Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (review)

Ryan André Brasseaux, a tenth-generation Cajun, admits that he "began this project as a way to reconnect with the soundtrack of my youth," where he heard the "thin, processed sound of Cajun music broadcast by a local French-language AM radio station in my maternal grandfather's Chevrolet pick-up truck" (3). One might be wary that the romantic lure of his youthful Cajun memories combined with cultural preservationist norms might predispose Brasseaux to skew Cajun Breakdown to salvage this pure cultural product before it vanishes from the onslaught of Americanization and commodification of the capitalist mass culture juggernaut. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Cajun Breakdown reflects Brasseaux's passion for Cajun culture and music along with his desire to place Cajun music into a historical and cultural context at the most sophisticated analytical levels. Expectations of any idealized connections to folk culture are immediately denied in the preface as Brasseaux indicates that the "genre's commercialization and commodification and the broad spectrum of Cajun musical expression make its connection to 'folk' ideology tenuous at best" (ix).

Cajun Breakdown forcefully articulates the core intellectual framework into which this history of Cajun music to 1950 fits and provides the necessary details such that its analysis provides a powerful cultural perspective. Brasseaux begins by staking out a cultural landscape set in a geopolitical and historical context, placing the Cajun Grand Derangement ethnic cleansing of 1755 within the milieu of the French and English contest for North America and the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763. He also complicates the pristine imagery of isolated Cajuns deep in Louisiana, asserting that their music is "woven of many strands" and is the result of "worlds in collision" (3). Cajun music, he contends, is a product of not only south Louisiana's heterogeneity, but also its interaction with the national popular culture. Hardly hermetically sealed in a lost rural oasis, Cajuns interacted with urban centers such as New Orleans, borrowed from varied racial and ethnic groups, consumed products and information from throughout the United States and the world, and felt the impact of the dominant Anglo-American culture. Through his denial of a romantic, isolated perspective, Brasseaux rejects a vision of Cajun music as a remnant, a vestige languishing in brackish cultural backwaters. Instead, Cajuns were dynamic, fully engaged "participants in American culture" who selected and internalized "strains of cultural information circulating in south Louisiana" (5).

Brasseaux's propensity to interpret Cajun music in broad geopolitical, historical, and sociocultural context leads him to view musicians as cultural brokers and interpret the British and French geopolitical hostilities as cultural friction. Social scientific concepts such as matrix, asymmetrical relationships, adaptive mechanisms, authenticity, cultural filters, and behavioral shifts make their way into the discussion, yet without the typical pretense of jargon. Quotes and references to the work of anthropologists, ethnographers, folklorists, musicologists, historians, geographers, and sociologists also inform Cajun Breakdown. The developmental stages of the Cajun music cultural persona entail an ongoing process of assimilation and accommodation, as existing musical structures are integrated into the Cajun performance style.

The conceptual sophistication of Cajun Breakdown is matched by its technical presentation of details. The narrative divides the development of precommercial Cajun music into three phases, 1764-1830, 1830-80, and 1880-1927, and its commercial period from 1927. Brasseaux's comments on the 1830-80 period prove particularly enlightening, highlighted by his analysis of the impact of the Civil War on Cajun culture. The greatest attention of Cajun Breakdown, however, focuses upon the commercial period beginning with the Bristol Sessions of 1927. (Of course, Brasseaux acknowledges the arbitrary nature of the 1927 date, given the earlier recordings of Fiddling John Carson in Atlanta and the urbane country recordings of Carson Robison and Vernon Dalhart.) The historical progression begins with Leon Meche, Joe Falcon, and Cleoma Breaux's 1928 New Orleans recording for Columbia of "Lafayette...