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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Cajun music is a central component and marker of Cajun identity and culture in southwestern Louisiana. Largely accordion and fiddle-based and primarily sung in vernacular French, Cajun music has foundations in Indigenous American, African, German, Irish, Anglo-American, and Francophone folk…
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A relatively recent invention, the bellows-driven, vibrating reed squeezebox known as the accordion, was first manufactured in Germany and later in Russia in the 1820s. It is unknown who brought the first accordion to South Louisiana or which French Creole or Acadian first played the instrument, but…
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