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. The Acadiana Center for…
Read More
Each spring, Downtown Lafayette comes alive with the sights, sounds, and flavors of Festival International de Louisiane, the largest free Francophone festival in the U.S. This five-day event transforms the city into a global stage, where music, art, and culture from around the world take center…
Read More
GRAMMY award-winning and nominated musicians from Acadiana Music has been the soul of Acadiana since the area's humble beginnings, with a melting pot of Cajuns, Creoles, European, and Native American cultures inspiring fresh new sounds. South Louisiana has fostered folk music, country, rock, rhythm…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
