>> Nancy Groce: Thank you so much for presenting such a great Botkin Lecture. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh, a pleasure, I had a blast. >> Stephen Winick: So, we were interested in. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It's always wonderful to get an audience to, you know, listen to this stuff. >> Stephen Winick: That's right, yeah and we had a pretty good venue for it today I should say. So, yeah we were interested in some of the areas that you touched on especially some of the people that you've worked with over the years, and you used a phrase that I felt was great which was 'vernacular professors'. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh yeah. >> Stephen Winick: And explain that phrase and was it your creation? Or did, have you heard it from others? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I don't know. It just made sense to me. You know, people like Dewey Balfa who, I mean, I had many, many, many hours of you know, ongoing conversations with him about the way things are and how things work and who is who, what's what? I mean he's the one who came up with this concept of having the first festival in a place where people couldn't dance. And my initial reaction to that was like, it's dance music. What are you nuts? And he said, no if they're dancing they're not going to be paying attention in the same way. I thought wow, wow, you know, I mean that's worth tuition. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Or what [inaudible] did, what then [inaudible] did you know, turning his chair around to tell me those stories when he realized that the audience out there, he wasn't sure they understood his Creole. He didn't know who they were. He didn't know how they were reacting to this but he knew me. I had spent hours with him on his porch so he just turned his chair around and started telling me the story and I thought way, this is working way better. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Right, I mean where do you get an idea like that? Do you get an idea like that from somebody renegotiating the context or instinctively, or in a folklore class, a theory class where you know [laughter] they're saying, how could we possibly, you know? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, no and what's interesting about it too is, so as you explained the story, he was on a stage doing storytelling which is not the natural context necessarily for those kinds of stories but you were on the stage with him and so to reorient to you was actually giving that audience more, an experience that was more like how those stories would normally be told. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Right, they get to peek into what would typically happen on his porch. We weren't on his porch but he had renegotiated that as much of that as he could. I saw something similar at the Festival of American Folklife, I want to. I forgot what year it was but Ray Hicks was there. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: A great storyteller from Appalachia and they had him on a stage. It was a small stage but nevertheless it was a stage with a microphone. And it just wasn't working. He felt uncomfortable and the crowd didn't know what they were doing there and. And so, what the next day before his session on the stage was scheduled to happen he was over there leaning against a tree telling a bunch of people some stories like which he really felt more comfortable doing. You know happily the stage producer, the stage manager saw that happening and he said oh, okay, never mind this thing, this is completely useless. He just went over there and put a lavalier mic on him and a little speaker nearby and it just enhanced the sound a little bit. And instead of telling the stories for five people, he told the story for 15 or 20. But he felt comfortable doing that. So, you know, I guess my point is if folklorists are paying attention, the lessons are there. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well let's talk about Dewey a little because you know I've interviewed a bunch of Cajun musicians, Michael Doucet and Steve Riley and all those folks and all of them say oh well, without Dewey none of this would have happened. They all studied with him. He really was a professor in that sense. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: He really was. >> Stephen Winick: They all went to study with him. So talk about the importance of Dewey if you would. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Whew, where to start? >> Stephen Winick: Because I didn't know that you'd been so influenced by Dewey personally which is [multiple speakers]. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well, when I went and knocked on his door you know, sent there by Roger Mason, what happened was when I went to knock on his door in [inaudible] at his house, a lot of people had come by that point, you know Roger Mason and Ron and Fay Stanford and a few. There was a lot of people who had come in, musicians and folklorists and other folks but not anybody from home yet. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: And so, you know he said, where are you from? I said I'm from near Lafayette. He told me, you're not going away. He thought you're not going away. You're going to be here. I could ride this horse for a long time. And he was always very open to, you know, people coming in from the outside, Tracy Schwartz and all these people came in from the outside but I think he, leading up to the first concert in 1974 he began to make important contacts with local folks. And I'm not just talking about Robert Jordell [phonetic] who was, you know just interested in playing music with him, which was already a big deal, but I'm talking about what Dewey often called the people who determine things, you know the movers and shakers, the people who could make inroads in the university or festival programming or television programming. Or, you know he was keenly aware that there are some people who have access to those things and if he could, you know, jig them in [laughter]. >> Nancy Groce: Was he that way throughout this life? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh yeah. >> Nancy Groce: And or affected his life? