Back in 1986, when BeauSoleil was first starting to tour a lot outside Louisiana, back when the Doucet brothers still had a bit of hair atop their heads, the band played at the Kennedy Center, Washington’s red-carpeted bastion of high culture. BeauSoleil was just a quartet in those days—Michael Doucet on fiddle, David Doucet on [...]
In 2007, the Folk Alliance hosted a concert by three banjo players at Memphis’s Marriott Hotel. The three men sat in a semi-circle of chairs, the drum-like bodies of the banjos in their laps, the thin sticks of their fretboards pointing to two o’clock. It was a historic occasion, for all three men were African-American, [...]
There’s a reason you will likely hear “Walking to New Orleans” more than once during this year’s Jazz Fest. Fats Domino’s 1960 top-10 pop hit evokes the desire to come back home to the Crescent City better than any other song. And for the thousands who were flushed out of town by the Army Corps [...]
The 2005 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival was everything Jazz Fest used to be: small, local and funky. Out-of-towners made up maybe 10 per cent of the crowd, which was dominated by grandparents in their lawn chairs, married couples sharing paper plates of crawfish and teenagers in tight T-shirts glancing over their shoulders at groups of [...]
John Boutte took the outdoor stage in Austin’s Town Lake Park on March 18 around 6:45 p.m. He was part of the South by Southwest Music Conference’s free outdoor concert to honor Louisiana music and its resilience since Hurricane Katrina. The event had begun early in the afternoon with dancers two-stepping on the green grass [...]
