By David Simpson

I grew up in Baton Rouge, graduating from Lee High in 1965 and LSU in 1969 (I also have three graduate degrees), but I knew very little about the French culture of Southwest Louisiana until I arrived in Eunice in the fall of 1974 to accept a position teaching English and handling some public relations at a two-year campus of LSU. I was surprised at the number of people in the community who spoke French, but I was focused on my work at LSUE and did not get involved in the culture. Many years later, when LSUE first established an Internet web site about 1996, I decided to post some tourism-related pages as a public service. Later, I added some pages on rural Mardi Gras activities, and, since I was exposed to Cajun and Zydeco music while taking photos for these projects, I began to consider the possibility of adding pages just on music, but it seemed like a daunting task.

Here’s how I got hooked on the music and began LSUE’s music pages. The Magnolia Sisters played at LSUE in spring 1999 as part of the college’s Performing Arts Series. At the end of the program, I bought their CD Prends Courage, which has liner notes that provide French and English lyrics. Though my acquaintance with French is basically limited to a rudimentary reading knowledge that I acquired in graduate school, I realized that, if I could look at the written lyrics, Cajun French was indeed French, and it was possible to understand the beautiful songs that Ann Savoy and the other Magnolia Sisters were singing.

A month or so later, I decided to attend Lafayette’s Festival International and take some photos of Balfa Toujours and of Geno Delafose, who was performing with them. When I heard the “La valse des Balfa,” sung by Christine Balfa, I could not understand what she was singing, but her strong, passionate voice combined with the intense, aching sadness of the twin fiddles made me want to find out. I went to Todd Ortego’s Music Machine store in Eunice and bought Balfa Toujours’ first CD, Pop, tu me parles toujours. When I read the translation in the liner notes, I discovered that Will Bolfa’s lyrics were, if anything, even more intense than the music. The singer is determined to find the woman he loves or die in the last drop of his last blood.  He discovers her with another man and then proclaims that if he had five days left to live, he would give up three just to spend the last two days with her and then die in her arms.

In mid-May 1999, having been impressed by what I had observed of Geno on stage with Balfa Toujours at Festival International, I went to see him with the rest of French Rockin’ Boogie at Downtown Alive! in Lafayette. Geno played for more than two hours without stopping, singing mostly in French. Up until then, I had no idea of the richness of the Creole tradition, carried on by a young man from the town where I live. I got his CD La Chanson Perdue, and played it over and over again, along with CDs from Balfa Toujours, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys (beginning with the CD Friday at Last), and Marc and Ann Savoy.

The First Web Cajun and Zydeco Web Pages

 By June 1999, I decided to begin putting together pages on Cajun, Creole, and Zydeco musicians. I began taking photos regularly at the Liberty Theater, located just a couple of miles from my home in Eunice, and, as time would allow, at various festivals like Festivals Acadiens and the Original Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Festival.  I added background information about individual bands and performers as a kind of extension of my public relations duties at LSUE, but I did everything on a voluntary basis outside of my regular work assignments.

Some time in 2002, I began receiving occasional inquiries from two or three newspapers about using photos of musicians, and I put together a CD of photos at their original resolution (instead of the low res Internet versions) and distributed it to various print media to use free. For several years, I continued to assemble CD compilations of photos for the media.

In May 2009, after 35 years, I retired from LSUE.  Starting in 2008, I began uploading sets of photographs to the Internet site Flickr.  I now have some 50,000 high resolution photographs on line, including a number of Mardi Gras shots, indexed at www.cajunzydecophotos.com.

Print Publications

 In addition to area newspapers that have used my photos from time to time, music magazines like OffBeat occasionally used them as well as a scattering of other publications. My photos appeared on covers of a few CDs and in publicity materials for several festivals, including the Northwestern State University Folk Festival in Natchitoches and Festivals Acadiens et Créoles in Lafayette, which in recent years has used thumbnail-size photos in the festival’s pocket guide.

I was especially pleased when Philip Gould, the master photographer who has taken numerous iconic images of Acadiana, invited me to submit some shots of Festivals Acadiens to fill in some gaps in his coverage for a book about the festival.  He was able to use about 25 of my photos in the book One Generation at a Time: Biography of a Cajun and Creole Music Festival, with text by Barry Jean Ancelet combined with images of festival posters designed by Benny Graeff, published in 2007 by the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 2014, Philip chose a number of my photos for an exhibit he curated at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s art museum titled “Visions of Tradition: 40 Years of Festivals Acadiens et Créoles.” Several photos were also included in a printed guide to the exhibit.  My photographs also appear in One Generation at a Time: Celebrating 50 Years of a Cajun and Creole Music Festival, published by Festivals Acadiens et Créoles in 2024.

