Rounder Releasing 'Louisiana Cajun and Creole Music: The Newport Field Recordings' September 28.

Rounder Records will release Louisiana Cajun and Creole Music: The Newport Field Recordings September 28.

The collection features 27 tracks on a single disc, recordings spanning 1964-67, recorded by by Ralph Rinzler, working under tthe Newport Folk Foundation and at the suggestion of board member, legendary folk music archivist Alan Lomax.
Rinzler, who later headed the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian Institution, came to Louisina in “Cajun country” in Louisiana when the music was actually seen as a threat by some tp  English-language culture pressed in upon the Cajun people.
The recordings, first released by Rounder in the mid-1970s, are believed to help save Cajun music by exposing the sounds to people elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world.
Performers on the anthology include the Balfa Brothers, Bois-Sec Ardoin and Canray Fontenot, Austin Pitre, and Adam and Cyprien Landreneau. Today, you'll find many of them on Amazon, as well as in record stores all over the country (though not the Targets or Wall-Marts of the world. Well, maybe some in Lousiana, one would have to check).  Balfa and Ardoin eventually received National Heritage Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“These recordings are among the most important in the history of Cajun and Creole music," said Barry Jean Ancelet of the University of Louisiana. "Much of what is happening now in this rich music can trace its energy directly to the days when Ralph Rinzler’s fielder work in the 1960s produced these recordings. "These performances brought Cajun and Creole music to the attention of the national folk music community, and inspired.”
This release contains many never before published photographs and extensive liner notes by various writer, more than 80 pages in the PDF embedded in the disc.Louisiana Cajun and Creole Music: The Newport Field Recordings is rich with the joy and sometimes, bittersweet sorrow one can find in Cajun music, too.  The sounds are among the most organic in American history and certainly among the most distinctive as well.