It wasn’t always the 62-year-old musician’s intent to carry the torch for Cajun music. Like so many of his generation, he started playing folk and rock as a kid after watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Yet there was always an allure to the native style that soaked the very fabric of his home state.
Pianos and fiddles were always present at family get-togethers, he said, and he learned the songs and their French lyrics in the same fashion that those from another background might learn Christmas carols. But it wasn’t until he was a high school senior that he noticed that the older generation of musicians was beginning to die off, and he realized that when they did, their music and history would go with them.
He made the choice to take music more seriously, and in the years since, he has become a sort of "semi-anthropologist" on Cajun music and culture, studying, taping, and recording the great fiddle masters of years gone by.
And although he started his band, BeauSoleil, in 1975, he never thought that, 38 years and some 35 albums later, he would be a two-time Grammy winner who has reached the highest of the music industry’s heights.
"We did that for fun. But we never thought it would sustain us… nobody thought about making a living doing this," he said with a laugh.
All the while, he’s kept true to his roots. The songs are still sung in French, and, with their slow, deliberate moods and the natural rhythms, reflect the swampy climate they rose from. There’s a mix of cultures present in every note, and the Spanish, Native American, and African influences can be heard with varying degrees of prominence.
While some might think of Cajun music as simply "party music," he said, songs like "Carencro," which chronicles a tale of lost love and murder, reflect the darker side of his writing style.
"The rhythm represents the cadence of the environment… I think that really affects it," he said.
And although most listeners outside of Louisiana and France might not understand the lyrics, they won’t have a hard time gleaning the meaning of the songs from fiddle and voice alone
"Sometimes, you don’t actually need to know what the song is about," he said. "It’s about a certain visceral feeling, an understanding, that we all share. And I learned it in French, so I think it’s good to keep it in French… I’m too ornery to change it."
That orneriness appears to run in his blood, and Doucet, who graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in English literature, said that the band’s name derives from a nickname given to one of his relatives, Joseph Broussard, who led an eighteenth-century rebellion in Nova Scotia against the English.
Captured and later deported, he eventually led other French-speaking countrymen — the Acadians — to the Louisiana territory that Doucet still resides in.
"It’s been kind of a family battle cry for a long time," he said of the word. "And we were asked to play in France in 1976, and they said, ‘[Your band] must have a name! So I said, ‘Yea, BeauSoleil.’"
There won’t be a setlist for the show at the Ringwood Public Library, which is slated to start at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 17, but that’s okay. The band never has one anyway, and he treats every audience differently. Once the place fills up, he said, he’ll figure out what they need to hear.
"It’s all serendipitous," he said.
For more information, go to ringwoodlibrary.org/newlegacy.shtml.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/music/231854291_Cajun_fiddler_Michael_Doucet_to_play_Ringwood_Public_Library.html?page=all
Tags: BeauSoleil, Cajun fiddle, Louisiana, Michael Doucet, Music,
No comments:
Post a Comment