Sheffield — Beau Soleil avec Michael Doucet has been called “the best Cajun band” more than once. In their 51st year together as a band, the Louisiana group will play in the Barn Space at Race Brook Lodge on April 2. Two-time Grammy winners (with 12 nominations), they were the first Cajun band to win the award, with a traditional folk album in 1998. They have played countless festivals and toured nationally and internationally. The website of the National Endowment for the Arts calls lead fiddler and singer Michael Doucet “perhaps the single most important figure in the revitalization of Cajun music in the United States.”
Yet the founding members of Beau Soleil never really set out to be musicians.
“In Cajun we have a word called ‘lagniappe,’ which means something extra,” Doucet told The Berkshire Edge. It often refers to a little extra food thrown in for free. “So all this is lagniappe for us. We’re just having fun.” Their idea, Doucet told The Edge, was mostly to research the Cajun music they heard on a regular basis growing up amid the Acadian culture of southern Louisiana.
“In the beginning, it was trying to preserve a culture that was rapidly fading away,” said Doucet. “I think we helped to do that, stop the erosion a little bit, in our own way. There was no agenda at all, except to bring out the music of people who created this music in the first place, who we were lucky enough to sit side by side with and learn this music from. People who had recorded back in the 1920s were still alive in the late ’60s and ’70s, even later.”
Doucet, who in 2005 was selected as an NEA National Heritage Fellow, taught the music in schools, from elementary level to universities. But at the same time, people were hearing them play. They had a band Doucet calls “the Cajun Grateful Dead,” with twin guitars and twin fiddles, and Beau Soleil grew out of that. They initially played a lot in French-speaking countries, recording their first record in Paris in 1976. They began playing festivals in the U.S., like the National Folk Festival, and frequently went on Prairie Home Companion. So in 1986 they decided, “Let’s Cajunize America,” recounted Doucet. “So we did, we played every state in the union, including Alaska and Hawaii, more than three times each.”
While first their outfit was just acoustic, they “got more electric in the ’80s,” adding drums, bass, and percussion. Even as a bigger band, “it comes down to the basic instruments,” said Doucet—fiddle, accordion, and guitar. Doucet grew up surrounded by musical instruments and people who loved music, but said he never really had a music lesson, even later. “When I was five, I had kind of a binary personality: I was half Gene Audrey and half Elvis Presley. I would dress like a cowboy but sing all of Elvis’ songs, and so it progressed from that.” He played guitar and trumpet but didn’t get serious about the fiddle until he was 21.
Doucet grew up about two hours west of New Orleans and still lives just seven miles from that rural environment where he “could ride [his] horse for a couple of miles and be on a relative’s property.” Everybody played music, he said. His uncle played fiddle, his cousins played piano, trombone, and trumpet. They had parties where everyone played and sang. “Music was just a way of life.” His father had three sisters who sang old French ballads. “I never thought anything more about it,” recounted Doucet, “until my cousin and I were in France in 1974 at a festival and there’s people our age [who] were singing the same ballads. I could not believe that; there was the connection I never even knew existed.” He thought, “How would my aunts know about these songs anyway?”
In the 1970 census, there were 1 million French speaking people in southwest Louisiana, Doucet notes, and in 2000, less than 100,000 French speakers. “You can’t stop it,” he said of this downward trend, “and we’re not trying to; we’re just doing our part by being who we are, and just being real and playing the music we love.” Half a century in, Doucet is the only original founding member playing in Beau Soleil. Joining him are his brother David, who has been playing with the band for a long time, and his son Matthew, who is a violin maker, playing second violin and percussion. Chad Huval, whom Doucet calls “a whiz at accordion,” is a longtime friend. “I think he’s the only MIT graduate who plays Cajun music,” Doucet laughs.
And all the band members are not just musicians but music researchers. Beau Soleil is grounded in traditional tunes, but that music provides a framework for plenty of original songwriting, too. “It’s like a wagon wheel; you know you kind of need another cog, and whatever’s missing, it allows me the chance to write and to put it in there,” said Doucet. “We’ve never followed any rules,” he said of Beau Soleil. “It was like, how do you do this? … We wanted to live our lives here as normal as possible, and still go out and tour.”
They had a grand run of it, with many supportive agents. “I don’t know what I would do now,” Doucet says of the music business. “That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t play music and create music just for themselves, just for the pleasure of it, which is what we did, because that’s going to last.”
Doors open at 7 p.m., and advance tickets can be purchased here for the April 2 show at Race Brook Lodge.