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well I mean, when I met him. I don't know how far back it went but when, you see he was, he was recorded by Rinzler in '64. But, by then he had already been playing with his own family band and also Nathan Abshire and a few other people. So, he had a public performance persona but in '64 something remarkably different happened. He became introspective, aware of what was going on in a way that I don't know any, no other musician was aware of it that way. And it had a lot to do with what he and Rinzler talked about. Ralph saw in Dewey a, you know a willing participant in this conversation and well Dewey was the first, one of the first Cajun musicians that anybody ever heard explaining a song or explaining where the band was or explaining what they were doing. And his own brother, Will [assumed spelling] would often say when they came to play the festival oh 'Dewey will parle' Dewey is going to talk, that's what he does. But he had learned to do that, you know and Will didn't do it. Nathan didn't do it. None of those other people did it. Dewey did that. So he was already sort of aware, kind of plugged into the notion that something remarkably different was happening, was available to happen and that drew young people like Michael Doucet and me, Nick Spitzer, a lot of other people to him because he got it. You know he was very intelligent, not, he didn't have a lot of education but he was extremely intelligent. I mean he saw what the issue was, oh there, that's the nerve. There's the nerve, I see it. >> Stephen Winick: What was his teaching like? I mean, how was it, to be sitting there with him and? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well, teaching about what's going on or what kind of strategy you might need to be developed for, I don't know, presenting a festival or something like that, was conversational. Anybody who learned music from him, it was much more, you know regimental. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I mean he said, you know he used to use the metaphor, the corner post, where the basic fingering for the fiddle, this is where you start. Everything goes back to this. Every, start here and come back to here, this is the corner post. So, the way that he learned music, I mean the way that he taught music to people like David Greely and Steve Riley [inaudible] he said look, play it this way exact, and David Greely is the same way. David Greely learned from him and he's the same way. He said no, I didn't say do this, I said to this. You're doing this. I want you to do this [laughter]. He also had a very, at the same time, a very flexible notion of what was being done. I mean you know if you sang, I don't know, say if you sang words to a song that weren't the way he would have sung it he didn't. I never saw him have a problem with that. >> Nancy Groce: Who was his mentor? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: He learned from his family. He learned from people that he was playing with you know, Austin Pete and some of the people that were playing, Nathan. But, I don't know that he had what one would call a mentor. >> Nancy Groce: One, yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: No, I think he made this up. He intuited it. >> Nancy Groce: And how old was he when you met him? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh, I don't know, a lot younger than I am now. He wasn't an old man. I guess he was in maybe his late 40s. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Or so. >> Stephen Winick: And it's also interesting how probably part of his transformation into such a force in Cajun culture came from interacting a little bit with outsiders. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh absolutely. >> Stephen Winick: You know, and Ralph being part of it. So explain how his, you know his connection to Ralph Rinzler and to Newport and all that may have helped in this process? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know it's interesting to remember that Dewey went to that first Newport Festival in 1964 as a last-minute replacement on guitar. And he ended up playing the guitar so much. He wasn't used to playing guitar and he ended up playing the guitar so much his fingertips were numb and bleeding. But you have to wonder what might have happened. I guess eventually it would have happened anyway but you have to wonder what might have happened if you know, the guy who was supposed to go on guitar had gone and you, if he had been willing to get on the plane, what would have happened with Dewey? I think Dewey had already been recorded. He had already met Ralph and I think he had already had that epiphany, you know it's like, oh, something is up here, something potentially interesting and powerful is up. But when he got to Newport I mean he saw what happened and you know, he was a terribly quick study. He got it. Oh, I get what's happening. I get this. I see what's happening. Because already, that first year at Newport he noticed, you know the Tommy Garrells [phonetic] and the Monroe Brothers [assumed spelling] and you know all the other people who were there, performers. Oh, I see what does that. I see what makes that crowd [inaudible] a little faster, a little fancier, you know perform a little bit, you know public performance, public persona. He figured it out right away and he also heard them talking to the crowd. He heard the presenters doing it but then he heard them doing it too and thought oh, okay. I could see where that would be useful. They don't know who I am. They don't know what this is, just help them understand who we are, why we're doing this. I mean within the first year he was already doing that. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, and it's like he came back as a combination of a musician and a presenter. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, absolutely. He came back, the way he put it himself was, he said I wanted to bring home the echo of that ovation, of that applause that we heard in Newport. I wanted to get people from south Louisiana to hear that our music was appreciated. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, what did that mean to someone in south Louisiana at that time? