As a native of France, Sara Le Menestrel brought her own similarities and differences to the extended fieldwork and participant observation which are the foundations of this study; making the transition from classically trained violinist to Louisiana fiddler was also part of the process of experiencing and observing difference. The book's ‘objective is neither to trace the history of local music styles nor to cover the entire Louisiana French music scene’ (p. 15); rather, it is ‘to study how social hierarchies and stereotypes based on the notions of race, class, and region shape, and in turn are shaped by tastes, representations, and musical practices within French Louisiana music’ (p. 15).
Despite this disclaimer, both historical enquiry and contemporary description are necessary underpinnings for Le Menestrel's theoretical enquiry. Indeed, her first chapter is titled The Early Twentieth Century, and includes material (not new, but hitherto not widely available) about the activities of touring jazz bands during the period. This is useful to have, but more important is the assured discussion of notions of hierarchy and respectability: the descendants of Creoles of colour were anxious to distinguish themselves from the descendants of freedmen, stressing skin tone, the ability to read music and the playing of jazz as more respectable than ‘French music’ and zydeco; white musicians like the strict tempo Louisiana Six also held ‘French music’ in low regard.
The author rightly resists the notion of Louisiana French music as uniquely able to absorb and integrate outside influences. (In the 1930s, it's more accurate to say that bands like Leo Soileau's integrated Frenchness into western swing; a parallel process can be observed in the music of Czech-American Adolph Hofner.) As Le Menestrel notes in her Conclusion, it is not helpful to view creolisation as ‘a seamless, smooth process that seems culturally beneficial and wholly valorizing, devoid of divisions and restricted to the francophone heritage’ (pp. 317–18). Her view is that creolisation is, rather, ‘a confusing tool for understanding the social dynamics at work in Louisiana society’ (p. 318), and that study of ‘the intricate interactions between analytical categories and vernacular categories’ needs to ‘[take] into account every actor who makes use of them’ (p. 318).
Considering the music in those terms is a complex business, but for the most part, Le Menestrel's descriptions and analyses are deftly done. That said, her attempt to ‘situate [French Louisiana] music outside of any ethnic and racial identification and to focus instead on regional identification’ (p. 16) seems at odds with the facts on the ground. There has been musical overlap, blurring and borrowing, both past (Denis McGee and Amedé Ardoin playing and recording together) and present (Geno Delafose exploring Cajun music, Travis Matte And The [white] Zydeco Kingpins exploiting stereotypes of black eroticism), but this does not negate the reality of musics that can be distinguished as culturally African-American and Cajun. (One might ask here why African-American music continues to be subject to this sort of treatment; attempts to downplay the Irishness of Irish music, or the Jewishness of klezmer are thin on the ground by comparison.)
‘The perception that racial distinctions are embedded in French Louisiana music’ (p. 161) is not wholly fanciful: evidence includes Amedé Ardoin's beating for (what was perceived as) excessive intimacy with a white woman at a dance, and Le Menestrel's own account of the travails undergone by Horace Trahan after he declined to be the second coming of Iry LeJeune, and formed a mixed-race zydeco band led by his African-American father-in-law. Michael Doucet's account of visiting with Canray Fontenot (p. 244) is also germane: ‘if you'd catch him sober, he would tell you a story one way, the more he's drink [sic], he would loosen up, and you'd really feel the racism somebody Creole had to deal with, so you got a whole different prospective [sic] about his music’.
Nevertheless, Le Menestrel (following Rogers Brubaker) is right that race and ethnicity (and, one might add, class) are more usefully considered, not as identities, but as ‘categories for doing’ (p. 19). In ‘doing’, however, it is also important to include ‘not doing’; segregation was a system of taboos imposed on both black and white actors, rather than a system of positive actions, which is not to deny that failure to observe the taboos could lead to such terrible positive actions as that inflicted on Amedé Ardoin; on a lesser scale, the abuse meted out to Horace Trahan is again relevant.
Le Menestrel's discussion of the politics of cultural authenticity is a good account of the complexities and power relations involved; the roles played by outside agents – producers, writers, impresarios like Ralph Rinzler, musicians and others – in chronicling and publicising the music are rightly stressed, but it's questionable that ‘development, evolution and validation’ describes their contribution. Validity is not conferred by the awareness or approval of outsiders, even though their attention may make insiders (Dewey Balfa is the classic example) aware of the importance of what they are doing.
This is not the only place where the author fails to interrogate her assumptions: that outside interest is what validates Louisiana French music (‘zydeco … first became popular in 1964 following the release of Clifton Chenier's first album on the Arhoolie label’ [p. 14]), and that there is a musical hierarchy, in which interaction with mass culture determines rank: ‘Brian Terry … explains his ambition to elevate zydeco to the level of rap’ (p. 130); Beausoleil ‘even opened for the Grateful Dead’ (p. 133). These assumptions may explain the inclusion of a chapter on ‘transplants’ from northern California, and their interactions with Louisiana music and culture; the difficulties encountered by New Age, vegetarian progressives in a conservative, meat-eating region aroused little interest or sympathy in this reader.
One of the earliest British essays to consider Louisiana French music was titled Creoles[,] Cajuns and Confusion. Sara Le Menestrel does away with a good deal of the confusion, and substitutes a nuanced and sophisticated discussion of ‘Creoles, Cajuns and complexity’. This book is a valuable contribution, both to its field of study and to the theory and practice of anthropological enquiry.
