0:00 After the Civil War, there was no longer a legal distinction between free people of color and slaves. The free people of color were a de facto elite due to their land holdings. Below them was a large population of former slaves, which within, also contained a small minority of descendants of while planters and their slave mistresses who were not manumitted. It is this minority population, for the most part, who are responsible for the Creole revival movement and are the musicians playing Creole and Zydeco music.
5:00 The majority of these descendants would have been from the original wave of slaves brought in from West Africa, the Bambara, from what is now present day Mali. Brasseaux sees the inference that there was a large population from Haiti as an exaggeration. He says it would be nice if the Saint-Domingue connection was true as it would solve some riddles, like the population of Creole speakers, both white and black, stretching from Parks to Cecilia. There's an all-white Creole speaking population on the fringe of LaFourche/ Terrebonne Parish. But he believes it's the case of parallel developments. Because the slave trade was a monopoly handled by one French company, you see a population of Creole speaking people in the French islands in the Indian Ocean that were colonized at the same time as Louisiana. The community of Creole speaking people in the West Indies even has a variety of music they call Zydeco, a term believed to be a French corruption of the Wolof infinitive for "let's dance".
10:34 In 1964, the Opelousas newspaper wrote derogatory remarks about Dewey Balfa and others who were playing at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. Tisserand brings up the Opelousas newspaper covering a 1929 accordion contest that was pro-Cajun music. Brasseaux says there were many things happening simultaneously at that time. The release of the film 'Evangeline' in 1929 was followed by a movement by the elite to establish the Evangeline Longfellow National Park. Dudley Leblanc was the spokesperson for the community. At the same time, The Bayou Pom Pom radio program was the Cajun answer to Amos and Andy and French language was being suppressed in the schools.
14:55 LSU was at one time a hotbed of Cajun and Creole research when James Broussard was there. They pride themselves on being a center for Old South Studies. But there's not much of this information there or at Tulane. Most you will find here in the folklore and folklife collection here that Barry Ancelet administers(at UL). He says it's a wonderful resource that's going to waste and is not staffed. Brasseaux suggests Tisserand try to contact Alan Lomax.
17:52 The free people of color adopted some of the elite's attitudes towards poor whites during the Antebellum period. The term Cajun became associated with white trash by the civil war and was used by blacks themselves as an insult in their own community. Queen Ida muddied the water by using the name Cajun for herself. Tisserand says that in California there seems to be a resentment to be told you play Creole music, as if it infers that you can't play Cajun music. Joe Simien. Brasseaux agrees that that dynamic doesn't exist here. The Creole Newsletter is published in Simi Valley. They talk about resentments by parts of the community towards the infusion of other genres into Cajun music.