Lafayette, LA Joshua Clegg Caffery, December 2004
LOST AND FOUND
Young Cajun band Lost Bayou Ramblers is winning over fans from Acadiana to New York City
When the Lost Bayou Ramblers stepped onstage at a bar high in Colorodo’s Rocky Mountains earlier this summer, singer/fiddler Louis Michot looked out at a stone-faced audience.
“The place was full of these hard-looking Colorado cowboys,” says Michot. “They didn’t know if they were going to like us or not.” According to Michot, he could barely sing that night because of the altitude, but nonetheless he and his bandmates proceeded to belt out their set of unforgiving traditional Cajun music. A Denver Broncos win that night may have had something to do with it, but the leery crowd soon warmed to the band.
“This guy went from straight-faced and hard one second, then the next thing I knew he was sitting by my side,” says Michot. “And it sounded like he knew the words. His buddy came up and said, ‘I don’t know what you guys are singing about, but he sings like this every day at work, and he finally found someone he can sing with.’”
As a young ban trying to make a living playing Cajun music in the 21 st century, the Lost Bayou Ramblers often find themselves in this scenario. Singing in a foreign language about places nobody has ever heard of, playing fiddles, accordions, and lap steel guitars and driving around the country in vehicles of questionable reliability, there are a lot of gazes to turn away from the TV screens at the other end of the bar.
The Ramblers have proved capable of overcoming those challenges. In a way quite different from their contemporaries, they’ve managed to puncture the veil of language an culture, attracting an enthusiastic following that includes city dwellers, zydeholics, New Orleans hipsters, and a growing pack of music journalists. While attracting the interest of local fans of Cajun music, they’ve also become an attraction in Austin, parts of California, French Canada, and the East coast. They’re even making inroads in New York City, where they’ve earned press raves in the New Yorker magazine and an unexpected and devout following in the Bronx.
In the words of folklorist Ryan Brasseaux, the Ramblers’ friend and sometime triangle player, “They’re so old-timey, they’re avant-garde.”
Andre Michot, 29, is a soft-spoken, dark-haired young man whose restrained on-stage demeanor belies an intense musicality. A sought-after musician known for his rock-solid rhythm guitar playing, Andre primarily plays accordion with the Lost Bayou Ramblers. Shying away from the onstage gymnastics and posturing employed by some Cajun accordionists, Andre sits down when he plays and bears down on his instrument with calm focus, like most older Cajun musicians.
Louis, his 26-year-old younger brother, is a different story. Attacking his fiddle with long, furious bow strokes, and singing in a high, raspy cry, he seems perpetually infused with kinetic energy. When he sings, the sinews in his neck leap out in sharp relief, and the veins balloon like an oxbow river. Louis is an old soul in a young, wiry frame.
The two brothers - sons of research biologist Thomas Michot - form the core of the Lost Bayou Ramblers. Both grew up exposed to Cajun music, as their father and uncles Mike and Rick Michot make up Les Freres Michot, one of the mainstays of the local French music scene.
Louis first started on the fiddle after receiving his grandfather’s instrument as a gift, and he started building a small repertoire of Cajun tunes while roaming around the country in his early 20s. A summer trip to Nova Scotia to study French at St. Annes University furthered his desire to become a Cajun fiddler.
“Going to Acadie and learning French kind of gave me a boost,” says Louis. “When I started speaking French, I started singing. From that point on the fiddle kind of helped me get around.” Armed with about 12 Cajun French songs an his grandfather’s fiddle, Louis stayed in French Canada for another three months, busking the street corners of his ancestors’ homeland.
Louis returned home to find that Andre had been playing the accordion, and the two brothers started playing together for fun. Before long, they started jamming with other friends, including Matthew Doucet (Beausoleil fiddler Michael Doucet’s son). The loose configuration of musicians played its first gig at the former Café Rue Vermillion in downtown Lafayette to a small crowd of friends.
They began to refer to themselves as the Lost Bayou Ramblers at the suggestion of a friend, the late enigmatic Ryan Domingue. According to Ryan Brasseaux, Domingue was a scientific genius who spent his days listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs and counting dolphin brain cells at the New Iberia Research Center.
