Note:  The following is a paper I wrote for a French Linguistics class at the University of South Florida (taught by Anne Latowsky, Ph.D.), Spring Semester, 2012.

Abstract

The Cajuns and African-American French Creoles of Louisiana have developed music styles that greatly contributed to the Cajun and Creole renaissance beginning in the 1970s through today.  While the music and language are similar between the Cajuns and the Creoles, this paper gives a brief history and background of the people and music in order to explain the differences of the musical genre.

Introduction

Out of a shared heritage of upheaval, social and linguistic discrimination, and rural poverty, two distinct sociolinguistic groups in southern Louisiana have developed similar, but different types of a French musical genre called Cajun and Zydeco.  Most people confuse the two styles since both have French lyrics (for the most part), share some instruments like the accordion and drums, and make you feel like tapping your feet or dancing.  Visually, you might notice Cajun musicians are white and Zydeco musicians are “people of color” of African descent.  But a closer analysis will reveal different attributes of the music and lyrics, due to the different culture and heritages of Cajuns and African-French Louisiana Creoles.

From Acadia to Louisiana:  Le Grand Dérangement

“Cajun” is a term derived from “Acadian”, the name of the French  colonists who settled in Acadia in the 1600s (the eastern maritime provinces of  Canada:  Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and  Prince Edward Island).  In 1710, the  British took control of Acadia because the French, being Catholic, refused to  sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to the king of England, a Protestant.  In retaliation, in 1755 the British imposed
the Great Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement),  where three-fourths (about 11,500 people) of the French population of Nova Scotia, and many from other parts of Acadia, were forcibly removed from their  homes and put on ships to other British or French colonies.  The Acadians were not sent directly to  Louisiana, which at the time was a Spanish colony.  Some were transported to other British colonies in Canada and to American colonies along the eastern seaboard.  Beginning in the 1760s, some were sent from Canada to the Caribbean – to the French Antilles (Saint-Domingue – present-day Haiti) either directly from Nova Scotia or via the American colonies. From Saint-Domingue they reach their final destination of Louisiana.  Some Acadians were sent across the Atlantic to France and England.  In 1785, Louisiana was under Spanish rule.  The Spanish sponsored about 1,600 Acadians in France to return to North America and settle in Louisiana, a political move to populate the colony with British rivals (Hall, 1995).   By 1800 the Acadian population in Louisiana was about 4,000 — half of the entire Francophone population in Louisiana
(Salmon & Dubois, 2009).  They were petits habitants — subsistence farmers without slaves, and maintained small farms and ranches (Brasseux, 2009).

Today, there is an estimated 400,000 to 700,000 descendants of the Acadians in Louisiana (Martel, 2001).  The French region of southern Louisiana and the bayous, now known as “Acadiana”, is comprised of 22 parishes, including cities and towns reflecting French heritage such as Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houma, Thibodaux, and Breaux Bridge.  The name “Cajun” has been traced to a letter written the late 1700s in Louisiana, and in
print in the late 1800s (Henry, 1998). In was not until the 1960s that the term was no longer considered derogatory (Martel, 2001).

African-French Creoles in Louisiana

The term Creole in Louisiana originally meant white descendants of French or Spanish settlers who were born in Louisiana.  In Louisiana today, the name Creole refers to gens de couleur (“people of color”), meaning black Creoles or African-French Creoles (Spitzer, 2003).  These Creoles are descendants of African slaves brought to south Louisiana to work the sugar cane plantations by French slave traders in the early 1700s, free people of color, and emancipated slaves.  Most of the slaves came from the western African region of Senegambia (in Senegal, between the Senegal and Gambia rivers).  This was unusual since slave owners normally separated slaves from the same tribes to make it more difficult
to plan uprisings (Squint, 2005).  They spoke Sereer, Wolof, Pulaar, and Mandekan languages.  Former slaves in the late 1800s were still singing songs in their African languages (Hall 1995)[1].  The plantation owners’ lack of recognition of the power of language contributed to the Pointe Coupee slave revolt in 1731, led by Mandekan speakers of the Bambara tribe.

The Creole language that developed by the Africans was based on West African languages influenced by different classes of colonial French speakers – from the less educated slave ship sailors to the plantation owners (Squint, 2005).  After the Haitian
Revolution that ended in 1804, many white French colonists from the island
formerly known as Saint-Domingue, as well as their slaves and free people of
color, who spoke Haitian French Creole, fled to Louisiana.  While Haitian Creole may have contributed to the language already spoken in Louisiana, they are a similar, but separate
language (Maguire, 1979).  There is substantial evidence that the Louisiana Creole language was already stable at the end of the 1700s before the Haitians arrived (Squint, 2005).  This form of Creole was not only spoken by the slaves.  As the plantation society disintegrated after the Civil War, some Whites worked alongside the Blacks as sharecroppers (Brasseux, 2009) and began speaking Louisiana Creole (Klinger, 2003).  African-French Creole is a mix of several languages:  the superstrate being French,
and the substrates being the various African languages.  Cajun, on the other hand, is a dialect of French, based on the French spoken in Acadia, Canada by immigrants from western France.

An example of Louisiana French Creole is this excerpt of lyrics of a slave folk song from the 1800s called “Michié Préval” (Krehbiel, 1913, performed by George, 1976): [2]

Michié Préval li donnain
gran bal, Li fé  (moun’) payé pou sauté
in pé.

