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Drinking on the Job

By Christopher Courville

A house filled with folks, great music, and free-flowing alcohol would only seem like a hard day at the office if you count the recovery time involved, but it’s a typical nose-to-the-grindstone/bottle day in the long, revolving-door recording sessions for Valcour Records’ latest project, Allons Boire un Coup: A Collection of Cajun and Creole Drinking Songs. Produced by writer and musician Josh Caffery, this undertaking involved numerous musicians from the Lafayette area who were perhaps more interested in the promise of unlimited libations than with the actual recording.


When Josh was approached to produce a record for Valcour, he cycled through a few ideas until a comparison of cultures led to inspiration. “It struck me that I’ve seen albums of Irish drinking songs, and that tradition is a well-know component of the Irish repertoire,” he says. “Why not make an album of Cajun drinking songs, then? Anyone familiar with the repertoire knows that drinking figures into the lyrics of enumerable Cajun songs, in a variety of ways.”


After considering some of the obvious choices from the Cajun inebriation genre, Caffery decided to search a bit further. “I did some digging around and listening and came up with an elaborated list including tunes like ‘Allons Boire Un Coup’ and ‘Table Rond,’ songs people don’t really perform too often. I found recordings and made a CD and drove around listening to it, making a wish list of what bands I thought would work with what songs.”


Most of the recording took place in the St Julian Street house of Feufollet members Chris Segura and Chris Stafford with the label’s engineer Joel Savoy at the controls. “We tried to set up the sessions so everyone would be loose and feel comfortable, and I think we really got such great natural performances on this CD because of this,” Caffery says. “We had the moonshine flowing, random people walking in during sessions, people cooking between a booth and the control room—we really had a great time!” According to Caffery, the finished product includes uncovered gems, originals offered up by the musicians involved, and plenty of extra input from those in attendance. “I think something like 35 artists, musicians and poets, participated. Lafayette is currently the nexus of an amazing group of creative, inspired people, and I think this album certainly benefited from that.”


Published February 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 2.


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