The rotating cast of characters who backed up the brothers in these days includes clarinetist Gary Hernandez, Matthew Doucet, and various Michot cousins an uncles. The band’s first professional gig as the Lost Bayou Ramblers was for a wedding at a plantation house in Baldwin, La., a job arranged for them by Brasseaux. Like Dr. Barry Ancelet, who provided an academic foil for young Cajun musicians like Michael Doucet and Zachary Richard during the Cajun music renaissance of the 1970s and early ’80s, Brasseaux soon came on board to lend a folklorist’s perspective to the proceedings.
“So I walk in, an here are these young guys playing Cajun music,” says Brasseaux, remembering the band’s debut gig at Café Rue Vermillion. “And then they start promenading around downtown, playing the Mari Gras Song. And so I thought to myself: what is this?’”
From this point on, the motley crew of musicians began playing local clubs, its initial audience made up of friends and peers. In early 2002, the group started playing double bills with local honky-tonk musician Cavan “Lil’ Enos” Carruth. For half of the show, it would play as the Lost Bayou Ramblers and then back up Carruth as the Bayou Bandits. In exchange, Carruth would play guitar for the Ramblers, and he soon became the band’s steady guitarist. Around the same time, percussionist Chris “Oscar” Courville joined the band.
Courville, who originally met the Ramblers while doing computer work for Tommy Michot, usually stands when he plays, stomping on a bass drum and playing a snare or a washboard. His nickname Oscar derives from Courville’s trashy, bare bones style. With Courville’s addition, the band coalesced and began traveling around the state and to out-of-state jobs as far-flung as New York City. Around the same time, the Blue Moon Saloon opened, and local enthusiasm for Cajun music enjoyed an upswing. As the group’s popularity continued to grow, its bandmembers made Lost Bayou Ramblers their primary focus - not to mention their primary source of income.
With the exception of Courville, who has managed to stay employed with various computer design firms in New Orleans despite his increasingly demanding musical obligations, the Ramblers’ steady touring schedule has become the central component of their livelihood. Getting rich, though, is apparently not why the Ramblers are in the Cajun music business.
“For the money,” says Louis Michot, “I’d rather be a janitor than a musician.” But that hasn’t stopped him and his bandmates from pursuing their dream.
“I love music, and I love playing music,” he says. “I’m not really into the whole deal of going out all the time and playing all the time. I’m more of a homebody. But I feel, like, how could I not? .It’s like you were chosen.”
Courville, who often drives from New Orleans a few times a week for Lost Bayou Ramblers gigs, echoes the sentiment that there’s a higher purpose motivating the choice to play Cajun music. “I guess the main reason I give much more of my time to the Lost Bayou Ramblers than any band here in New Orleans or elsewhere is because I genuinely enjoy playing the music,” he says. “I get to play with great musicians, it’s a part of my culture and upbringing, and I feel that the way in which we are playing it serves to remind people these songs are just as infectious - the waltzes just as powerful and moving, the two steps just as energetic and driving if, not more so - when played simply without excessive polish and production. It’s not necessarily a new idea, but it’s one I like to think has some importance.”
It’s this philosophy, perhaps more so than any other factor, which has established the band as one of Acadiana’s most exciting young groups of any genre. While other groups playing Acadiana’s traditional music have had success by making Cajun music more modern and palatable to outsiders, the Lost Bayou Ramblers take almost the opposite tack, distilling the music to its clear, exhilarating core. Brasseaux refers to this aesthetic as “emotional honesty.”
This year has found the Ramblers continuing to grow as performers and musicians, while refusing to compromise their almost punk-rock simplicity. It’s a powerful balance that continues to bring them more fans and more acclaim, not to mention the interest of local festival promoters.
“Their style of playing is very rustic an very rough, very much like a lot of the old Cajun musicians used to play, and you don’t find that much,” says Pat Mould, who programs the Heritage Stage at Festival Acadiens, where the Lost Bayou Ramblers played for the first time this year. “A lot of young musicians coming up, they kind of want to add this polish, try to put something new on it, where I think these guys have a tendency to try to keep themselves in the past musically, and that’s what comes across when you hear them play.”
The Lost Bayou Ramblers are reminiscent of a growth stock. In a time when the music industry in general is in the tank, when pop icons seem more and more ridiculous and irrelevant, when the very infrastructure of popular music and the music business seems to be crumbling, the Lost Bayou Ramblers are doing better than ever. They’re making a decent living playing music and having a hell of a time doing it, all while gaining fans, respect, and stature. In financial terms, they’re defying the market.
