Le Grand Hoorah

Le Grand Hoorah

The Celebration of Cajun Culture Returns Home to Evangeline this September

Story by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot • Photo by David Simpson

It all goes back to Evangeline Parish, to the home of Cyprien Landreneau, where, in the 1960s, a boy called Winky was falling in love with a girl called Chicken. Welcomed over the Landreneaux’ threshold, a portal of sorts, Winky (formally called Gilbert Aucoin) started falling in love with something else, too. Sitting in the living room of one of the twentieth century’s most influential Cajun accordionists, he found himself enraptured by the old world joie de vivre of his home, of Evangeline Parish.

“I saw the music at home, the friends and the neighbors who’d come. I saw the dance and the food and all the joy from these three things ... and I thought, ‘Just look at the atmosphere that he creates,’” said Winky, speaking of his late father-in-law. Winky had grown up in Evangeline, just down the road from his future-wife’s home in Duralde, but had up until then never been so profoundly immersed in the cultural treasures of the area as he was in Cyprien’s home. “It really ignited something in me. He was a reflection of our parish … it all just came home.”

This seminal experience opened the door for the couple’s lifelong dedication to cultural and language preservation initiatives in Acadiana—all culminating in this year’s Le Grand Hoorah, a Cajun and Creole gathering to be held at Lakeview Park & Beach, just a stone’s throw away from where Cyprien’s house once stood.

Held on Saturday, September 24, the festival brings together all of the ingredients for an authentic, Cajun good time: good food, good music, good company. The Pa-Ta-Sa Cooking Krewe will be hosting a traditional boucherie. A music jam will invite all aspiring fiddlers and accordionists and guitarists and triangle players (singers, too!) to make some magic. And the main stage of Lakeview’s legendary dance hall will welcome some of the best names in the current Cajun and Creole repertoires: Geno Delafose, the Pine Leaf Boys, Balfa Toujours, Steve Riley, and more. Steps will be taken in twos and drinks will be had by the plenty. And all will come to a grand Cajun Catholic end on Sunday morning, when a local priest will offer Mass in French just where all the raucous fais do do-ing had taken place the night before.

Le Grand Hoorah’s origins go back to the year 2000, when Winky and Chicken joined other regional culture bearers, including musician Christine Balfa, in forming the organization Louisiana Folk Roots with the intention of creating an immersive educational and celebratory experience around Cajun and Creole music and dance. After a year dedicated to fundraising and promoting, the inaugural Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week took place in April, 2001 at Lake Fausse Point in St. Martinville. Dedicated to the legacy of one of Cajun music’s best-remembered ambassadors, the event functioned like a camp—featuring seven days of immersion into South Louisiana Francophone culture, with music intensives taught by local masters, dance classes, French tables, traditional craft workshops, cooking demonstrations, jam sessions, and nightly concerts that were open to the public.

The response was overwhelming— spots quickly filled up with not only locals interested in connecting with their culture, but with creatives from all across the country who wanted to experience an authentic presentation of this way of life. “It was this cocoon of Cajun culture,” said Winky. “These students were coming from all over the country, all over the world, and we were putting them in the cocoon, where they could flourish.”

In 2003, the event had become so popular that organizers decided to host a spring and a fall session—and the fall session was to be held in Evangeline Parish’s Chicot State Park. In 2004, the event returned to Lake Fausse Point, but from 2005 to 2013, Chicot State Park welcomed hundreds of cultural tourists for the festivities every year.

Winky tells of one instance when an entire group of Russians drove up to Chicot Park, concerned about the preservation of their own culture six thousand miles away, to learn about how the Cajuns had saved theirs. “By the time they left,” said Winky, “they were Zydeco’in and eatin’ boudin. And had an idea of what they were gonna do when they got home.”

Perhaps more monumental, for Winky and Chicken, than the outsiders coming in to learn about Louisiana culture—was helping locals to fall in love with their home again, just as Winky had. And it was happening. Every night, thousands of local folks from around the region paired up in the concert tent to dance the night away, to break bread with all these visitors. “The message my wife and I were trying to convey to our local people was, ‘My God, you should be proud. These people came to be with us. And so come see them, come visit. Come have a plate of sauce piquante with them,” said Winky.

In 2014, Louisiana Folk Roots decided to move the camp outside of rural Louisiana into the urban heart of Cajun Country in Lafayette, to be hosted at the living history museum and folklife park, Vermilionville. And though the event continued to be successful in its new home, the Evangeline Parish folks deeply felt its absence.

So, the next year, Winky and Chicken joined up with other interested individuals in the area to create a new organization, Prairie Heritage, Inc.—which would be dedicated to putting on an annual two-day cultural festival in Evangeline Parish, inspired by the environment cultivated by “Balfa Week,” which still takes place annually at Vermilionville (2023 dates TBA). The new event, they decided, would be called “Le Grand Hoorah”—which translates to “the big good time”.

After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, the 2022 festival’s new venue at Lakeview is both novel and nostalgic. Besides being logistically simpler to stage (“Chicot was like a tent city.”), the sixty-plus-year-old campsite on the edge of Evangeline and St. Landry has been host to various culturally-rich events over the past few decades—from Lundi Gras celebrations to boucheries to weekly fais do dos, not to mention a visit from Anthony Bourdain in 2011. Lakeview has also been a sponsor of Le Grand Hoorah in the past. “It’s got the right … I almost want to talk like some of those people that come from California—there’s a certain vibe,” said Winky. And Lakeview’s got it.

This year’s festival is particularly special, too, because of its—somewhat unintentional—whole hearted celebration of Evangeline. Looking at the slate of chefs and entertainers and organizers and even the priests, you can trace almost every single one of them back to the Cajun Music Capital of the World. “Father Jason Vidrine is going to open with us and pray with us,” said Winky. “The French Immersion kids are going to come in the morning, from Mamou. The camp jammers are all some guys with roots in Basile, Mamou, Ville Platte.” He goes on to list the bands, starting with the revival of his and Chicken’s sons’ band Ti Salé, The Aucoin Family Band— featuring Jean-Jacques and Louie Aucoin and their sons. Then there are three Evangeline Parish-originated bands that have been performing at Balfa Week since the beginning: Christine Balfa’s Balfa Toujours (of which Jean-Jacques is the accordion player), Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys (“Steve, we’ve got a common ancestor with him,” said Winky.), and Geno Delafose and French Rockin’ Boogie— the king of Evangeline Parish Zydeco.

Almost sixty years ago, when Winky was falling for Chicken and Cyprien still lived just down the road, the accordionist was one of the first musicians to play a dance on the Lakeview stage. As legend has it, the Smithsonian folklorist Ralph Rinzler was in the area searching for musicians to bring to the 1964 Newport Folk Festival when “the wildest thing you ever heard” came on the radio—a radio broadcast featuring Cyprien and his son Adam, playing the old traditional Cajun songs. That discovery of Rinzler’s would lead to one of the first performances, by none other than Dewey Balfa, of Cajun music on a national stage—which would ultimately lead to the renaissance that sparked celebrations like Le Grand Hoorah.

In 2022, Dewey and Cyprien’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will carry on the torch of a heritage that evokes a particular joy, a particular endurance, in a place that has managed to remember it best. All because the wild sounds of Cajun music, and the community it fosters, inspired a few devotees to share it with the world. Je te verrai lá-bas, au Grand Hoorah.

Le Grand Hoorah will take place at Lakeview Park and Beach on September 24, with a closing mass on September 25. Details at legrandhoorah.com.