Later this week, Festivals Acadiens et Créoles kicks off in Lafayette. But this biannual celebration of Cajun music and culture is far from the only festival of its kind. In late September, WWNO’s Alana Schreiber traveled to Lakeview Park and Beach in Eunice, Louisiana to attend Le Grand Hoorah. She brought back this story on the more intimate festival and hog roast.
(The following transcript has been edited for clarity.)
ALANA SCHREIBER: If you really want to understand Le Grand Hoorah, you have to talk to the two masterminds behind the event:
GILBERT 'WINKY' AUCOIN: My name is Gilbert Winky Aucoin and I’m from Ville Platte.
MARGARET 'CHICKEN' AUCOIN: my name is Margaret Chicken Aucoin.
WINKY: The community she was raised in right down the street – there are no streets here – right down the pasture, is called Durald. And we’re Winky and Chicken.
SCHREIBER: That’s right. Winky and Chicken. A beloved married couple who have been putting this festival on since around the year 2000. But for them, it’s not just a celebration of Cajun music and culture. It’s also personal.
CHICKEN: My dad was an accordion player also and played here. Probably one of the first musicians to play in that big dance hall right there.
WINKY: Her father and her mother had twelve kids. And he was a farmer and an accordion player. He played all over the country, he played all over the world, and we do this to honor him.
SCHREIBER: One way that Chicken’s father is honored is through the music. At 10 am, despite highs of 96 degrees, the patio outside the dance hall is packed. A circle of musicians gather their fiddles and accordions, the local radio station, KVPI, is doing a live broadcast, and Winky is kicking off the festival with the opening ceremonies.
WINKY: Début, s’il vous plaît. Pour le prix, pour le succès de la célébration….
SCHREIBER: And then, the local school children begin to sing…in French.
Despite large French-speaking routes in Acadiana, the language was largely suppressed in the early to mid 1900s, resulting in a loss of native Louisiana French speakers. But now, French is so widely promoted in the schools, that teachers have come all the way from France to work in the immersion program. And today, they’re at the festival.
Local school kids sing and play French music
FLORENCE: Oui, je suis Florence. Je viens de l'ouest de la France.
SCHREIBER: Florence, a French teacher in Evangeline Parish, has not only watched french-speaking grow among students since the immersion program first kicked off 4 years ago, but she’s also witnessed adults take up a new interest in it. Here she explains that with translating from local, Wanda Verette.
FLORENCE: A essayé, grâce aux enfants, de parlez français, et plus d’accepter cette culture la, moi je crois ça mais…euh?
WANDA, TRANSLATING FLORENCE: She’s saying that the grandparents speak and the parents don’t, but then when they see their children speaking to the grandparents, it makes them kind of want to learn.
SCHREIBER: As soon as the music kicks off, so does the dancing. Partners take to the floor to two-step or waltz to Cajun classics. And the first set of musicians are actually quite youthful. The Aucoin family band is made up of Winky and Chicken’s children and grandchildren.
But if anyone isn’t inside dancing, it’s because they're outside, tasting the food. Like Brent Byrd, who’s smoking ribs and offering a free taste to anyone that walks by.
Brent Byrd (right) demonstrates how he smokes ribs
BRENT BYRD: Earlier this morning we took the pig down and then we lined up the ribs. My job is to make sure we skim the ribs, cut the excess fat, put a dry rub on them, and now we got them smoking.
SCHREIBER: But ribs are far from the only part of the pig being eaten today. At the surrounding booths there’s boudin balls, pork meatballs, sausage, and even spicy meat stew.
BRENT: Once the hog is down they heat water to 160 degrees and put them in a tub to where the hair loosens up off the skin and they can scrape it off. Once they get all that done, they open it up to get rid of the leftover stuff you’re not really going to use. And they make a gravy with that. And make a gravy with that. After that they start deboning and that ends up either in boudin or they’ll grind it up and season it and we’ve got some sausage smoking in the smokehouse right now.
SCHREIBER: According to Brent, this painstaking process of preparing and eating as much of the pig as possible, is actually a big part of the tradition.
It really derives from the olden days when they had no refrigeration and no means to do things like that. They’d come together in the community with three or four families and they wouldn’t waste anything. It’s all stuff they did by necessity, and now we are doing it to show people, but also to remember our heritage and what we do.
But Le Grand Hoorah doesn’t just offer a space for music, food, and dancing. It’s also a place for musicians to repair their instruments with the help of Calvin Ardoin, or as he likes to be known..
CALVIN ARDOIN: Fiddle Fixer
SCHREIBER: Calvin has a booth where he demonstrates how fix instruments and even build them from scratch.
CALVIN: The part that vibrates the most at the top is made out of spruce. All the rest of it is hardwood. The most common type is maple.
SCHREIBER: But, as far as what Calvin likes most about fiddle fixing.
CALVIN: And I love bringing things back to life. And to me, every instrument has a life, an essence, so it’s just very rewarding.
SCHREIBER: Bringing things back to life is kind of the central theme of Le Grand Hoorah. But it’s not only about mending broken fiddles, it’s also about revitalizing – and celebrating – an entire culture. Again, Winky and Chicken Aucoin.
WINKY: Even though there were many influences that could have taken our music from us, that could have changed our recipes, changed our method of dance. They didn’t and we’re still here and we still got it.
CHICKEN: And we wanna share it with everyone! My dad always said he never met a stranger. Anyone was welcome in our home.
SCHREIBER: In Eunice, I’m Alana Schreiber
French transliteration courtesy of Zoe Beriss.
