At a time when the word “Cajun” was unknown or disrespected by many Americans, Louisiana native Michael Doucet began to collect and preserve traditional Cajun music. The word “Cajun” (a corruption of “Acadian”) refers to the French settlers of Acadie (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island in Canada) who migrated to southern Louisiana after the Great Expulsion of 1755.
Doucet grew up surrounded by Cajun music. “I don’t think I know a French family that doesn’t have a musician in the family,” he told Sing Out’s Mark Greenberg. His four aunts were singers; one of them was married to a fiddle player who taught the young Doucet traditional songs. He learned French from his grandmother and parents, who still spoke the language.
Music was a part of family life. “Next door to us was accordion player Don Montoucet,” Doucet told Greenberg, “and we’d always go to his garage on Saturdays to hear music.” Radio also influenced Doucet, as did a local television show called Passe Partout that was dedicated to Cajun music. As he grew, Doucet learned to play the trumpet and guitar; years later he rescued his uncle’s fiddle, the instrument he became best known for playing. Doucet’s interest in traditional Cajun music was sparked when he heard “Cajun Woman” by Fairport Convention. He formed a band with few of his friends, and together they played the old songs at local hot spots.
In 1974 a French promoter spotted them during a performance at a local bar/service station and invited them to a folk festival in France. “So we went to France,” Doucet told Greenberg. “Wow! They knew about this music…. It was like speaking to people of our great-grandfathers’ era who were our age. It was the turning point of my life…. I really got to see firsthand the inescapable correlation between old French songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and our music here.” After a long stay in France, Doucet returned to the United States and, with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, began to collect the traditional music of southern Louisiana.
During this time, Doucet and five others performed as Coteau, a band known as the “Cajun Grateful Dead” for its mix of rock ‘n’ roll and Cajun music. When the group disbanded after about two and a half years, Doucet formed Beausoleil with some of the best Cajun musicians available, including Dewey and Will Balfa, Varise Connor, Canray Fontenot, Bessyl Duhon, and the noted fiddler Dennis McGee. Their name was taken from an Acadian settlement in Nova Scotia whose name meant “good sun.” Their first record was cut and released only in France, but in 1977 their American debut album, The Spirit of Cajun Music, was released by Swallow. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll described the album as “an eclectic mix of blues, ballads, standards, and traditional music.” But “there was no work here at the end of the ‘70s,” Doucet explained to Sing Out’s Greenberg. “There was not one dance hall here in Lafayette.”
Despite the weak demand for Cajun music, Beausoleil continued to play, releasing record after record in the early 1980s, including the albums Parlez Nous a Boire, Louisiana Cajun Music, Zydeco Gris Gris, and Allons a Lafayette. When the Cajun music craze erupted, fueled by soundtracks from The Big Easy and Belizaire the Cajun (both of which included music from Beausoleil), interest in the band’s music increased exponentially. From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/beausoleil
