Is the name. Cajun music. This title demands that the music is only played by cadiens, but that’s not the case. Even if one were to define a Cajun as an inhabitant of Southern Louisiana, this word wouldn’t work because there are, for example, some groups like The California Cajun Orchestra who play it. Cajun music is no always so Cajun. The big question: “How important is it for the musicians who play Cajun music to be Cajun?”

Here’s a song played by real Cajuns that has few of the characteristics that one would expect from this genre:

In fact, Amazing Grace is a Christian hymn composed by a British man. There’s almost nothing about this song that suggests that it’s something Cajun save the language.

Likewise, this group here plays songs from time to time that are without a doubt of Cajun origin, even including a violin, an very important instrument in the music, but I doubt that they would call their sound Cajun:

They often sing in Louisiana French, another defining feature of Cajun music, which is a language that’s sometimes called Cajun French. This is a similar problem: speakers of Cajun French are not at all always Cajun, regardless of how on defines a Cajun. For example, one common definition est that a Cajun is someone white who comes from Southern Louisiana while a Creole is someone black from the same place, yet Canray Fontenot speaks Louisiana French, not Louisiana Creole, even though he is usually considered a Creole who played Creole music or la-la music:

I here nothing in his music that’s particularly different from Cajun music, but it’s not according to some people. But maybe one decides that a Cajun is someone with Acadian roots, then Mr. Fontenot could be Cajun, but who really knows?

I tried to determine exactly who Cajun music is, among other things, in my honors thesis that I wrote at the end of my undergraduate career. I adapted a tableau from linguistic optimality theory in order to do it and the ethnicity of the musicians turned out to be one of the most important constraints. There are of course problems with my study, so y’all can figure out yourselves how all that works as I’m uploading my whole thesis to this site. Click Writings and look for The Use of Language in Cajun Music to read it.

For what it’s worth, I really like the name la-la. Maybe we can bring it back.