There have been rough spots, of course, but the goodwill the band has created has kept it afloat when things have gone awry. When the van containing all their instruments was stolen from a parking lot in Colorado this summer, people came out of the woodwork with donations of money and even instruments. And although the van was eventually found with instruments intact, the cost of flying back and forth from Colorado and meeting their musical obligations with rented equipment exhausted all of the donations.
“Something about these guys,” says Mould, “just makes you want to help them out.”
The Lost Bayou Ramblers’ fanbase hasn’t reached the national following that groups like BeauSoleil and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys have built, but the Ramblers seem to be in a unique position to become leading standard bearers for the music in years to come. “They’re poised,” says Chas Justus, guitarist for the Red Stick Ramblers.
After months of steady playing, a number of broken-down and stolen vehicles and exhausting tour, the Ramblers are now taking some time off the road. With a newly bolstered line-up that includes ace Gin and Tonics bassist Alan LaFleur and firebrand Elton guitarist Jon Bertrand, they plan to start recording in the coming weeks.
The upcoming album will be recorded live at the Michots’ camp in the countryside near Milton. According to Louis Michot, they hope to have it out sometime in March, before festival season. They insist on keeping mum about further specifics of the album’s release, but odds are they won’t be straying far from the hard-hitting, no-frills sound found on Pilette Breakdown , their 2003 album on Swallow Records.
“I think the most traditional thing we do is that we don’t practice, and we don’t make arrangements,” says Louis. “We don’t want to practice. We don’t want to be refined. We tried to practice for the album, and we were like, ‘Man, what are we doing? What do we have to practice?’”
That approach might not necessarily work for other bands, but it’s paying off for the Lost Bayou Ramblers.
“The feeling is what will get you with this band,” says Festival International Programming Director Lisa Stafford, who booked the Lost Bayou Ramblers for the festival this year. “They make you feel like they’re bringing you back home. Kind of like if you are out of town for a long time, getting homesick and then you hear a song from Louisiana, it makes you homesick. That’s how their band makes me feel when I hear them at home: homesick.”
LOST AND FOUND
Young Cajun band Lost Bayou Ramblers is winning over fans from Acadiana to New York City
When the Lost Bayou Ramblers stepped onstage at a bar high in Colorodo’s Rocky Mountains earlier this summer, singer/fiddler Louis Michot looked out at a stone-faced audience.
“The place was full of these hard-looking Colorado cowboys,” says Michot. “They didn’t know if they were going to like us or not.” According to Michot, he could barely sing that night because of the altitude, but nonetheless he and his bandmates proceeded to belt out their set of unforgiving traditional Cajun music. A Denver Broncos win that night may have had something to do with it, but the leery crowd soon warmed to the band.
“This guy went from straight-faced and hard one second, then the next thing I knew he was sitting by my side,” says Michot. “And it sounded like he knew the words. His buddy came up and said, ‘I don’t know what you guys are singing about, but he sings like this every day at work, and he finally found someone he can sing with.’”
As a young ban trying to make a living playing Cajun music in the 21 st century, the Lost Bayou Ramblers often find themselves in this scenario. Singing in a foreign language about places nobody has ever heard of, playing fiddles, accordions, and lap steel guitars and driving around the country in vehicles of questionable reliability, there are a lot of gazes to turn away from the TV screens at the other end of the bar.
The Ramblers have proved capable of overcoming those challenges. In a way quite different from their contemporaries, they’ve managed to puncture the veil of language an culture, attracting an enthusiastic following that includes city dwellers, zydeholics, New Orleans hipsters, and a growing pack of music journalists. While attracting the interest of local fans of Cajun music, they’ve also become an attraction in Austin, parts of California, French Canada, and the East coast. They’re even making inroads in New York City, where they’ve earned press raves in the New Yorker magazine and an unexpected and devout following in the Bronx.
In the words of folklorist Ryan Brasseaux, the Ramblers’ friend and sometime triangle player, “They’re so old-timey, they’re avant-garde.”
