The Songs of Acadiana
Josh Caffery, director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at UL Lafayette, visited with Franklin Rotarians Tuesday at their regular luncheon at the Forest Restaurant.
Caffery, a Franklin native, has been researching the historical music of southern Louisiana for the last 10 years, particularly John and Alan Lomax and the recordings they made of Acadian song lore in 1934.
According to Caffery, the Lomaxes, a father and son team, were the most prolific song collectors of the 20th century, gathering songs from across the country with a 300 lb. recording device.
“They came down here in 1934 and recorded about 200 songs in the summer of 1934,” Caffery said, “and it’s really the first record that we have of traditional music right from this little pocket of Louisiana.”
Caffery said the Lomaxes were not interested in “commercial recordings,” but were instead in search of songs with more historical and traditional merit.
He said they did the majority of their recording around New Iberia and found songs of lesser known origins which had been carried to Louisiana in the minds of original Acadian migrants.
Caffery exhibited Alfred Granger from Loreauville, who was recorded singing: “L’amour et Fanatisme,” acapela in high, wavering tenor tones.
He said that after some difficulties in searching, he found the song to have been written in 1859 by a French aristocrat, making Granger an exception to songs of Acadian origin.
The song is said to be about an Islamic knight in love with a Christian girl, their love forbidden by Allah, which drives the knight to the front lines of battle, there to die, rather than live without his beloved.
Caffery said he knows the song can’t have been brought from Nova Scotia with the original Acadian settlers because it still had to wait around one hundred years, or so, to be written. But nonetheless, Caffrey said he is interested in how the song made its way from a French opera house to Granger in Loreauville, and he said that’s one of the things he finds so fascinating about the research of these songs.
Caffery teamed up with Joel Savoy and a record label in Eunice and re-recorded many of the tunes he found in the Lomax Collection, with a variety of artists, to create “I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in Evangeline Country,” released in 2017, and nominated that year for a Grammy Award.
Caffery shared that the lone St. Mary Parish artist recorded by the Lomaxes was John Bray of Morgan City.
“He was a really interesting guy,” Caffery said. “He was a finger-blues guitarist, and it’s a shame that the only recordings we have of him are the four recordings made by the Lomaxes, because he would have been famous if he would have gone on the folk festival circuit in the 60’s.”
Caffery said Bray was a songwriter as well as a performer and wrote a song called, “Trench Blues,” in which he narrates his memories of fighting the Germans in World War I, and how he felt, at one point singing, “I was worried about the submarines.”
“He should be more well-known,” Caffery said, “and he would be more well known, had he received more exposure.”
Bray was recorded by the Lomaxes singing another song based on the singing-calls Bray remembered from being a “bully” (boss or captain) of a logging crew, pulling cypress logs from the swamps around Morgan City.
The compilation of the Lomax recordings can be found and heard at Lomax1934.com, where Caffery has divided them by parish.
Caffery also wrote a book called “In the Creole Twilight: Poems and Songs from Louisiana Folklore,” which can be found at https://www.joshcaffery.net/store/c2/Books.html.