This book examines Cajun music’s social and cultural evolution through 1950. Since the ethnic group’s inception, the Cajun community constantly adapted and incorporated select elements of the American musical landscape. French North American songs, minstrel tunes, blues, New Orleans jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom’s synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture that extinguishes the myth that Cajuns were an insular folk group astray in the American South. Mus ... More

This book examines Cajun music’s social and cultural evolution through 1950. Since the ethnic group’s inception, the Cajun community constantly adapted and incorporated select elements of the American musical landscape. French North American songs, minstrel tunes, blues, New Orleans jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom’s synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture that extinguishes the myth that Cajuns were an insular folk group astray in the American South. Musical exchange and the pervasive pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty are used to demonstrate the extent of Cajun interaction with members of English-speaking United States. Cajun Breakdown is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music ever put into print. It raises broad questions about the ethnic experience in North America and the nature of vernacular American music.