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Lost Bayou Ramblers |
Click here for high res photos of the Lost Bayou Ramblers on Flickr,
including a performance with Luderin Darbone.Click here
for information on the group's 2008 CD, Vermilionaire. |
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2007 CD: Live à la Blue Moon |
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For more information, go to the Lost Bayou Ramblers Official Web Site. Scroll down the page for more on the band's background. The laid back, loose and easy Blue Moon Guest House and Saloon in downtown Lafayette quickly begins to shake and shimmy when the small wooden back porch dance floor overflows with two-stepping Cajuns there to have a stomping good time to the rockin’ roots music of the Lost Bayou Ramblers. That excitement has been captured on Live à la Blue Moon, recorded in January 2007 and released later that year by Swallow Records. The CD has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the new Zydeco-Cajun category. With Louis Michot on fiddle and vocals and his brother André on accordion and lap steel, the band takes standards like “J’étais au bal” and makes them pulsate with new energy punctuated by a thumping drum-upright bass-guitar beat, joined by dancers smacking the floor with primal intensity. Chris Courville is on drums, Alan LaFleur on bass, and Cavan Carruth on guitar and vocals. Louis Michot, who has taken over the early Sunday morning slot from his uncle Rick on KRVS public radio with a program featuring early recordings of Cajun music, and André Michot certainly know how to root their music in tradition while the band injects songs like “Chere Tout Tout,” “Bosco Stomp,” and “Lacassine Special” with their own raucous, beautiful, unadulterated grit. One of the many pleasures offered on the CD is the vibrant sound of André’s lap steel on swing numbers like Harry Choates’ “Austin Special,” on the French and English “Macaque” (“You Can’t Put a Monkey on My Back”), and on several Cajun standards. Other cuts include Cyp Lanreneau’s “Talle d’éronce,” the Rodney LeJeune number “Dans les misères,” John Fontenot’s “Tasse café pour me réveiller,” both “Alida Waltz” and “Alida Two Step” from Aldus Roger, and Lawrence Walker’s “Valse de malchanceux.” The CD was recorded Jan. 12-13, 2007, when the New Orleans Saints were in post-season playoffs (they won against the Eagles Jan. 13 and then lost to the Bears), so on one cut the band switches from Cajun to Irish Channel to play “Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints?” The CD also features live versions of Louis Michot’s “Blues de la Frontier,” David Michot’s “Moi j’’connais pas,” both originally recorded on the Pilette Breakdown CD, and the title song from the Bayou Perdu CD plus “Mexico One-Step,” and, as part of the final cut on the live CD, “Blue Moon Special.” The band’s song celebrating drinking and dancing at the Blue Moon segues into “Step It Fast” (“T’en as eu, t’en n’auras plus”) and Marc Savoy’s “Sam’s Big Rooster,” ending the evening with more stomp down rhythm and cut loose vocals. You can’t duplicate the experience of a Louisiana weekend without actually being there jostling with the dancers to a pounding beat strong enough to levitate everyone into another dimension, but listening to this CD comes close.
Photos in this section were taken at the Blue Moon, at Grant Street Dance Hall, at Festival International, and at the Liberty Theater. Band members, shown immediately above at the Blue Moon Dec. 29, 2007, are Louis Michot on fiddle; André Michot on accordion and lap steel; Cavan Carruth on guitar; and Alan LaFleur on upright bass. Chris Courville is shown on drums in the right column. Guest drummer in the photo above is Frank Kincel of the Bluerunners. |
Click on thumbnails to view larger photo. |
| In fall 2005 the Lost Bayou Ramblers
released Bayou Perdu, their second CD on Swallow Records,
provides another invigorating offering of traditional Cajun
songs together with many new songs that add to the tradition. The
band continues to travel all over as ambassadors of Cajun
culture, performing at clubs and festivals and also presenting a
multimedia program to colleges audiences.