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh, I mean in the, in the early 1960s when that happened you know, Cajun music was appreciated by a segment of the population but by other segments of the population was considered old and passee and raucous. I mean look in 1965 a guy named Burton Grindstaff who did a column for the Opelousas Daily World Newspaper heard that they were, what he called talent scouts from Newport in the area looking to bring musicians, to take musicians up there with them. And he said, he wrote in a column what an embarrassment this would be. I mean he said there's. He said there's music, there's Cajun music and then there's you know, music and they don't want anything to do with each other. He said it's like cats fighting under the porch. And he said. He made a prediction. He said it would be terrible and embarrassing if one of those talent scouts took some of these recordings that they're making back up there and they got a faulty needle and heard it wrong and thought it was good and invited us up there. What an embarrassment it would be. Well it turns out it wasn't an embarrassment at all, it was exactly the opposite. So you know, there was a prevailing notion among certain segments of the society that this was, well they referred to it as nothing but shankey shank [phonetic]. It was considered old and passee and you know with the Americanization process it was precisely something that Cajuns should be trying to get away from, run [inaudible] away from. And Dewey said, well no, they're loving this up there. Why wouldn't we love it? Why can't we appreciate our own treasure? When he started talking to Jimmy Domengeaux, the chairman of the council for the development of French in Louisiana about Cajun music, it happened before '74, a few years before. CODOFIL was created to restore French in Louisiana, to preserve and restore French in Louisiana. And Dewey understood, or thought, understood that you know, you don't. Language and culture are not separable. I mean language doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists to express things in a culture. And so he started trying to talk to Jimmy Domengeaux about integrating, incorporating local Louisiana French cultural effects into this effort to try to preserve and promote the French language of Louisiana and Domengeaux was not a Cajun music fan. He was more like the Burton Grindstaff, you know. He liked jazz, he liked New Orleans Dixieland jazz. And he thought that, the only Cajun music he had ever heard was, you know raucous and kind of out of tune and played by a bunch of drunks or I don't know what, something. And Dewey was talking to him. He talked to him over a number occasions and he said, you know, you don't like this. You think you don't like this because you've only heard it poorly played. If you heard it well played you would change your mind. And Domengeaux of course would blow him off. Oh, I don't know about all that. You Balfa boys want to try to bring this, that raucous stuff. Well, at one point Dewey Balfa and Leo LeBlanc who was the representative of the Quebec government in Lafayette helping CODOFIL to conceptualize what it was doing. Leo LeBlanc was a guitar player from New Brunswick originally and he understood Dewey's message and he and Dewey blindsided Domengeaux at a party just outside of Lafayette, between Lafayette and [inaudible]. They were at somebody's camp and he said, oh that's one of the Balfas. That's one of those Balfas that's always talking about that damn Cajun music. And he said I got my fiddle in the car and Leo has a guitar, let me play you something and Dewey played of course. Dewey was you know great right, Dewey plays his stuff. And Domengeaux says wow, I never anything like that. And that was the beginning of the flip. A few, just a short time later Domengeaux accepted the, you know, the idea to produce that first concert. By the way, did you ever hear about how that happened? >> Stephen Winick: Tell us. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It started out to be a demonstration to 150 French-language journalists from all over the world who happened to be having their convention in Lafayette and CODOFIL, Domengeaux was concerned that they. He wanted them to write positive things about the presence of the French language in Louisiana. He didn't want them to write about, you know, this whole thing is dead. And so he was trying to figure out ways to present them some, some local culture in French. And up until then CODOFIL had been very cerebral. It had been top-down. It had been, you know, imported French from France. And Dewey kept saying you know we have this stuff from here. We could show them. And after he heard that performance, that improvised, impromptu performance at the camp, he said well maybe so, maybe so you know. So we started talking to him and I had worked on the Smithsonian Festival in '74 so I kind of had a notion of, I had met Ralph and we started working on this thing. And CODOFIL representatives and Domengeaux accepted to do this concert but it was supposed to be a very, very slow-key, small format thing. >> Nancy Groce: And where was it taking place? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well, it was going to take place in a theater on campus, look it, you know, seating capacity of about 350 or 400 people. It was mostly, it was for the journalists. It was just going to be a demonstration of Cajun music to them and Creole music. Then we started. As we were working on this we thought, you know, maybe some people from the public might want to, might be interested in coming so we decided to open it up a little bit to a nearby ballroom and then to a larger venue in the municipal auditorium which seated about 3000. Because we were getting feedback from the public, yeah, you know I might want to like. I might want to see that. And then we ended up with the Blackham Coliseum which had a capacity of 12,000 people. But Domengeaux at that point got cold feet and he said man, you know if we do this in there and it's half full, it's going to look half empty. There's going to be a lot of empty seats. I don't know why but I felt like you know this [inaudible] is going to work. I think it's going to work. I was all-in. You know on the poker table, I was all-in. And we ended up doing it there and Leo LeBlanc, that same Leo LeBlanc was writing press releases, sending them out in the newspaper, getting people kind of excited about this. But honestly, we had no idea if anybody was going to come. We didn't. I didn't even know if the musicians were going to come. We weren't paying them anything. And we were talking about Clifton Chenier and the Balfa Brothers and Nathan Abshire and [inaudible] and Canray, I mean you know. And we didn't know if any of them would show up. And then, that day, it starts pouring down raining, I mean cats and dogs. There was a foot and a half of water on Johnson [assumed spelling] Street right outside of the coliseum. I thought, oh well there's it. You know if this goes bad I'm done. I'm just moving to California or something. I'm going to be done here. Well, about 4. The schedule started at 7. About 4:30 Lionel LeLieux, "Bois Sec" Ardoin and Canray and a couple of ballad singers showed up, their pants rolled up above their knees, walking through. Where do we plug in? Well, this may work, something is going to happen. Sure enough, everybody showed up. The people start coming, coming and coming and coming and coming. It's