Andre Michot, 29, is a soft-spoken, dark-haired young man whose restrained on-stage demeanor belies an intense musicality. A sought-after musician known for his rock-solid rhythm guitar playing, Andre primarily plays accordion with the Lost Bayou Ramblers. Shying away from the onstage gymnastics and posturing employed by some Cajun accordionists, Andre sits down when he plays and bears down on his instrument with calm focus, like most older Cajun musicians.
Louis, his 26-year-old younger brother, is a different story. Attacking his fiddle with long, furious bow strokes, and singing in a high, raspy cry, he seems perpetually infused with kinetic energy. When he sings, the sinews in his neck leap out in sharp relief, and the veins balloon like an oxbow river. Louis is an old soul in a young, wiry frame.
The two brothers - sons of research biologist Thomas Michot - form the core of the Lost Bayou Ramblers. Both grew up exposed to Cajun music, as their father and uncles Mike and Rick Michot make up Les Freres Michot, one of the mainstays of the local French music scene.
Louis first started on the fiddle after receiving his grandfather’s instrument as a gift, and he started building a small repertoire of Cajun tunes while roaming around the country in his early 20s. A summer trip to Nova Scotia to study French at St. Annes University furthered his desire to become a Cajun fiddler.
“Going to Acadie and learning French kind of gave me a boost,” says Louis. “When I started speaking French, I started singing. From that point on the fiddle kind of helped me get around.” Armed with about 12 Cajun French songs an his grandfather’s fiddle, Louis stayed in French Canada for another three months, busking the street corners of his ancestors’ homeland.
Louis returned home to find that Andre had been playing the accordion, and the two brothers started playing together for fun. Before long, they started jamming with other friends, including Matthew Doucet (Beausoleil fiddler Michael Doucet’s son). The loose configuration of musicians played its first gig at the former Café Rue Vermillion in downtown Lafayette to a small crowd of friends.
They began to refer to themselves as the Lost Bayou Ramblers at the suggestion of a friend, the late enigmatic Ryan Domingue. According to Ryan Brasseaux, Domingue was a scientific genius who spent his days listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs and counting dolphin brain cells at the New Iberia Research Center.
The rotating cast of characters who backed up the brothers in these days includes clarinetist Gary Hernandez, Matthew Doucet, and various Michot cousins an uncles. The band’s first professional gig as the Lost Bayou Ramblers was for a wedding at a plantation house in Baldwin, La., a job arranged for them by Brasseaux. Like Dr. Barry Ancelet, who provided an academic foil for young Cajun musicians like Michael Doucet and Zachary Richard during the Cajun music renaissance of the 1970s and early ’80s, Brasseaux soon came on board to lend a folklorist’s perspective to the proceedings.
“So I walk in, an here are these young guys playing Cajun music,” says Brasseaux, remembering the band’s debut gig at Café Rue Vermillion. “And then they start promenading around downtown, playing the Mari Gras Song. And so I thought to myself: what is this?’”
From this point on, the motley crew of musicians began playing local clubs, its initial audience made up of friends and peers. In early 2002, the group started playing double bills with local honky-tonk musician Cavan “Lil’ Enos” Carruth. For half of the show, it would play as the Lost Bayou Ramblers and then back up Carruth as the Bayou Bandits. In exchange, Carruth would play guitar for the Ramblers, and he soon became the band’s steady guitarist. Around the same time, percussionist Chris “Oscar” Courville joined the band.
Courville, who originally met the Ramblers while doing computer work for Tommy Michot, usually stands when he plays, stomping on a bass drum and playing a snare or a washboard. His nickname Oscar derives from Courville’s trashy, bare bones style. With Courville’s addition, the band coalesced and began traveling around the state and to out-of-state jobs as far-flung as New York City. Around the same time, the Blue Moon Saloon opened, and local enthusiasm for Cajun music enjoyed an upswing. As the group’s popularity continued to grow, its bandmembers made Lost Bayou Ramblers their primary focus - not to mention their primary source of income.
With the exception of Courville, who has managed to stay employed with various computer design firms in New Orleans despite his increasingly demanding musical obligations, the Ramblers’ steady touring schedule has become the central component of their livelihood. Getting rich, though, is apparently not why the Ramblers are in the Cajun music business.
“For the money,” says Louis Michot, “I’d rather be a janitor than a musician.” But that hasn’t stopped him and his bandmates from pursuing their dream.
