Where did this melody come from? Is that from Canada? Or Ireland? It’s just really cool, making the connections, finding out the history of the music, going on these deep dives.’”
For Powell, some of Cajun music’s touchstone recordings are of her grandfather and his brothers. “Those old fiddle tunes? The way my PerPer would play them … That—I love that sound,” she said.
“And Rodney and Dewey’s voices together?” gushed Reed.
“It’s so good!” said Powell. “It just, it like hurts it’s so good.”
In 2019, Bonsoir, Catin opened Festivals Acadiens et Créoles in Lafayette—which was curated around the theme of “The Role of Women in Cajun and Creole Music”. As special guests, Miller and Powell joined the performance on fiddle and guitar, respectively, and as lead vocalists.
Recalling that performance, Miller said that she got on stage with a rare wave of performance anxiety. “I was so nervous … the people I was getting on stage with. They wrote these songs, like if I messed up, they were all gonna know. They play this song every day, you know? So, I’m getting ready to play my first note, and I look over at Amelia. And it was just like this super deep stare, and I was just like ‘No’. Like, no. This is fine. And that was probably the best performance I had been a part of, with these other women that are just so influential in my life, that I grew up obsessing over, and I was always up against the stage trying to study them. I was getting to be a part of something that’s so much bigger than me, and I was doing it with my best friend.”
