A weekly curated playlist by local musician Philippe Billeaudeaux featuring music by Lafayette, LA musicians with a weekly rundown of live music happening in and around the area. Tune in each week here or follow us on Spotify for your weekly dose of the sounds of Lafayette. Louisiana legend George…
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For Michelle Colon, better known by her stage name Malentina, music has always been more than just performance. It’s been a way of stepping fully into herself. Her earliest memories of music stem from singing along to Disney movies as a child in Puerto Rico, where she would stage living room…
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The frottoir — sometimes spelled froittoir — is a percussive, rhythmic instrument omnipresent in zydeco music, and played, to a much lesser extent, in Cajun music. Also called the rubboard, washboard, and scrubboard, the frottoir takes its name from the standard French verb frotter , meaning ‘to…
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Zydeco is a continuously evolving Louisiana music genre that blends elements of many Black American folk and pop styles, including blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, rock and roll, soul, funk, hip-hop, and rap. Though scholars surmise that zydeco contains deeper historical roots in West African…
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Few families embody Cajun music and culture like the Savoys. From Marc Savoy’s first handmade accordion to Ann’s groundbreaking scholarship and GRAMMY-nominated performances, the family has dedicated their lives to preserving and evolving Acadiana’s traditions. Across generations, the Savoys have…
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In a region renowned for its rich cultural soundtrack, the ways musicians acquire their instruments is rarely, if ever, discussed. Yet without those instruments—many of them specialized for the musical world of South Louisiana—the music would not exist. Today, it might be easy enough for a working…
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The triangle is a simple, percussive rhythm instrument central to Cajun music. Consisting of two parts, the baton, or striker, and the triangle itself, the instrument was originally a form of upcycling, or creative reuse, in Acadiana. Early craftsmen developed the instrument from the tines of rice…
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Swamp pop, according to its foremost historian, Shane K. Bernard, represents the cultural collisions of "Cajun and Creole, black and white, French and English, rural and urban, folk and mainstream." Sharing affinities with rhythm and blues, rock and roll, country and western, and rockabilly, swamp…
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Are you short on time for your first visit to Cajun & Creole Country? Are you overwhelmed with all of the things to do and experience? There’s no shortage of ways to experience the Happiest City in America and its nearby communities. We’re sharing our favorites for first-time visitors. On any…
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A bowed string instrument, the fiddle is central to Cajun music's sound, culture, and history. The history of the fiddle, an instrument more or less synonymous with the classical violin, is rooted in early 16th-century Western Europe, where it derived from the medieval, bowed string Byzantine lira…
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