“I love music, and I love playing music,” he says. “I’m not really into the whole deal of going out all the time and playing all the time. I’m more of a homebody. But I feel, like, how could I not? .It’s like you were chosen.”
Courville, who often drives from New Orleans a few times a week for Lost Bayou Ramblers gigs, echoes the sentiment that there’s a higher purpose motivating the choice to play Cajun music. “I guess the main reason I give much more of my time to the Lost Bayou Ramblers than any band here in New Orleans or elsewhere is because I genuinely enjoy playing the music,” he says. “I get to play with great musicians, it’s a part of my culture and upbringing, and I feel that the way in which we are playing it serves to remind people these songs are just as infectious - the waltzes just as powerful and moving, the two steps just as energetic and driving if, not more so - when played simply without excessive polish and production. It’s not necessarily a new idea, but it’s one I like to think has some importance.”
It’s this philosophy, perhaps more so than any other factor, which has established the band as one of Acadiana’s most exciting young groups of any genre. While other groups playing Acadiana’s traditional music have had success by making Cajun music more modern and palatable to outsiders, the Lost Bayou Ramblers take almost the opposite tack, distilling the music to its clear, exhilarating core. Brasseaux refers to this aesthetic as “emotional honesty.”
This year has found the Ramblers continuing to grow as performers and musicians, while refusing to compromise their almost punk-rock simplicity. It’s a powerful balance that continues to bring them more fans and more acclaim, not to mention the interest of local festival promoters.
“Their style of playing is very rustic an very rough, very much like a lot of the old Cajun musicians used to play, and you don’t find that much,” says Pat Mould, who programs the Heritage Stage at Festival Acadiens, where the Lost Bayou Ramblers played for the first time this year. “A lot of young musicians coming up, they kind of want to add this polish, try to put something new on it, where I think these guys have a tendency to try to keep themselves in the past musically, and that’s what comes across when you hear them play.”
The Lost Bayou Ramblers are reminiscent of a growth stock. In a time when the music industry in general is in the tank, when pop icons seem more and more ridiculous and irrelevant, when the very infrastructure of popular music and the music business seems to be crumbling, the Lost Bayou Ramblers are doing better than ever. They’re making a decent living playing music and having a hell of a time doing it, all while gaining fans, respect, and stature. In financial terms, they’re defying the market.
There have been rough spots, of course, but the goodwill the band has created has kept it afloat when things have gone awry. When the van containing all their instruments was stolen from a parking lot in Colorado this summer, people came out of the woodwork with donations of money and even instruments. And although the van was eventually found with instruments intact, the cost of flying back and forth from Colorado and meeting their musical obligations with rented equipment exhausted all of the donations.
“Something about these guys,” says Mould, “just makes you want to help them out.”
The Lost Bayou Ramblers’ fanbase hasn’t reached the national following that groups like BeauSoleil and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys have built, but the Ramblers seem to be in a unique position to become leading standard bearers for the music in years to come. “They’re poised,” says Chas Justus, guitarist for the Red Stick Ramblers.
After months of steady playing, a number of broken-down and stolen vehicles and exhausting tour, the Ramblers are now taking some time off the road. With a newly bolstered line-up that includes ace Gin and Tonics bassist Alan LaFleur and firebrand Elton guitarist Jon Bertrand, they plan to start recording in the coming weeks.
The upcoming album will be recorded live at the Michots’ camp in the countryside near Milton. According to Louis Michot, they hope to have it out sometime in March, before festival season. They insist on keeping mum about further specifics of the album’s release, but odds are they won’t be straying far from the hard-hitting, no-frills sound found on Pilette Breakdown , their 2003 album on Swallow Records.
“I think the most traditional thing we do is that we don’t practice, and we don’t make arrangements,” says Louis. “We don’t want to practice. We don’t want to be refined. We tried to practice for the album, and we were like, ‘Man, what are we doing? What do we have to practice?’”
That approach might not necessarily work for other bands, but it’s paying off for the Lost Bayou Ramblers.
“The feeling is what will get you with this band,” says Festival International Programming Director Lisa Stafford, who booked the Lost Bayou Ramblers for the festival this year. “They make you feel like they’re bringing you back home. Kind of like if you are out of town for a long time, getting homesick and then you hear a song from Louisiana, it makes you homesick. That’s how their band makes me feel when I hear them at home: homesick.”