Danséz calinda, boudjoum, boudjoum!

English Translation:

Monsieur Preval gave a ball; he made the people
pay so they could dance and sway.

Dance Calinda, boom, boom.

(The Calinda was a type of African dance imported by the slaves from
Martinique.)

From Folk Music to Cajun and Zydeco

Cajuns and African-French Creoles shared traits that contributed to their musical
styles.  Both groups spoke a form of French, were generally considered underclass, were illiterate, poor, and lived in rural southern Louisiana.  The primary Cajun musical instrument of the late 1700s was the violin (fiddle), clarinet, and the triangle or ‘tit fer (Valdman, 2001).  Cajuns held house dances (bals de maison) through the 1800s, and
around the time of the Civil War, they held musical events at dance halls. It was around this time when white sharecroppers borrowed from their black counterparts and added musical features such as syncopation and call-and-response vocals.  The accordion
was introduced to Louisiana in 1850, but was not prevalent in Cajun music until around 1900 (DeWitt, 2003).  In the late 1800s/early 1900s, improved transportation (waterways, rail, and automobile) and mass communication brought traveling musicians and other entertainers to the theaters, opera houses, showboats, and school gymnasiums of Cajun country.  Showboats even traveled down the Mississippi all the way into Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Têche and introduced Cajuns to contemporary music of the 1920s and 1930s, albeit in English.

As for the African-French Creoles, most were country people who had their own kind of folk music, such as Juré.  Juré was a type of chanting, hand clapping, and foot stomping, often performed on front porches and at bals de maison, as shown in a film entitled  Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (Spitzer, 1986).   Juré, probably from the French word for “testify”, originated in Catholic churches attended by the Creoles.  (Tisserand, 1998).  The most famous of all Juré songs, sung by Jimmy Peters and the Ring Dance Singers, was recorded in 1934 by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.  Called “J’ai fait tout le tour du pays” it contains a phrase in the lyrics that would later be credited was the origin for the name “Zydeco”.  This expression, meaning hard times, was “Les haricots sont pas sales”, which translates to “The beans are not salted” (salt was expensive) (Spitzer 2003).  The liaison made by the Creoles between “les” and haricots” (which is not done in standard French) sounds like [lezariko], and was spelled in various ways, such as “zarico” before it became “Zydeco”.

Another form of music by the Creoles of Louisiana was called “La La”.  In the 1930s,
in towns such as Parks, near Lafayette, the Creoles enjoyed traveling minstrel shows entertaining them in local dancehalls with the new jazz and blues of the era, who performed in English. However, La La music was not played in dancehalls like the brass bands, but at bals de maison.  The people called the event, as well as the music, a “La La” (Wood, 2001).  The music consisted of simple instruments including homemade percussion instruments like the frottoir (rubboard made of corrugated aluminum worn like a vest and rubbed with a spoon or other metallic object).  Melodic accompaniment was made with the button accordion.  Creoles began to learn English under a literacy initiative by Governor Huey Long (the slaves were deliberately prevented from receiving an education at all).  This positively affected their social, economic, and political status.  They
also began to write the lyrics of their songs with a mix of Creole and English.  There is evidence that black musicians were the first to use the diatonic button accordion “squeezebox” in the late 1800s, but with a fast, syncopated rhythm (Brasseux, 2009).  Apparently the Cajuns borrowed the accordion from the Creoles, as evidenced in the first commercial recordings of Cajun music.

During and after World War II, many Creoles left Louisiana to work in the oil refineries of Texas and the shipyards of southern and central California.  The Creoles form
Louisiana brought their La La music with them, particularly to Frenchtown, near
Houston (Wood, 2001).  La La was the unamplified precursor to modern Zydeco music.
Beginning in the 1950s in Texas, the “King of Zydeco”, Clifton Chenier, from Opelousas, Louisiana, transformed La La music to what we know now as Zydeco (Strachwitz, 1997).  Zydeco musicians were influenced by American blues and jazz, and added drums and electric guitars, no longer used fiddles, and upgraded their accordions to larger, more
complex models.  To appeal to the mainstream American audience, and because younger Creoles speak French less and less, English titles and lyrics have been more prevalent since the Creole renaissance of the 1970s (Ancelet, 1988).

Cajun music today, while there is some cross-over with Zydeco, sounds more like Country music. Instruments in Cajun bands are mostly two fiddles, drums, the ‘tit-fer triangle, and acoustic guitar.  Some musicians use the frottoir and accordion, but not always.  Cajun’s national anthem is “Jole Blon”, first recorded in 1929 by the Breaux Freres and called “Ma Blonde Est Partie”.  It has been recorded in French and English and by Creoles as well.  The Cajun renditions by Harry Choates in 1946 and by Doug Kershaw in 1969, sound much different from Clifton Chenier’s Zydeco version.  The same is true of the two versions of the song “The Back Door” by Zydeco musician Beau Jocque and Cajun musician D.L. Menard. [3]

The Cajun and Creole renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s to today, as well as support by such organizations as the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), has helped to preserve Cajun and Zydeco music.  However, there is evidence
that the Louisiana Creole language could disappear, as the language is not consistently
being passed down to the younger generations (Carlisle, 2010).  And Cajun French is also at risk (Fielder, 2006).  Indeed, if we allow that to happen, we will all be singing “Les
haricots sont pas sales”.