French Connection Folk festival celebrates legacy of Franco emigrants

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Maine is a very French place.

With roughly a quarter of its people having French, French-Canadian or Acadian ancestry, Maine is the most “French” state in New England, census figures show. Franco-Americans in Maine, New England and New York represent the second-largest concentration of French speakers in the United States, second only to Louisiana.

In recognition of the contributions that the French and their descendants made to folk culture in Maine and elsewhere in the nation, the organizers of the 64th National Folk Festival, which begins Friday, are doing something they have not done before.

“For this year, we decided to put a special emphasis of the legacy of French in North America,” said Julia Olin of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the Washington group that produces the festival. “It’s definitely because of Maine’s French heritage, not only in northern and eastern Maine but throughout the region.”

To that end, festival organizers have tapped some of the nations’ best-known performers of Quebecois, Cajun and Creole music as well as a Franco-Canadian step dancing troupe.

Olin said that the focus on French won’t be limited to music and dance. It also will figure into the festival’s material culture, craft and food offerings.

While performances by these groups will take place throughout the three-day festival, a block of French heritage acts is slated for Saturday afternoon. The stellar lineup, in order of appearance, consists of the Quebecois group La Bottine Souriante, the Cajun band BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet, Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas from New Orleans, and Gilles Roy and the Steppin’ Ambassadors, a Franco-Canadian step dancing troupe from Ottawa Valley. The fun starts at 1 p.m. on the Railroad Stage.

Following are thumbnail sketches of the four styles of music, how they originated and what they have become today, as described by the musicians.

La Bottine Souriante

Quebecois

In a time not so long ago, before the advent of radios and televisions, families and friends in French-speaking Quebec regularly gathered in each other’s homes for old-time entertainment. Boisterous and noisy, the house parties featured singing and dancing to music made with simple instruments such as the fiddle and accordion.

“We hear that there are still parties like that,” Regent Archambault of La Bottine Souriante said during a telephone interview from his Montreal home.

It was from those traditions that La Bottine Souriante was born in 1976 in Lanaudiere, a large region in central Quebec known for its extensive and rich tradition of song and dance. Archambault said that the area, while relatively isolated, saw large inflows of Acadian and Irish people, all of whom contributed to the style of music developing there.

“People started to look back at their origins,” Archambault said. “What we observed is that the influence of Irish music and Scottish music [on French music] is strong.”

La Bottine’s songs are performed in the members’ native French, the language spoken by more than 90 percent of Quebec’s population, according to Archambault. Common themes in Quebecois music are drinking, hunting, logging, love and sex, said Archambault, who plays double bass. “It’s very humorous,” he said of the style, which tends to be earthy and filled with double entendres.

“It’s not complicated music,” he continued. “It’s music that conveys a lot of happiness. It’s energetic music. It’s old-style party music. That’s what it was created for. It’s very upbeat and, for dancing, it’s perfect.”

When interest in the folk scene began to wane in the 1980s, La Bottine took steps to reinvent itself, adding influences from other musical styles into the mix. Perhaps the band’s boldest step to date was the addition of a four-piece brass section in the 1990s.

The group’s blending of traditional chansons a repondre (call and response songs) and traditional instruments such as the fiddle and accordion with salsa, jazz and rock has become its trademark. The mix apparently works for La Bottine, which has released 10 albums and has won a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy.

“It’s world music because it’s music that comes from the fusion of traditional music with what is happening in world music,” Archambault said.

BeauSoleil

Cajun

“Maine and Louisiana are as far apart as can be, but in some ways they’re very close,” said Michael Doucet, fiddler, lead vocalist and songwriter for BeauSoleil, one of the world’s best-known Cajun bands and winner of a Grammy in the traditional folk category.

That’s largely because the Cajuns of southern Louisiana are the long-lost cousins of the French-speaking people of the St. John Valley in northern Maine. Both descended from the Acadians, who settled what now is Nova Scotia in the early 1600s.

Sometimes melancholy but more often lively, traditional Cajun music speaks of lost and found love, the beauty of nature and the hard times that Cajuns have endured, few if any of them surpassed by Le Grand Derangement.

That infamous event, in 1755, marked the beginning of the expulsion of Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia. As history has it, the trouble began in 1714, when the Acadians (whose language and customs were French and whose loyalty was to the French king) were asked to take an oath of allegiance to the English.

The Acadians initially declined but eventually did so. But because the British didn’t believe the Acadians were being sincere, or because the British were motivated by greed as some believe, they seized the communities, splitting up families and forcing the exiles onto ships sailing south. Roughly half died along the way. Those who lived were scattered up and down the East Coast. Some made their way to the bayous and prairies of southwest Louisiana, where they became Cajuns.

