The Big Bayou Music Festival Lineup
March 1, 2013
Courts rule in LHSAA’s favor; VCHS ousted from playoffs
March 5, 2013
When Hurricane Katrina wrought destruction along the Gulf Coast, the Kenner-based Dupuy family was not immune to disruption and loss.
Among other heartache, the Dupuys were forced into a month-long evacuation in Maurice. It was while taking shelter at a family friend’s house that the squeezebox seed was planted in an 8-year-old’s mind, the first indications of award-winning accordionist and Cajun musician Cameron Dupuy’s prodigious talents broaching the surface.
“The whole purpose of playing accordion was from the evacuation, being around all the Cajuns,” says Cameron, a native of the Greater New Orleans area.
Cameron, 15, is a third-generation Cajun musician (fourth if the lineage begins with his great-uncle). He’s now the Dupuys’ shining star, fronting the festival-favorite Cameron Dupuy and The Cajun Troubadours, who also feature his father Michael, a guitarist, and his fiddling uncle Chris Dupuy.
Then an 8-year-old Katrina refugee south of Lafayette, Cameron experimented with an old accordion that Jimmy Breaux played as BeauSoleil backed Mary Chapin Carpenter on her 1991 Grammy Award-winning single “Down at the Twist and Shout.” The boy had played with “toy” accordions for many years, but this was the first time he scrunched the real instrument.
“That was another thing that got in his blood, that he was playing accordion,” Michael says.
No one could have then imagined that Breaux would sign up to back Cameron’s accordion with percussion, as he did recently.
The evacuee’s sampling left a great impression. Cameron received for Christmas that year his first guitar – the instrument his father and grandfather both began playing at 12 years old – but before he became a teenager he had an urge to go back to the accordion. So he taught himself how to play.
“I just listened to mostly old records and learned by ear,” Cameron says. Three years after Katrina, he had persuaded Michael to repair his accordion, originally played by Marc Savoy. Michael relented but declined to shell out for lessons. “I said, ‘No, just learn on your own. Teach yourself,’” Michael recalls.
At 12, Cameron landed his first gig: brunch on Sundays in the Ritz Carlton New Orleans. Accompanied by a guitar and fiddle, Cameron views that summer-long weekly recurring show as his springboard.
“That’s probably where I got most of my experience, and that’s definitely where I got better playing accordion,” he says. He fondly remembers playing for Drew Brees and Sylvester Stallone that summer.
The Ritz Carlton now in the rearview, The Cajun Troubadours have since played the Fais Do-Do Stage at Jazz Fest, Festivals Acadiens et Creoles in Lafayette and Swamp Stomp in Thibodaux. Last summer, Michael and Cameron toured Canada’s east coast with a young Cajun band.
To define Cameron’s talent in context of his age is restricting. It’s nice that he’s young and it’s intriguing to consider his potential, but the Kenner native’s present-day skills transcend his youth and longing speculation of what his future might hold diminishes what he’s accomplishing right now.
Competing with professional accordion players (“all the hot shots”), Cameron – whose instruments are custom-made by Randy Falcon – has won six of seven judged competitions in which he has partaken in Crowley, Jennings and Lafayette, Michael says.
Cameron attributes his competitive success to focusing on keys on both sides of the squeezebox: treble to the right, bass to the left. Many competitors forsake the instrument’s bass, he says.
“I think it separates a good accordion player from a bad accordion player,” Cameron says. “The way I think it is, if you’re not playing the bass side, you’re not playing the instrument to its full potential.”
Cameron’s greatest influence is Aldus Roger, with the young man probing elements of Roger’s dance-hall sound.
“He developed the style I play more in his own way,” Cameron says. “He really developed the whole Cajun music sound – the dance hall sound. I just think that has the most feeling in Cajun music.”
A first baseman on the playground in his spare time, Cameron is an honors student at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metairie.
“We definitely have a country flare about us that separates us from what they’re doing in Lafayette today,” Michael says in reference to the evolving Cajun music genre. “We kind of gravitate toward that style and they’re getting away from it in Lafayette.”
The father-and-son duo is in the process of finalizing three original songs. Two are instrumental two-steps, and the third is a waltz about the storm that changed much of their lives.
Michael continues to massage the lyrics to “The Katrina Waltz,” which the band intends to play when it performs at Nicholls State University’s Swamp Stomp on March 24. Before the storm hit, Michael and his father worked together at an automobile title business in New Orleans.
“It’s going to focus mainly about that once I left the city that day, I’ve never seen the people I used to see again,” Michael says. “We left that day, my dad was in great shape. He was battling cancer. But he actually came back to the city, and he developed a staff infection, I guess because his resistance was weak, and he never bounced back. Everybody I worked with, I’ve never really seen them again.”
Cameron Dupuy, pictured here as a 14-year-old playing Jazz Fest 2012, plays Nicholls State University’s Swamp Stomp this month with his band The Cajun Troubadours.
Dupuy, pictured here with The Cajun Troubadours at Jazz Fest 2012, has won numerous awards since he began playing the accordion earnestly three years ago.
