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The next year, the morning of Mardi Gras, I was jogging down LSUE Drive headed back home when I encountered the Eunice Courir as it was turning onto Sittig Road. A couple of Mardi Gras on horseback shouted a few humorous taunts at me. I can't remember what it was, but one of them said something that I thought was pretty clever. When I arrived home a few minutes later, I decided to quickly put on my jeans, grab my camera, and head out to Patasa to try to catch up with the Mardi Gras. I drove down Maple and turned south on one of the streets that intersects with Perchville Road.

The Mardi Gras, led by Capitaine Nelson Godeaux, were just reaching that point. They were really letting loose, dancing, yelling, carrying on. I reached into my pocket for change to give to begging Mardi Gras. I was captivated by the almost medieval strains of "La chanson de Mardi Gras." I watched the Mardi Gras chasing chickens. By then, I knew I was hooked. I wanted to photograph more courirs.

To learn more about courirs, I read Barry Ancelet's monograph "Capitaine, Voyage Ton Flag: The Traditional Cajun Country Mardi Gras" and I watched Pat Mire's film "Dance for a Chicken." Within the next year or two, I found out from Larry Miller that the Tee Mamou Women's Mardi Gras started at the Fruge Barn near D.I.'s Cajun Restaurant, I got information on the Elton Run from David Bertrand, in 1998, Betty David, who worked in LSUE's Student Support Services, invited me to come to their home near Church Point where she and her husband, the late Jim David, hosted a big crowd at Mardi Gras stop, including a busload in what at that time was USL's Elder Hostel Program. I heard about the Soileau Mardi Gras from Melvin Ceasar on the KRVS "Zydeco Est Pas Salé" program and contacted Allen Parish Tourism who put me in touch with Andrew Cezar in Metro Soileau where the run began at his sulky racing track.

When I retired in 2009, I took all of my Mardi Gras photos and music photos and uploaded them to Flickr, a web site to which you can upload original resolution versions of photos. I got my own web site, www.cajunzydecophotos.com, where I provided an index of the photos.

Some 10 years later Olivier Duport, a co-founder of the FLEE Project, which documents unique cultures and is headquartered in Paris, France, contacted me, expressing a strong interest in my photos that he saw on Flickr. By that point I had been keeping copies of all of my photos on a flash drive with instructions in my will to my attorney to offer copies of the flash drive to libraries and others who might be interested in having a copy after my photos are no longer available online.

I decided to send Olivier a copy of the flash drive, telling him he could use the photos in the FLEE Project's work without charge. Right before Mardi Gras in 2023, he told me that he was going to travel to our area, and he wanted to meet me. A couple of days after Mardi Gras, we met for coffee at Café Mosaic in downtown Eunice. I was really surprised when he showed me on his phone an electronic copy of a book that he had put together of my Mardi Gras courir photos. I agreed to let him publish the book. I didn't ask him to make any changes in the photos he selected other than to point out that he didn't have any photos from Mamou, a courir that really needed to be included, so he switched out a couple of photos and added two shots from the 2023 Mamou courir. The other courirs in the book are Eunice, Church Point, Elton, Soileau, Lejeune Cove, the Tee Mamou men, Faquetigue, Basile, a couple of shots from a Mermentau Courir, L'anse Meg, photos of the Creole Mardi Gras entering Mamou, and one photo from Egan.

A couple of months later, Olivier emailed me that he was moving forward with publication of the book and that he planned to return in spring 2024 to launch the book in our area in addition to launches elsewhere. I cautioned him that, since most people interested in courirs probably already have plenty of courir photos on their phones, there might not be much demand for a courir photo book here.

Nevertheless, in April 2024, after a launch in Paris and others planned in New York City and several other European cities, he and another co-founder of the FLEE Project embarked on a book launch tour that included a book signing at Fred's Lounge in Mamou April 20, 2024.

The FLEE project supplied copies of the book to several independent bookstores in the United States including Cavalier House Books in Lafayette in addition to stores in Europe and also was able to get stories about the book published in the French online magazine Beware!, in the British magazine Songlines, and in the Paris daily newspaper Libération.

Photography has always been only a hobby for me. I have never charged for the use of my photographs, and I am not receiving any money from sales of the book. I did order 50 copies of the book from the FLEE Project at the wholesale price of $17. I briefly considered selling the book myself, but I don't need the money and I don't want to get involved in sales transactions, so I decided to offer free copies to the Eunice Depot Museum, with all proceeds from sales of the book going to the museum.

I'll be 78 in May 2025. My legs are not very steady, I have some vision problems (including night vision) and other chronic health issues, so I'm not getting around as much as I used to. I still hope to continue taking photographs of Cajun, Zydeco, and Creole musicians and of rural Mardi Gras, but on a more limited basis than in earlier years.

David Simpson
Eunice, LA
Feb. 5, 2025