still raining cats and dogs. People are pouring in there. It filled the place up. I thought Oh My God, this is way. We had set up. We had set up, can you see this? If you think of this as an oval, we had set up the stage here so that even, if we just got two-thirds of the crowd. >> Stephen Winick: Right, right, right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It wouldn't look so bad. They filled backstage too. It filled everywhere. The whole place was surrounded. Look at this and it went off. It was an amazing night. The energy, people were hearing this music for the first time that way and you could tell there was a buzz. People were talking. And so I went to Domengeaux backstage and I said you owe me an apology. And he said I don't apologize to anybody but he said but you were right. This is amazing and that's what started. That's what plugged Dewey Balfa into the local community in a very serious way. He became an icon for us. That had already started happening at Newport and Chicago and other national folk festivals and those other places, the Smithsonian but he. >> Stephen Winick: He was sort of an icon of Cajun music to the outside. Then he became, yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: [Multiple speakers] he really hit the stride after that. >> Nancy Groce: Can you explain? When you were growing up, were you aware of Cajun music? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh yeah, sure. >> Nancy Groce: How was Cajun music? How was your family structured or where did they fall in the community? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: My dad was a barber. My mother was a beautician. There was always a hair in the soup in our family. But you know, working class folks and. >> Nancy Groce: Was there music in your family? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: No, nobody played. My father whistled that was about it. But, he was a great whistler too man. He couldn't carry a tune vocally to save his soul but he could whistle like, amazing. But, no, you know we would hear Cajun music, go to a wedding dance or sometimes we'd go out to a party somewhere and somebody was playing. We had some records. Daddy's favorite record was the Ira LeJeune reissues. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: And we heard Aldus Roger and the Lafayette Playboys on Saturday afternoons on television. And you know it's just something that was always there. We weren't all that, I mean to be honest, you know, we had the Beatles and Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones and all that other stuff going, Chuck Berry and all that stuff going on, right, so that was really the bulk of our musical world. But there was this stuff and it was ours and I enjoyed listening to that as much as anything else. I didn't do it as often until I realized, oh wait, this is us. This is what we have. This is the treasure that we need to value. >> Stephen Winick: And your, your early training and you mentioned that you went to Indiana originally to study French? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I did. >> Stephen Winick: French literature as opposed to folklore. So, that was the angle that you first came to it from. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, I've got to tell you, you know, for me studying French after that 8th grade class, studying French was really the path of least resistance. It was lazy. It was the lazy way. [Inaudible] was easy for me, I spoke French from home. I walked into a classroom and I already knew it was a plume and papier and [foreign language spoken]. I knew all that stuff. I knew how to, nobody had to teach me how to make it, do the 'passe compose'. I knew how to say 'I ate something yesterday'. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: So, what I had to figure out was two things, one, how to write and read what I already knew how to say but also how to negotiate a place for the local vernacular into the larger scheme of the way the French language works in the world. That ended up becoming one of my 'cheval de guerre' over my career. I did not want to I didn't want to declare independence for Cajun French. I wanted to force the French to accept us at the table. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, I mean that, it makes sense as a strategy in the sense that French is a huge force in the world and why separate yourself from that if you could join it. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, and early, early on in that, the going was pretty tough because you know, the French can be very, kind of closed-minded about what French is. >> Stephen Winick: Sure. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know [foreign language spoken] as they say. And it was with the eventual explosion on to the concept of La Francophonie where you know, there were lots of countries in the world where French was spoken but not necessarily like France and their references were not French. They were West African or Northern African or Belgian or Quebecois or Louisianan. And once that notion of a larger context for French in the Francophone world emerged it enabled places like Louisiana to figure out a way to preserve our own specificity, the way which, because you know, the business about preserving French and teaching French in Louisiana, what's the point unless it's the French that produced those songs and stories that we value so much, I mean right? That was not an easy goal in the beginning. I mean I remember people from France would come to visit us, to visit this sort of you know, linguistic museum or something [laughter], linguistic living museum and they would say. We would say something in French and they would say, oh [foreign language spoken], you know, that's not said. And we'll finally learn to say [foreign language spoken]. Of course it's said, I just said it. And then they would say oh. They figured out well, you know, it may not be politically correct to, you know judge like that so they started saying oh [foreign language spoken] it's interesting how you say that. Then we learned to say no, here it's not interesting at all, here it's usual. Here, you're interesting and like it turned the tables on them [laughter] especially people from France. But, two things, two people I usually, I offer to quote in that regard. One, ironically is Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France who said, referring to la Francophonie that its biggest weakness was that it was the only one who didn't recognize its own strength, if you understand. >> Stephen Winick: The only one of what? I'm sorry. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: The only [foreign language spoken]. >> Stephen Winick: I see, okay yeah, right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: La Francophonie doesn't recognize its own strength. >> Stephen Winick: Everybody else recognizes it but La Francophonie does not, right, yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, right, right, and what he meant was it's actually a sign of strength, this diversity, this linguistic diversity. It's not a sign of French being deteriorated. On the contrary, it's a sign of French being enriched by all these variant contexts. And the other is a novelist, a Quebecois novelist who wrote the "The couteau sur la table" Jacques Godbout, who wrote in the preface of that novel [foreign language spoken]. Instead of being French we prefer to be ourselves in French and therein is precisely what, you know, what I think we were after in Louisiana. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, that's a great quote [laughter]. So, you know being at. Yeah, go on. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Interestingly, no interestingly you know I didn't talk a lot about the French side of it, I talked about the folklore side of it but the two were in my mind, in my experience, the two were inextricably linked. It was all part of the same thing and that same thing was finding and recognizing and valuing that ourselves, who we are and how we speak and what we do, how we sing, how we dance, everything. It was all part of the same thing and the French language was a part of that. In fact I sometimes got accused of being so attached to the French expression of things that I was kind of turning up my nose at some of the groups in South Louisiana who were singing in English. And I said guilty as charged. I mean it is a French thing. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know, for me, I mean I'm not saying other people should not do that but for me that was what I was interested in. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, well I mean one of the things that's interesting is that when folklorists approach something like a French diaspora one of the tendencies is for them to try to trace stuff back to France just because of the, sort of valuing things that are very old. If you look at Dewey's early recordings a lot of the songs that he did, did have connections to France and I wonder if that was organic to his repertoire or if it was part of his recognizing that that's would play well with CODOFIL and other organizations that were interested in him. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well, I'm not sure that the second was his motive. The first was one of his motives. But the other thing, you know, he was, he was interested in what was profoundly us about those songs. And a lot of 'us' was really old stuff. He enlisted the help of his brothers and other people, his sisters, his aunts I mean to mine the family tradition for, you know, the oldest songs they could remember, sometimes [inaudible] songs like [foreign language spoken]. And so he was trying to reach as far back as he could but he was also valuing contemporary creation, as long as it seemed like it was in a flow. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know a recognizable flow. But what you said about you know, sometimes people get stuff going back to France, we did. We did and it was sort of like a self-defence mechanism. You know, the French keep saying that you know, some of the stuff we say, is an erosion, it represents an erosion of the language. But we started looking into it and it turns out they weren't erosions at all, they were preservations of the ways things had been, except that you had to go to the exact provinces, you know [foreign language spoken], you know those areas where the original settlers had come from. If you go there they still refer to a coffee pot as not [foreign language spoken] but [foreign language spoken] like we do. So, and they still, you know conjugate the imparfait [foreign language spoken] instead of [foreign language spoken] so it wasn't. We weren't making mistakes we were preserving the way, some of the things that we had inherited from our origins. And sometimes those were songs. Now one of the reasons why the Lomax Collection was so profound, it was a watershed moment when we heard that. And the reason, one of the reasons was that up until then our notion of the way Cajun music had evolved was based on the commercial recordings. Those were as far back in history as we could go. And we had been all profoundly influenced by Chris Strachwitz's historical re-releases, you know going back to the late 20s and 30s and 40s and he was sort of putting it into a sort of historical sweep. And it made sense right? You know, there was this early stuff and then there was the swing band influence stuff. And then there was the war stuff and the post-war stuff and so that made sense and it was telling a very compelling story. Then the Lomax Collection, it was like whoa. It was, a lot of the stuff was way older. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It was recorded in '34 but the Lomaxes were looking for people who were representative of pre-commercial recording stuff. All of a sudden you start thinking oh wait, man all these ballads, all of this lyrical treasure of lyrics that come from way. A lot of this stuff you could actually connect through Quebec and Acadie, all the way back to France. I mean whew, we had to rethink the whole thing and sometimes one of things that occurred to me as I was listening to this stuff was hey, I recognize that theme. I recognize that [foreign language spoken]. But in the ballads it was elaborated with four or five verses where it, you know intricate, whereas in the dance music lyrics it had gotten compressed. It got tight and compressed and impressionistic. But that's obviously where it had come from. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Yeah, so you have the new compositions actually coming out of these older traditions but you hadn't realized it. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: [Multiple speakers] or people who were at, at least sort of conceptually aware of them. They weren't word for word but they were addressing the same themes you know. >> Nancy Groce: In your talk you were very eloquent about new creations coming in just as you're saying now is kind of a, part of a tide that keeps going, a river that keeps going. Could you talk a little bit about your contributions to that? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Mine, in what way? >> Stephen Winick: Well, I mean, well talk about Jean Arsenault. