30 years later, BeauSoleil remains true to their Cajun upbringing

During their 34-year career, BeauSoleil has earned a reputation as the nation’s top Cajun band.

Little wonder.

With 11 Grammy nominations, two Grammy wins and countless other awards to their credit, the Lafayette-based, six-man group has emerged a leader when it comes to producing contemporary traditional Cajun music.

With brothers Michael and David Doucet at the helm – Michael provides violin, guitar, accordion and mandolin accompaniment and handles vocals, while David can be heard on guitar and singing – BeauSoleil also includes accordion player Jimmy Breaux, percussionist Billy Ware, drummer Tommy Alesi and, on fiddle and bass, Mitch Reed.

This month, the band joins Houma bluesman Tab Benoit at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival. They’re slated to perform Sunday, Oct. 10.

Since the group formed in 1975, they’ve elevated the Cajun sound to an international stage. And here at home, fellow musicians gave a nod to their 1998 release, “L’Amour Ou La Folie,” awarding it the Grammy in the Best Traditional Folk Album category. The band would return to the Grammy winner’s circle in 2009 with “Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival,” which won in the Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album.

The group’s recent release on Yep Roc Records, “Alligator Purse,” was also among this year’s Grammy nominees in that same category.

Considering BeauSoleil’s original goal – to preserve the sound the Doucet brothers had grown up enjoying in Cajun Country – the ride to worldwide fame has been nothing short of epic.

“In the beginning, we mainly tried to get this music to the people in Louisiana,” Michael says. “When I graduated from high school in 1969, we noticed that when people died, so did the culture, whatever culture they had with them.

“It was a transitional time, the old world French and the New World,” he continues. “So we had time to hang out with people of our grandparents’ generation who could teach us songs.”

After college, Michael tested what he’d learned while touring France with the Bayou Drifters, his band at the time. It would be six long months before he’d return to his native Louisiana.

“When I came back, my duty was to bring this music back to the younger generation because it was so vastly disappearing,” he says.

BeauSoleil was born. A Cajun pioneer of its day. The band would celebrate many firsts: they were the first to play the fottoir, the rub board that’s a staple in the genre’s cousin zydeco, and the first to feature a female vocalist and an acoustic guitar.

“We were the first Cajun band to really bring back the acoustic sounds,”?Michael recalls. “It’s music that we learned acoustically around the table. It didn’t evolve around a group or an image; it was just a group of friends that wanted to have a good time and develop it.”

Eventually, they’d have to plug in and grab a mic to reach audiences. But the celebration of Cajun music and their unique marriage between yesterday and tomorrow has kept the band on the path less traveled and, often, completely undiscovered before now.

BeauSoleil’s 29th release, “Alligator Purse,” continues to forge into new territory.

Michael and the band returned to the Clubhouse Recording Studio in Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they’d practiced for a number of benefits as part of the Build the Levee concert series designed to help victims after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. With Michael Pilot producing, and a number of Pilot’s heavyweight musician friends contributing their talents, this compilation of worldly sounds-meet-Cajun jam was created.

“It was so relaxed and we had a great time in the studio,” Michael recalls. “We recorded 15 songs in only four days. Everything was done live with very little overdubs.”

Doucet describes the release as an orchestration of a dance. “This whole album tells a whole story from the beginning of a dance to the end of the dance.”

The purse is packed with a number of great sounds … a swamp pop twist on Aldus Roger’s “Marie”; a full blown “palm-trees-and-coconuts arrangement on th a cappella ballad “La Chanson de Theogene Dubois”; a bit of New Orleans jazz on “Les Ognions”; bluesman Hambone Willie Newbern’s – aka Muddy Waters – “Rollin’ and Tumblin'”; and Tulsa rocker JJ Cale’s “The Problem.”

That’s the sound BeauSoleil will bring to the VOW Fest this month. And, oh yeah, feel free to dance.

30 years later, BeauSoleil remains true to their Cajun upbringing