Protest Gumbo and Chanky Chank Music

My husband asks me why, almost every time we put on a party at our house, I insist on making gumbo. I always cite several reasons, but the biggest one is "It's my heritage". I am a Cajun girl, and always will be. Even though I live in North Carolina, I miss the live oaks with Spanish moss dripping from their heavy, ponderous branches, the lively Cajun music pouring out of the old clapboard buildings that serve as bars and dancing halls, the lovely, soothing patios of the Cajun dialect, and of course, the spicy, mouth-watering food that is uniquely Cajun.

Also, having grown up in the South during the homogenization of American culture, I missed out on a lot of what it meant to be Cajun. For whatever reason, it was labeled as old fashioned and outdated starting after World War II, when the politically correct thing to do was to speak English and act like an American. My mother who spoke French at home during her childhood and only learned English after starting school, tried to keep our heritage alive in small ways in the 60's and 70's - teaching us French words and making gumbo for us, but after being uprooted from family and home by my father, after awhile, gave up entirely. To this day, I still long for the rhythms, the ebb and flows of family and familiarity. I miss seeing people, as my sister once said with a catch in her throat, that look like me. After visiting Louisiana in 2010 for the first time in 30 years, I understood what she meant. More than once, while hanging out with my cousins, I had to "go outside to get some air", so overwhelmed with emotion just by being with family again after so many years.

So that is why when I start planning a party, my heart leans toward gumbo. It reminds me of where I come from, the people who raised me, loved me, helped me through tough times when I was too young to even know what what was happening and who embraced me even after 30 years of absence. My protest is against homogenization - I don't want to be "All American". I want to be a Cajun American!!! :0)

Re: Chanky Chank Music.....I mentioned it in an earlier post. Below is a story that explains my fondness for it, and the connection it has to preserving my Cajun heritage.....Enjoy!!! Or as we say in Cajun Counrty - Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler, sha!

Excerpt from article about Dewy Balfa, a Cajun Musician that helped preserve Cajun culture.....

Cajun music was first recorded in the late 1920s—Joseph Falcon and Cleoma Breaux's 1928 "Allons a Lafayette" is believed to be the first genuine Cajun music recorded. Throughout the 1930s and '40s recordings by such Cajun artists as Amede Ardoin, Dennis McGee, Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire, and Mayuse LaFleur sold well regionally, although the style was largely unknown outside Louisiana.

Despite its long history and its attractiveness as a genre, by the 1950s Cajun music, as well as Cajun culture in general, were in serious decline. In the post-WWII era, Americans were urged to discard regional cultures for a more modern, albeit homogenized, national one. In an era that saw the rise of rock and roll, many Cajuns were embarrassed by the regional French they spoke and the old-fashioned "chanky-chank" music still being played in their communities.

It's a rare thing to be able to point to one event as changing the course of a culture's history, but in the case of Cajun culture, Dewey Balfa's participation in the 1964 Newport Folk Festival was pivotal. That year, in the midst of a revival of American public interest in folk and regional culture, folklorist and traditional music promoter Ralph Rinzler (who later went on to found the Smithsonian Folklife Festival) invited a Cajun group to perform at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival. Dewey actually went to the Rhode Island festival as a guitarist—a last minute replacement in an ensemble that included the great Cajun accordionists Gladius Thibodeaux and Louis "Venesse" Lejeune. To their amazement, rather than laughing at them, the largely urban audience of 17, 000 went wild. As Dewey recalled many years later:

"I had played in house dances, family gatherings, maybe a dance hall where you might have seen as many as 200 people at once. In fact, I doubt I had ever seen 200 people at once. And in Newport, there were 17,000. Seventeen thousand people who wouldn't let us get off stage."