This Month on Spinning Tales

The American Musical Melting Pot:  

The Unique Sounds of Norteño and Cajun Music!    

Although Mother Nature seems to be an absolute tease, bringing us a dazzling sunsparkler one day and plunging us down toward freezing the next, it's definitely Spring here in Western Massachusetts! So, it's time to leave the Blues behind us and move on to two other unique traditions of music that emerged in the cauldron of the American culture: the Norteño music of South Texas and the Cajun music of Louisiana.

Just as the Blues was an amalgam of African and Anglo-Saxon music born in the Americas, Norteño and Cajun music were also products of America's Melting Pot. In each case, the musical traditions of those who came from the European colonial countries of Spain and France were influenced dramatically by the introduction of the accordion and the music brought to the New World by German, Czech and Polish immigrants in the later part of the 19th century.  And as polka and redova met the bolero and corrido, as the mazurka met the Arcadian ballads and waltzes of the descendants of the French colonists expelled from the Maritime Provinces of Canada by the victorious British in the mid-18th century, the musicians of each community performed their alchemy.

By the time the burgeoning recording industry emerged in the 1920's the corridos, racheros and boleros of traditional Mexican music were evolving into the distinctive Norteño music of South Texas, and Cajun music, much of it two step or Cajun waltz, was a vibrant part of the Cajun culture of Louisiana.  In both cases, this music wasn't primarily concert music, it was dance music, the life and breath of fete and fiesta.

And as radio broadcasting emerged in the 1930's the airwaves of each region were alive with the pulsing dance rhythms of this music, with vocalists crooning lyrics in Tejano Spanish and Cajun French as live dance music became part and parcel of the radio programming of that era. 

Here in 2011, Spinning Tales can't bring you this music live on the airwaves or on the web, but we can share and enjoy the music that flowed through the veins of each of these cultures in the early decades of the 20th century and pick up on some it still played in those styles by artists to this day.  It'll be a rich month.  We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do!