CONCLUSION

At each Lost Bayou Ramblers performance that I attend, the band plays the song “Bayou Perdu.” It has the clippy and energetic beat that they want to establish as a special part of their identity, but the lyrics speak to something even more fundamental about the Ramblers,

specifically, and about their understanding of human experience, generally.

J’ai haler mon ti bateau I pulled my little boat

Pour pagayer sur le bayou To paddle down the bayou

J’ai tourné une autre coulée I turned another coulee,

J’étais Perdu, J’ai trouvé I was lost, I found

J’ai demandé avec le nèg I asked the man on the shore

Ma maison je veux la trouver I’m trying to find my house

Elle est pareille comme cette maison-là It looks like that one, there

“C’est drête-là,” “Well that is your house,”

Il a dit à moi He told me171

The liner notes to the album explain that the lyrics to this song were derived from the actual experience of their friend and Cajun storyteller, Sydney Bourque. While in his eighties, Bourque paddled down the Bayou Vermilion in search of his home after a day of fishing, having lost his way. The man upon whom he stumbled reminded him that he was facing his home after all. The analogy is in fact not an analogy at all. It is exact. Home, for Bourque, does not just resemble that house to which he points; it is his home. This charming story speaks to something real and complex about home, a place we know so intimately, but that knowledge is fragile in itself, especially when there is a sense that things are changing or being threatened.

Standing apart from one’s home, looking for it, looking at it with questioning eyes can be de-familiarizing and sometimes disorienting. Like Louis’s experience in Ireland, it can reveal something about one’s culture, which would otherwise remain was unknown. Or, it can be frightening, as in the case when Hurricane Katrina disordered and reshaped the whole landscape.

The narrative reveals something poignant about the changing complexion of the bayou, which may in fact appear different each day because it is so rapidly changing shape.

“Bayou Perdu” strikes at the heart of what the Ramblers express through their performance in the phrase employed by James Peacock: “place matters.”172 _{While this comes} across in their performance as something obvious and simple, it is in fact a cry of pride, a cry of defiance, a cry of anguish and fear, clearly a cry for help. The sharing of what their place is and why it means so much to them speaks profoundly to who they and to who their people are. Peacock elaborates, “The phrase ‘sense of place’ suggests the perception of a locale as more than just a physical space, as a territory but also a psychological space, a place imbued with history

172 _{James Peacock, “From Space to Place” in Space – Place – Environment (Stauffenberg Verlag, Germany 2004) 88.}

and memory, community and experience.”173 _{Place, ultimately, really does matter, especially} when damage done to the land threatens to wound or even destroy the culture. The music of the Ramblers as experienced through their energetic and compelling performances has the power to express this and to move people to a desire for it to thrive.

The Revivalists understood that Cajun culture has a value system that they wanted to retain, that which was - and still is - particularly valid and true for them. Among other things, this includes personal generosity and appreciation for a social way of life as seen in the many ways Cajuns gather for food, drink, music, worship and dancing, a way of life that is actually counter-cultural to the individualism of other parts of America. This generation identified Cajun music as representative of something unique to their culture, which they valued and fiercely upheld.

The deliberate decision on the part of the Ramblers, as members of this generation facing the forces of globalization and an intensified threat to the land itself, to re-articulate this value system and these ideals which they enact through performance should be seen as radical, not old-fashioned. While “progress” tugs us away from familiar ways of doing things, the Ramblers remind us of the power of tradition as it emerges within a contemporary context. Through their music, they point to that which is becoming, unfolding, that is, in the shaping of a future culture during its process of development. T.S. Eliot in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” claimed, “the past should be altered by the present as much is the present is directed by the past.” The Ramblers engage the past and the present using exceptional skill and vitality. By performing traditional Cajun music, and thus raising consciousness about this cultural expression as well as the plight of the land, the Ramblers are transforming culture.