An important appeal for help preserving Cajun and Creole culture. Longtime readers know I’m a proud south Louisiana Cajun, and it kills me to hear about this.
Considered by musicians (including the Mamou Playboys, Zachary Richard, and Beausoleil among others) and scholars to be one of the most important audio collections in the world, hundreds of tapes in the Archive of Cajun and Creole folklore are in danger of permanent loss caused by aging and environmental damage.
The recordings were stored without climate control during three years of renovations on the University of Louisiana Dupré Library. Located on the uppermost floor of the library, the archive was subject to the full onslaught of several Louisiana summers, exacerbated by an unusual period of drought that denied even a few cooling rain clouds. Many recordings exist only on reel-to-reel tapes, some of which literally melted in their boxes. Others often fall apart as they are being re-recorded onto other media. The Archive’s administration is doing the best it can: it recently won a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and has received some support from the University. But the undertaking is expensive and time consuming, and the few resources the Archive has are stretched as far as they can go…
Friends, this situation is bordering on tragic. With only volunteer labor and exhausted funding, John Laudun, Carl Brasseaux and Erik Charpentier are trying to save an irreplaceable treasure. These are field recordings of non-commercial Cajun and Creole music and storytelling dating back to the 1930s, when most of the performers were carrying forward music from the previous century. Most of the artists captured on tape in the Archive are long departed, and some of them can only be found in this Archive. It is a wealth of music and oral tradition that has never passed through the needle’s eye of the record business, and it enables us to conceive the depth and breadth of our musical heritage.
They are asking for donations; their goal is $50,000. Donation info’s available at that first link. (Alas, no PayPal.) I’m sending in my check — I hope my fellow Cajunphiles will do the same.
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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