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: [Laughter] well, you know if you hang out with those guys long enough you know you kind of say I'm interested in doing that. I could do that. >> Nancy Groce: You mean in actually writing just for these [multiple speakers]? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, yeah so the first time I did that was for Wayne Toups. He called me one night and said I've got this song I want to do but the lyrics are in [inaudible]. I wrote the, you know the lyrics are written down in English but you know, my notion of it is in French. Could you come and help me? So I went and we and I developed the lyrics for "Un Amour Secret" was the first song. And when I heard that, I had a moment not unlike Dewey's at Newport. You know I was in the studio watching that happen. The next thing you know this whole band is playing and he's singing lyrics that I just came up with and I thought, I love this, it's really great [laughter]. Man this is really cool, so. >> Nancy Croce: You did it as a pseudonym though? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah. >> Nancy Groce: Yeah and why, please talk a little bit about that. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: And the pseudonym is older than that. You want to hear this? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, sure. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Jean Arsenault was born when Barry Ancelet was 27 years old in Quebec City. I was in. I was in Quebec for [foreign language spoken] Francophone, a large international gathering of Francophone people hosted by the Quebec government. Quebec used to do this a lot because I think they wanted to sort of reassure themselves that they weren't alone in this, and so they would bring in Acadians and Louisianans and sometimes people from Missouri, other French-speaking, Ontario. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, they wanted to be sort of the capital of French America in a way, yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah and they wanted to kind of signal we're not alone in this effort you know. So, there was this [inaudible] in 1978 and I was there as a. I was there to give a talk on the integration of Louisiana French style of speaking into the classroom. And when I got there we learned that there had been, there was a literary event, a poetry reading. It was called [foreign language spoken]. It was to be poetry readings and music. The part of the music part, the part of the music side of it that they were going to present was a, the symphony orchestra of the City of Quebec was going to debut a symphony piece that Claude Levier [phonetic] had written composed in honor of Helene, Samuel de Champlain's wife. So there was a symphony orchestra onstage and there were these poets. Quebec had a long history, Gaston Miron and Michel Alon [phonetic] and all of these, a long history of poetry used as social fuel to, you know protest being drowned out, to protest, like Michel Alon's [inaudible] you know that kind. So they were having this literary event and we learned upon arriving there that they had forgotten to integrate, to include Louisiana and it was like a, like a gaffe, you know, what can we do? Well, nobody in Louisiana at that point, that I knew, was writing poetry in French. I mean there were people who had written songs and Zachary Richard, my dear friend from home had written some new songs but I don't know that anybody would have thought of it as poetry. It was but, so I'm talking to the organiser of this thing, Marcel Dube and he says well you know, this is a terrible you know embarrassment. We have to include Louisiana. Well, it turns out that I had written a few poems in reaction to a woman that I had met earlier that year in Moncton, originally from Quebec but she was living in Moncton. I'd kind of been smitten by her and I wrote a few things about her. And her name was Louise and there was an opportunity to sort of make a confluence of Louise and Louisiana, as you know, a potential mistress that you're. >> Nancy Groce: Muse, muse. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know your muse that you're smitten by, so it was like a. It was like being in love in your place, so there was a confluence. So, I didn't want to force his hand and I was. After we finished this thing in Quebec I was on my way back over there to see if that was going, how that was going to play out. So I had these things I had written about her but I hadn't intended to show anybody but he's pressing me so I said well, I have this friend. I didn't want to press, force his hand. I said I have a friend who has written a few things and. He said [inaudible]. I said I happen to have some here and so I showed him. And he said who is this? I said his name is Jean Arsenault. My name is Barry Jean Ancelet and my grandmother was [inaudible] Arsenault so I was. I mean right there as fast as that. He reads the stuff. He says oh, this is perfect, perfect. You'll read this. You'll read this. Call him and ask him for permission. So, he hands me a phone. This is 1978. This is before cell phones or answering machines or anything. So I called the number at my apartment in Lafayette knowing nobody was there. >> Stephen Winick: Right, right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: And I had a conversation with Jean Arsenault as the phone was ringing in my ear, to get his permission because now then, I was caught in my lie, to get his permission to do this. So, I hung up and I said he said it's okay. So he said well you'll read this. And then I thought wait Zachary Richard is here. He's here to perform in a concert. He had a bit hit so I went over to where his, where the concert setting was going to be and the [foreign language spoken] and Zachary Richard already by then was a big thing in Quebec. It would be like going to some, you know, big festival in England and say hey, I need to talk to Mick Jagger, like yeah, right. >> Stephen Winick: I'm his friend from home [laughter] right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I was like yeah like, so I told the guard there. I said [foreign language spoken] and he said you and about 500 other people. I said no, no, no I really. No, he said yeah, the same 500 other people. But while we're talking over his shoulder I see Ralph, Zackary Richard come out of his [foreign language spoken] trailer and I knew because you know he went by Zachary Richard but we all called him Ralph. