Abstract

A common aspect of rural Louisiana Mardi Gras is the Courir du Mardi Gras (Mardi Gras Run), a begging quest in which a band of costumed merrymakers travel house-to-house to solicit donations of food and money to provision a communal feast. The songs associated with the Mardi Gras run fall into two broad categories: those derived from continental French and French Canadian drinking songs and others with origins in continental French and French Canadian begging songs. Both forms represent combinations of direct survivals of earlier song texts, slight modifications that occurred through generations of oral transmission, and significant changes introduced because of the desire to develop distinct local song variants.

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