The group’s name, BeauSoleil or “beautiful sun,” comes from the nickname for Joseph Broussard, one of the heroes of the Acadian resistance who later joined the Acadians in Louisiana. The nickname is said to describe Broussard’s smile, said to be bright as the sun.

As Doucet was growing up near Lafayette, a Cajun renaissance was under way. While traditional music was always around, especially at family gatherings, Doucet said he didn’t appreciate his own rich musical heritage until he visited France in 1974, where he discovered French bands playing traditional Cajun music.

“It changed my life,” Doucet said. When he returned home, instead of enrolling in graduate school to study English romantic poetry, Doucet won a National Endowment for the Arts folk arts apprenticeship grant to learn traditional Cajun fiddle styles from some of the masters.

“I think that was the idea – to reclaim that and learn that for future generations,” said Doucet of what has become his life’s work.

In Louisiana, Acadians created new music influenced by the other ethnic groups living there – Spanish, Africans, Haitians, Anglos, Germans and American Indians. To the fiddle they added accordion, guitar, the triangle and washboard.

Like their French-speaking counterparts to the north, the Cajuns held house parties, where furniture was cleared to make room for dancing. When musicians sang, it was in a shrill voice that could be heard over the ruckus. That voice, coupled with strong fiddle playing, became characteristics of early Cajun music.

Though loyal to traditional Cajun roots, Doucet is not afraid to experiment with new influences. As he sees it, BeauSoleil’s unique style is the blend of old French and Acadian lyrics, themes and tunes with country, western, rhythm and blues, Caribbean and Tex Mex influences.

Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas

Zydeco

Nathan Williams likens zydeco to a popular Louisiana dish: “It’s like a gumbo. You know, a little of this, a little of that. It’s got a little French and English, some blues, reggae and rock. It makes you want to get up and dance.”

Though similar, zydeco is not Cajun in origin. It is the music of Louisiana’s Creoles of Color, the natives of south Louisiana whose ancestry is black, or black mixed with white or Indian, and who tend to be French-speaking and Catholic. Zydeco’s name comes from the common Creole expression, “Les haricots (zydeco) son pas sale, or “The snap beans are not salty” which some say means that in hard times, there isn’t any salt to go around.

“I’ve been listening to music for a long, long time – just about all my life,” said Williams, 39, in a telephone interview last week from Sid’s One Stop, his brother’s store in Layfayette, La. “I play a lot of the old traditional stuff but some of what I play is a little nouveau.”

Born in St. Martinville, La., Williams was raised in a community in which everyday conversation was conducted in Creole French, and has made recordings in that language. His big brother, Sid, gave him his first accordion, which came from legendary Buckwheat Zydeco, who lived across the street from Sid’s One Stop and was like a father to Williams. Williams clerked for his brother and practiced accordion while watching Buckwheat play in local clubs. He also heard other greats such as the late zydeco king, Clifton Chenier. (Too young to get into the clubs, Williams watched through windows, once getting so engrossed he forgot about the fan in the window and the unguarded blade cut the bill of his cap off.

Like Buckwheat and Chenier before him, Williams is passing on the zydeco tradition. Williams’ 15-year-old son, Nathan, often accompanies him on tours and has released a CD of his own – “Little Nathan and the Zydeco Big Times.”

Gilles Roy and the Steppin’ Ambassadors

Franco-Canadian step dance

Gilles Roy has spent almost all of his life step dancing.

“I’ve been at it for 50 years,” said Roy from his home in Ottawa, Ontario. “I’ve been teaching it for 35 years. It’s a lot of fun.”

Quick-paced, rugged and energetic, step dancing is usually performed to traditional fiddle music. The Ottawa Valley style of step dance for which Roy is renowned was born in the lumber camps of Canada, where Irish, English and French-Canadian loggers sharpened their footwork as a means of relaxation and recreation – an antidote to their long days and hard work in the woods.

“They used to call it a buck dance because it was danced only by men,” said Roy. “That’s because there were no girls in the lumber camps.” Despite that, women are among the members of the Steppin’ Ambassadors, Roy’s troupe of dancers and musicians.

Like many other families where he grew up, Roy’s French-Canadian family danced to the popular fiddle players of the day. He learned step dancing from his father and uncle, and made his public debut at the age of 5, when he won second place in the Ottawa Exposition. He won his first world championship at age 15, a feat he repeated twice.

Over the years, Roy has made numerous television appearances and has toured with such Canadian entertainers as Tommy Hunter. Roy also has danced for the queen on Parliament Hill and, a few years ago, was inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame.

Roy said he’s looking forward to his shows in Maine but noted that travel by air since Sept. 11 has resulted in an unusual problem for the troupe: They can’t bring the axes, saws and other logging tools they use in their act with them on the plane.

“Normally, I use a broad ax with a 16-inch blade,” Roy said. Nowadays, “not even a razor blade” is permitted.