Various - Allons Boire Un Coup: A Collection Of Cajun and Creole Drinking Songs

OffBeat Magazine's cajun Album of the year 2007! Featuring GRAMMY nominated artists The Pine Leaf Boys, The Lost Bayou Ramblers, Racines, Ann Savoy, and more! The stereotype is an old one: people in Southwest Louisiana like to party. People come from all over the country, from all over the world even, to party in places like Eunice, Mamou and Lafayette. Anyone who lives in these places can confirm this. People in Southern Louisiana like to drink, and they do so often. The stereotype falls short, however, by offering a limited version of how Cajuns and Creoles drink and how they talk and sing about drinking. People in every part of the world drink, but people in Southern Louisiana don't just drinkæthey create powerful artistic expressions about drinking, songs and stories that place drinking within the currents of a vital, dynamic culture, visions of the bottle weaving in with the pain of lost love, the turning cycles of death and rebirth and the rituals of celebration of mourning that order and nurture our spiritual and social lives. Yes, Cajun and Creole musicians do get drunk. In fact, as I write this, there is a drunk Cajun sitting right next to me, playing the accordion. This is not the point, however. In the songs collected on this album, we can see that Cajuns and Creoles do far more that just get wasted. In these songs, drunk people dream. They waltz. They get their guns and go out in the middle of the night and kills raccoons. When their bottles are empty, they stomp their feet and play furious, driving dirges on the fiddle. People all over the world get drunk on Saturday night and have hangovers on Sunday, but Cajuns drink a glass of lemonade and then write a song about it. It's not particularly interesting or important that people in Southern Louisiana like to drink. Of utter importance, however, are the wild and sometimes strange things they do when they drink and party together, and the soulful, brilliant way they transform these activities into song. We hope this album is a good example of both.