Stories & Songs: ACCF House Concert w/ Goldman Thibodeaux & Darrell Bourque

House Concert to Benefit Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore:
“Stories and Songs” Features Goldman Thibodeaux and Darrell Bourque

UL Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies is hosting an intimate afternoon performance on Saturday, December 3, with Creole musician Goldman Thibodeaux and former Louisiana poet laureate Darrell Bourque. CLS director Dr. Michael S. Martin considers Bourque “simply Louisiana’s greatest living poet. His artistry knows no bounds, and it is a privilege to be able to spend time with him as he devotes his talents to expanding and enriching our understanding of our state.” Together with Thibodeaux, Bourque has woven a tapestry of stories and songs in the reimagining of Creole musician Amede Ardoin’s short and tragic career. Thibodeaux is “considered the last to still actively play one of the oldest forms of traditional Creole music known as La La, and as a Creole ambassador proudly speaks the language, plays the music, and encourages others to do the same. His humble spirit and genuine passion for his heritage continues to inspire artists of all ages, backgrounds, and interests to pursue their dreams of cultural preservation and artistic expression,” according to local folklorist Dr. Moriah Istre.

The house concert series benefits the Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore housed at the Center for Louisiana Studies. The ACCF is the world’s largest collection of Cajun and Creole folklore, field recordings, oral histories, and other folklife materials. Bourque underscores the importance of ACCF’s mission: “Archives are memory banks, and the Archives for Cajun and Creole Folklore in the Center for Louisiana Studies is a repository for belief and custom and for every articulation of how we arrived at who we are, and who we are not. The ACCF holds answers to ancestry, to tradition, to the wisdom of the folk we are derived from. It preserves the chords we made music with, the blues and ballads and game songs and dances we continue move with to shape our sense of being. In a place like ACCF superstition, folk medicine, jokes and remedy of every kind sit in a balance with the plaintive call of an Iry Lejeune song or the profound playfulness in a Clifton Chenier song. The line from Cléoma Breaux to Sheryl Cormier and Kristi Guillory, Megan Brown, and Christine Balfa is revealed. D. L. Menard and Nathan Abshire and Amédé Ardoin all pull together to show us parts of ourselves. An archive like ACCF is one place where why we believe and how we believe merge, where surface differences weaken and cultural strengths coalesce. If we do not preserve such archives we lose Beau Jocque’s ‘Cornbread’ and Boozoo Chavis and Stanley Dural along with Rebecca Henry and Mary Alice Fontenot; we lose our first ‘doctors,’ our first historians, our own griots; we lose ‘billy goat gruff’ and the trolls under the bridge our grandmothers told us to be aware of when we crossed the ‘cattle gap’ at the edge of where we lived then with bright notions of how we might live in the world of now.”

Tickets are $40 and are available for purchase through ACCFStoriesandSongs.EventBrite.com. The ticket price also includes dinner. The concert is hosted at a local private residence and details and directions to the event will be
emailed to paid ticket holders on Thursday, December 1, 2016. Proceeds from the house concert series directly impact the archives through equipment and software upgrades, student internships, and new archival acquisitions. For more information please contact the Center at 337.482.1320 or clspresents@louisiana.edu.

When
Saturday, December 3, 2016 from 2:00 PM to 5:30 PM (CDT)
Where
To Be Announced December 1 at 5:30pm via email
Tickets
$40 at http://ACCFStoriesandSongs.EventBrite.com