Traditional Cajun Music

Traditional French Cajun folkmusic from the US. Mixed songs and tunes. Accordion, fiddle, guitar, percussion, bass, vocals. The north-American Acadian Cajun culture is disappearing. “I am the last of my generation to speak the Cajun Language. I deliberately did not teach any of my four children to speak it. Thanks to our government, I was punished, spanked and made fun of by my teachers who wanted me to speak the ’’QUEEN’S ENGLISH’’. I was detained by U.S. Customs upon returning from overseas and accused of being a spy because of my ignorant country, thinking everyone in America speaks English or Spanish only. My heavy Cajun accent caused the agents to ask ’What are you doing in American Uniform, we have no French people in America’’. If you didn’t learn Cajun at home, don’t ruin it by trying to learn from a book. It is a ’spoken language’ only, books cannot teach you the correct pronunciation. Today our government is wasting taxpayer’s money, hiring teachers from other countries to revive the Cajun language. When will government learn, it don’t work that way. After 40yrs of trying to ’revive’ the Cajun language, I have not heard one person speaking it, even the accent is dying out, government don’t know what they’re doing. Government killed the language when I was a child. I didn’t want my kids to be discriminated against b/c of their accent. I am proud to be American and ashamed what it did to people of different culture and languages. Cajun is my first language.“ - Clarence Thibodeaux, 2016 #music #culture