Experiencing the Music

During my years taking photos, I have, of course, had a chance to witness some great performances, hear a lot of wonderful music, and just enjoy the warmth of the community sharing these experiences.  I especially remember in 1999 when Christine Balfa, the late Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin, and Courtney Granger played at the Church of Annunciation in Duralde, not as a special performance, but as part of the annual fair, along with an auction and other activities.  A year or so later, going to photograph Geno Delafose at a benefit dance at the Church of the Assumption Parish Hall in Basile is another fond memory. The wooden floor shook and rocked like we were at sea.  A few years later I went to the bi-weekly Creole jam session in Basile at the 190 Muffler Shop hosted by the late Marcel Fontenot.  Marcel had his drum set up in one corner, and the musicians used a U-Haul dolly as a mike stand.  I saw the late Boozoo Chavis on stage only one time. If anything, he more than lived up to his legendary status.  In the sweltering plus 100-degree heat at the 2000 Original Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Festival in Plaisance, Boozoo not only commanded the stage: he also held forth in an interview session with Herman Fuselier, holding nothing back in letting people know how he felt about his music and his life. I also have many fond memories of Festivals Acadiens, which I have attended since 1999, the Blackpot Festival, and many events sponsored by Louisiana Folk Roots, among others.

I enjoyed attending the Saturday shows at the Liberty Theater in Eunice, especially the years when it was hosted by Barry Ancelet, both because the programs featured some great music from a variety of bands and because of the interaction between the host and the band members. Terry Huval and the Jambalaya Cajun Band, in particular, put on some outstanding shows at the :Liberty, including tributes to Cajun musicians Shirley Bergeron, Lawrence Walker and Aldus Roger, birthday celebrations honoring D.L. Menard, a Christmas show, and annual tribute shows to Hank Williams Sr. and to classic country music.

I am not myself really a direct participant in the music scene, so I don’t have close relationships with the musicians, but I continue to be amazed by their skill, artistry, and commitment to their music. One of the most encouraging developments is the continuing emergence of young musicians, many of them from families with a rich musical heritage.  The music will certainly still be around for a long time if it continues to get the support it deserves.

I continue to find in the music a heartfelt directness and emotional depth that most pop music lacks. The joy and the sorrow are real.  When Creole accordionist Goldman Thibodeaux titled his first CD Les misères dans le coeur, he was truly singing from the heart, from his own experience, and, in the process, giving thanks for the blessings that life offers along with the pain. Even when they have not lived everything they sing about, the younger musicians are close enough to their roots in their families and in their culture that their voices carry truths that are authentic, not manufactured for a mass audience. There is, of course, other roots music elsewhere that has a comparable power and intensity, but our role in Louisiana should be to enjoy and support our own very rich, amazing cultures that we have inherited and that we need to preserve.

About the Future

I am 79. I no longer go to many music events outside Eunice, especially at night due to my reduced low light vision. My legs and balance are now a bit wobbly, I have had Type 1 diabetes since 2007, and wet macular degeneration in my left eye has affected my close-up vision so that I have to keep checking the computer screen with just my right eye to verify that the edits I make to photos look right. However, I hope to continue with my photography as long as I am able. I plan, once again, to be at Festivals Acadiens et Créoles in mid-October. Since the re-opening of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center in Eunice (one of six sites of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve), I’ve been photographing almost all of the semi-weekly (5:30-6:30 Thursdays and 3-4 Saturdays) Rendezvous in the Prairie free music programs, which feature Cajun and Creole musicians playing on the center’s replica front porch stage. The acoustic music and the interaction between the musicians and the audience recall the musical gatherings on Acadiana’s front porches  from years past.  When the Liberty Theater re-opens, I hope to once again attend music programs there.

My photographs are currently available online, but I am also transferring them to flash drives that I eventually will give to institutions that might be interested in archiving the photos or, when I die, the flash drives will be made available to those institutions by the attorney who handles my estate.

David Simpson
Eunice
August 12, 2026