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: From back home, so I knew the only way I could get his attention was I yelled 'hey Ralph'. He turned around and he said, oh, what are you doing here? And he told the security, let him in. And the security guard [inaudible] let me in. And I said look, here's the deal. They want us to participate in this literary thing, evening. And I got one thing but I need something else. Do you have any songs that you haven't yet recorded that we could claim as poetry? He said yeah, I have a few things. So we picked Le Ballade de [foreign language spoken] and those are the two things that I read that night. And there were about 3000 people in the courtyard of the [foreign language spoken] in Quebec. I'd never experienced anything like that in my life. I couldn't have dreamed it. And I got a standing ovation I guess in large part because people were so astonished that this existed in Louisiana at all. But I was really, I had a moment like [inaudible] oh man, so when I got back home and I called Ralph, Zachary Richard. I said man you're not going to believe what happened. I read these things and he said yeah, I know, this happens to me all the time. I said no, but you're singing, it's different. When you're singing it's different. I was just speaking these words and it electrified the whole place and me too. He said okay. I said we have to do this here. It was the same principle. We have to do this here. So we organized a series of [foreign language spoken] music in Lafayette. And I had had so much fun with Jean Arsenault I elected to keep him around. And so all of the literary things that I wrote and published on some lyrics, stories, whatever, I published under the pseudonym of Jean Arsenault. >> Stephen Winick: And how many collections did you, did you publish or under that name [inaudible]? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh, six or seven and a lot of song lyrics. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: All of the song lyrics I did for Wayne Toups and Richard LeBouef and Steve Riley and even D.L. Menard and a few other people, they were all done under Jean Arsenault. And Floyd Soileau with Swallow Records in Louisiana said you need to tell people who you are man. I said no man, this is so much fun, I'm having a blast. Because Jean Arsenault, when Jean Arsenault would show up for a poetry reading or a performance he could look really different. >> Stephen Winick: [Laughter] no one can tell it's you? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I often, I would often wear a Mardi Gras mask. >> Nancy Groce: Did your colleagues at the university know you were [inaudible]? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was this, in a way it was. After a while it was the worst-kept secret in French Louisiana but never the less it was fun because it was kind of like having a stage persona that was able to play out there where there was no stage. It would be used in real life. You know Jean Arsenault could show up in. And the other thing about Jean Arsenault was that Jean Arsenault never had to worry about English. He never had to deal with English. He was exclusively French-speaking, right. One time when I was doing the KRVS Morning Show that Pete Bergeron does now from 6 to 7:30 I did an interview with Jean Arsenault. I would just. I would just ask a question and then answer it. And you know I didn't even change my voice. I just asked a question and then answered it. And some people started calling the studio and said hey, I want to talk to that guy. He wrote the lyrics to a Wayne Toups. He said I want to talk to you to see if he could. I said well hold on a second, hello? >> Stephen Winick: And no one, no one could tell? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It was so much fun you know. >> Stephine Winick: That's fun, that's great. >> Nancy Groce: And you started performing as him also? Are you singing now? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Well, Sam Brousard convinced me to use my real name on that CD. >> Nancy Groce: Yeah, talk a little bit about the CD. The title of the CD was? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: "Broken Promised Land". >> Nancy Groce: And when did that come out? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Which was based on The Promised Land where Ben [inaudible] was [inaudible] tell the stories. >> Nancy Groce: And when did that come out? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: A couple of years ago and what is 2016. And I didn't even know we were making a CD. I thought we were just goofing around in Sam's studio. He had a studio at home. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I had written a bunch of lyrics. He started putting them to music and at one point he said, hey I want you to sing on some of these. Like really? >> Nancy Groce: Had you sung before? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Happy Birthday and, no I used to sing a little bit at The Liberty, you know I would sing every once in a while. I sang with The Wandering Aces, Lionel LeLieux and Don Montoucet for a little while. I used to have a little bit of a voice, I don't have one anymore. I told that to Sam, I said all I've got is this gravely thing and he said that's all you need for this because it's our bluesy stuff. Anyway we recorded, but I thought we were just playing and after about ten songs he says, you know, what are we going to do with this? What are we going to do with what? He said well, we've got ten songs. Really, okay, what could we? He said we could put out a CD. I said how would we do that? Well, he said we could do it ourselves. I said uh uh, I don't want to be in the CD business. He said, well let's pitch it to somebody and see if they will put it out? And, so we talked to Joe Alsalvor [phonetic] first, about it. He said he was too busy. So I went over to Phil Blatt [phonetic] and talked to Floyd and Chris Soileau about it. I've got to tell you. I went in there with all ten songs and he said. I said Floyd, Floyd and I have known each other for a long time. I said Floyd, I've got to tell you before you hear this, I said it's different, like real different. He said it's okay. I could do different. Okay, so he starts listening to it and listen you all, I'm serious. I'm not making this up. They listened to all ten songs in a row with not a word. I was like, oh man, this is a train wreck, whoa. And at the end of the, in the tenth song pushes the pause button and he says well Ancelet, when you said it was different you weren't kidding. But he said I'll tell you what we're going to put this out because I don't want to be the joker that didn't put this out. So he puts this out on Swallow Records, sort of routinely. You know they send most of the stuff that they put out in a year for consideration for the Grammys. The damn thing gets nominated. I thought. I got that call one morning. I was still in bed. This voice said you know your CD has been nominated for a Grammy. I said, what are you saying? What are you saying? And they said yeah, no kidding, in the Regional Roots category. I thought oh man. >> Stephen Winick: And if I'm not mistaken it was up against one of Joelle's [phonetic] projects. