The Cajuns, Essays on Their History and Culture PDF Download

Author: Glenn R. Conrad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cajuns
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Author: Barry Jean Ancelet
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604736178
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This insightful book is by far the broadest examination of traditional Cajun culture ever assembled. It goes beyond the stereotypes and surface treatment given to Cajuns by the popular media and examines the great variety of cultural elements alive in Cajun culture today--cooking, music, storytelling, architecture, arts and crafts, and festivals, as well as traditional occupations such as fishing, hunting, and trapping. It not only gives fascinating descriptions of elements in Cajun life that have been woven into the fabric of American history and folklore; it also explains how they came to be. Cajun Country reveals the historical background of the Cajun people, who migrated to Louisiana as exiles from their Canadian homeland, and it shows their folklife as a living and ongoing legacy that enriches America.

Author: Glenn R. Conrad
Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette
ISBN: 9780940984103
Category : Cajuns
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617031113
Category : Cajuns
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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"This work serves as a model for compiling ethnohistories of other nonliterate peoples."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Shane K. Bernard
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604734965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana. In the 1940s, when America entered World War II, so too did the isolated Cajuns. Cajun soldiers fought alongside troops from Brooklyn and Berkeley and absorbed aspects of new cultures. In the 1950s as rock 'n' roll and television crackled across Louisiana airwaves, Cajun music makers responded with their own distinct versions. In the 1960s, empowerment and liberation movements turned the South upside down. During the 1980s, as things Cajun became an absorbing national fad, "Cajun" became a kind of brand identity used for selling everything from swamp tours to boxed rice dinners. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new information age launched "Cyber-Cajuns" onto a worldwide web. All these forces have pushed and pulled at the fabric of Cajun life but have not destroyed it. A Cajun himself, the author of this book has an intense personal fascination in his people. By linking seemingly local events in the Cajuns' once isolated south Louisiana homeland to national and even global events, Bernard demonstrates that by the middle of the twentieth century the Cajuns for the first time in their ethnic story were engulfed in the currents of mainstream American life and yet continued to make outstandingly distinct contributions.

Author: Jim Bradshaw
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781455621972
Category : Cajuns
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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And that's for true! For decades, master raconteur Jim Bradshaw has regaled Louisiana readers with the witty, wistful, and weird in his weekly column, C'est Vrai. Collected here for the first time are stories about the characters of politics, poetry, business, show biz, and sports, along with criminals, eccentrics, soldiers, and more. A fistfight with Huey P. Long, how the name Breaux got its x, a bootlegging priest--these anecdotes and more unfold with a deft touch and a light heart. Bradshaw's charming take on all things Louisiana is a quirky romp through colorful characters and strange sights, highlighting the rich history, culture, and distinct flavor of Cajun country. Award-winning journalist Jim Bradshaw has spent almost fifty years making and breaking the news. He was an editor of the Lafayette (LA) Advertiser until 2008. Bradshaw continues to entertain in his column, C'est Vrai, still published by newspapers and Web sites across Louisiana.

Author: Ryan Andre Brasseaux
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199711313
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya." Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan André Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey.

Author: Viola Fontenot
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496817109
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Winner of the 2019 Humanities Book of the Year from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Today sharecropping is history, though during World War II and the Great Depression sharecropping was prevalent in Louisiana's southern parishes. Sharecroppers rented farmland and often a small house, agreeing to pay a one-third share of all profit from the sale of crops grown on the land. Sharecropping shaped Louisiana's rich cultural history, and while there have been books published about sharecropping, they share a predominately male perspective. In A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years, Viola Fontenot adds the female voice into the story of sharecropping. Spanning from 1937 to 1955, Fontenot describes her life as the daughter of a sharecropper in Church Point, Louisiana, including details of field work as well as the domestic arts and Cajun culture. The account begins with stories from early life, where the family lived off a gravel road near the woods without electricity, running water, or bathrooms, and a mule-drawn wagon was the only means of transportation. To gently introduce the reader to her native language, the author often includes French words along with a succinct definition. This becomes an important part of the story as Fontenot attends primary school, where she experienced prejudice for speaking French, a forbidden and punishable act. Descriptions of Fontenot's teenage years include stories of going to the boucherie; canning blackberries, figs, and pumpkins; using the wood stove to cook dinner; washing and ironing laundry; and making moss mattresses. Also included in the texts are explanations of rural Cajun holiday traditions, courting customs, leisure activities, children's games, and Saturday night house dances for family and neighbors, the fais do-do.

Author: Albert Valdman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475752784
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Leading specialists on Cajun French and Louisiana Creole examine dialectology and sociolinguistics in this volume, the first comprehensive treatment of the linguistic situation of francophone Louisiana and its relation to the current development of French in North America outside of Quebec. Topics discussed include: language shift and code mixing speaker attitudes the role of schools and media in the maintenance of these languages and such language planning initiatives as the CODOFIL program to revive the sue of French in Louisiana. £/LIST£

Author: Barry Jean Ancelet
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061709
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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The virtual renaissance of all things Cajun and Creole has captivated enthusiasts throughout America and invigorated the culture back home. Who, just fifteen years ago, could have predicted that this regional music would become so astonishingly popular throughout the nation and the world? This new edition of a book first published in 1984 celebrates the music makers in the generation most responsible for the survival of Cajun music and zydeco and showcases many of the young performers who have emerged since them to give the music new spark. More than 100 color photographs, show them in their homes, on their front porches, and in their fields, as well as in performance at local clubs and dance halls and on festival stages. In interviews they speak directly about their lives, their music, and the vital tradition from which their rollicking music springs. Many of the legendary performers featured here--Dewey Balfa, Clifton Chenier, Nathan Abshire, Dennis McGee, Canray Fontenot, Varise Connor, Octa Clark, Lula Landry, and Inez Catalon--are no longer alive. Others from the early days continue to perform--Bois-sec Ardoin, Michael Doucet, D. L. Menard, and Zachary Richard. Their grandeur, humor, and humility are precisely the qualities this book captures. Featured too are young musicians who are taking their place in the dance halls, on festival stages, and on the folk music circuit. Cajun and Creole music makers, both young and old, still play in the old ways, but as young musicians--such as Geno Delafose and the French Rockin' Boogie, and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys-- experiment and enrich the tradition with new sounds of rock, country, rap, and funk, the music evolves and enlivens a whole new audience. Barry Jean Ancelet, a native French-speaking Cajun, is chair of the Department of Modern Languages and director of the Center for Acadian and Creole Folklore at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Among his many books are Cajun Country and Cajun and Creole Folk Tales (both from the University Press of Mississippi). Elemore Morgan, Jr., is an artist and retired professor of visual art at University of Southwestern Louisiana.