Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys

Thursday , July 17, 2003
08:00 pm
Location: Creole Gallery
concert ($14)

Steve Riley grew up in the prairie town of Mamou where French is spoken on the street, the national holiday is Mardi Gras, and a poor family is one without a fiddler or accordion player. American popular culture was stealing Mamou's children away when Steve took up the accordion and became his home town's favorite son.
He and the Mamou Playboys came together in 1988, and they were immediatley buoyed by the enthusiasm of academic folklorists who treasure their Cajun music. But the Playboys have pushed their audience to accept new ideas. The result is a new Cajun music that is completely connected with who they are, where they live, and all the history, language and DNA that put them there.
You could just as easily find the Playboys playing to a packed dance hall in Louisiana as a concert hall in Sweden. They've taken their seductive rhythms to the world, and the world has loved it.
Their eighth release opens a new window in the world of the 21st century Cajun. "Happytown", on Rounder Records, boasts burly, serpentine electric guitar, tightly interlaced fiddles and the fever of full bore diatonic accordion revelry. It has acoustic recordings made on the banks of the Atchafalaya Swamp as well as lyrics sung in Cajun French.
The Mamou Playboys have a compulsion for variety. Steve Riley makes his circuit through three different accordions, fiddle, vocals, guitar and bass. David Greely brings songs to life on fiddle, tenor sax, or guitar. Guitarist Sam Broussard, the newest member of the group, also provides soaring vocal harmonies. Kevin Dugas' percussion and Blaine Gaspard's electric bass make it all go effortlessly.
All these flavors silence the skeptics who think it "all sounds the same." This band is from Louisiana's Gulf Coast, South of the American South, and it is brimful of sounds that are compelling, diverse and exotic.

A bit about the Playboys roots:
Louisiana's rich cultural history helps to explain the Playboys. The Acadians (seventeenth century French settlers in the New World) were deported from what is now Nova Scotia in 1755. Overcoming great hardship, many of them eventually found refuge in the bayous and prairies of Louisiana.
Since that time, their culture has flourished, becoming "Cajun" as it absorbed influences from Afro-Caribbean, German, Native American, and even Scots-Irish neighbors. This mixture is nowhere more apparent than in the music.
Twentieth century Americana has brought powerful pressures to assimilate, but somehow South Louisiana continues to incorporate influences without losing its unique identity.
More recently Cajun musicians have yielded to the pleasures of zydeco, the music of their French-speaking black creole neighbors, and have also created a unique genre of rock and roll known as swamp pop.

Check out recordings we carry featuring Steve Riley