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Yeah and I participated on that one too so I was double-nominated that year. >> Stephen Winick: But I bet he was sorry that he hadn't said yes to you at that point. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: [Laughter] he might have been. Yeah, we were competing with, Eddie and Roddy Ramirez' [phonetic] album was also. We were three from Louisiana. We diluted our own vote but that's okay. You know I felt like being nominated, I won anyway. They gave me a medal and everything. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, that's a great [inaudible] just a great acknowledgement for what you've done over the years and for the culture in general. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Okay but it was more of a surprise to me. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah [laughter]. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I think nobody was more surprised than me. Sam was not surprised. He thought he had. He thought, you know, this is, you know different and an important step. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Interestingly I've got to say over the last four, five, six years I have seen the [inaudible] steadily rising on new production [foreign language spoken] The Lost Bayou Ramblers. I mean it's amazing what's happening, what's coming out of South Louisiana right now. And one of the amazing things is the quality of it, the cleverness of it, you know but another thing is that it's still in French. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It's still coming out in French like, I'm happy about that but I'm you know kind of surprised. >> Stephen Winick: One of the things that we love about it here at the library and I know you've talked about this a lot and will continue to talk about it, is the fact that those groups are still using our archival resources as their inspiration. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Absolutely. >> Stephen Winick: That is they're recording just like Michael Doucet was doing 25 years ago or 30 years ago and Steve Riley was doing 20 years and 15 years ago. They're doing it now and recording versions of our songs. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: You know why, you know why Michael Doucet was the first? Because he got, he got the jump on the project because when I brought back the Lomax copies to home, to the university, he and I were sitting side by side listening to the tape. There were 11 reels. We put on the first one, started listening. It was Wilfred Charles, a jure singer but he was by himself from New Iberia. He got through that song and he was singing about the Zydeco in 1934 but whoa, whoa, whoa. I pushed the pause button and I turned to Michael and I said man, we're going to have to rethink everything we thought we knew. The whole, it's a game-changer. >> Nancy Groce: Because it was so much earlier than [multiple speakers]? >> Barry Jean Ancelet: It was represented so much at an earlier tradition. That first song that guy was singing about Zydeco and everybody said Zydeco emerged in the 50s. Well what was he doing singing about in '34? And he wasn't the only one, there were two other songs. >> Stephen Winick: Right, there were some other ones yeah, yeah. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: And then we started hearing all that Hoffpower stuff and you know the stuff that's coming out of New Iberia and the stuff coming out of Crowley. It's like whoa the lyrical richness that we were hearing was stunning. So what do I do? I start thinking okay, how do we keep this going? Lomax had said, Alan and/or John had said as a tagline, on a number of those cuts, you know we're recording this for the Library of Congress so that it will be available to musicians in the future about it to learn. I said well let's see that. Let's do that. So I started calling people in. I said hey, do you want to hear something interesting? Michael had started doing it already and people were asking him, where did you get that? Well, it's in a Lomax cut. Really, where is that? So they were coming to the archives, musicians [inaudible] can I hear that? And they were starting to pick songs and recycle them, my Old Playboys [inaudible], I mean you name it, Ann Savoy and James Dream [phonetic], a number of people. So the next thing you know there's all this bubbling of brand new/old songs. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> Nancy Groce: Well, it's great for you to bring it back to the library today and to give us an overview of what you've been doing, what's been going on in the area. We could go on for hours but I think we need to [multiple speakers]. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: But I want to say by the way that on the record, I want to say on the record that the Library of Congress, the American Folklife Center has been so generous and supportive of all of this and enabled so much of this to happen. We appreciate what you all have done for us. >> Stephen Winick: Well, we absolutely appreciate everything that you've done for the music. One last point that I'll make is I've worked with those Louisiana collections and the cataloguing, the additional cataloguing that you guys have done is actually better than what was done here in the 30s and 40s so there are songs that we can find out about [laughter] that are in our collections that we can only find out about through your work. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Josh Caffrey, Josh Caffrey did an amazingly meticulous job. >> Stephen Winick: Absolutely. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Of identifying some of this stuff and finding out information about the backstories a lot times. I mean I had started that ball kind of you know in discovering a few things and then Josh, you know, took the hand off and ran for a touchdown. >> Stephen Winick: We keep his book in the Reading Room as one of our basic resources when people come in to talk about that material so, yeah, so thank you so much for the talk. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: Oh, a pleasure. >> Stephen Winick: And for talking to us in this interview. >> Nancy Groce: [Inaudible] to Washington, yes. It's been a lovely. >> Barry Jean Ancelet: I've enjoyed it, thank you.