The program was developed with Ryan Brasseaux, director of a museum exhibit design firm, host of a Cajun music program on KRVS, and an expert on the evolution of Cajun music. Brasseaux's liner notes for the CD offer a wealth of interesting information. The photo of Louie Michot at right was taken at Festivals Acadiens in 2004. Click here for more on the CD and 2005 photos. |
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The Lost Bayou Ramblers are a young group that plays in the old style–or
rather styles, exploring the rich diversity of the Cajun musical heritage.
Their first commercial CD, Pilette Breakdown, was released in 2003 by Swallow Records. It includes several cuts from Un 'Tit Gout, an independently produced CD. The band has been playing since 1999.
On the group's version of "O Bebe," first recorded by Oscar Doucet and Alius Soileau in 1929, Louis Michot's vocals fill the room with raw power accompanied by an accordion/fiddle duet and insistent rhythm guitar. If you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself at a Cajun house dance before the introduction of amplified sound. That same intensity comes across in the band's version of the Dennis McGee-Amédé Ardoin song "One-Step de Chameaux" and on original songs that sound like they came from decades ago: the title cut, "Pilette Breakdown," written by Louis Michot, and "Moi, J'Connais Pas," by Uncle David Michot.
The band also plays music from the string era of the late 1930s and 1940s, including "Tu Peut Pas M'Arrêter de Rêver" (a hit American song in 1937) and "Louisiana Boogie Woogie," the band's version of a Harry Choates number, recorded at a live performance in Brooklyn. The other number from that live recording is a rollicking combination of "O Bye," in which Louis Michot draws on the Creole tradition, segueing into "Blue Runner," with some zydeco double-clutchin' drum licks thrown in for good measure.
Among the other numbers are "Valse de Holly Beach,"–Lawrence Walker's tribute to the Cajun ability to let the good times roll even while being eaten alive by marsh mosquitoes– and "Happy Hop," another Lawrence Walker song.
Some of the songs are familiar, like "Tu Peut Cogner Mais Peux Pas Rentrer" and "La Valse Criminelle," but most, like "Cafe Chaud," have not been recorded often.
Also among the CD's 15 cuts are two original instrumentals: "Rainé Stomp," named after a horse owned by Uncle Bobby Michot, and a fiddle tune, "Blues de la Frontier."
Much more information about the band's music and Cajun music in general is included in the liner notes by Ryan Brasseaux. In addition, Brasseaux has combined a multimedia presentation with live music played by the band in a program titled "The Once, Present, and Future Cajun Music." In May 2004, the program was the keynote presentation at the International Country Music Conference in Nashville.
Louis Michot, fiddle and vocals, and André Michot, accordion and lap steel, are the sons of Tommy Michot, one of the members of Les Frères Michot, a band that for more than two decades has traveled worldwide (joined by Louis and André on their recent CD La Roue Qui Pend). That band, it is worth mentioning, includes State District Judge Rick Michot and State Senator Mike Michot. The father of Les Frères (Louis and André's grandfather) is Louis Michot, a remarkable entrepreneur. He is best known to most of us in Louisiana as the owner of Burger Chef restaurants from days gone by and as a former superintendent of education (when the position was a statewide elective office) and gubernatorial candidate, but he has also developed many other successful business enterprises, while managing to raise ten children.
As of spring 2004, members of The Lost Bayou Ramblers, in addition to Louis and André Michot, included
Chris "Oscar" Courville, drums and t-fer;
Jon Bertrand, guitar; and Alan LaFleur, upright bass. In the photos on this
page, Cavan Carruth, who plays guitar on three cuts on the CD, is shown on
guitar. In addition, on the CD, David Michot, uncle of Louis and André,
plays upright bass and guitar, and Randall Klitz plays upright bass on one cut.
The photos on this page were taken during a performance at Festival International in Lafayette April 25, 2004.
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 The photo above shows The Lost Bayou Ramblers somewhere in Patasa during the 2003 Eunice Courir de Mardi Gras. They were positioned near the front of the courir. |
All photographs and text by David Simpson.