DL Menard (1932-2017): The voice of Cajun music
By
Paul Bond
2 August 2017
Two months ago DL Menard celebrated the 55th anniversary of his most famous song. La Porte d’en Arrière (The Back Door), which has surpassed the popularity of Jolie Blon and been described as “the anthem for Cajuns today”, earned its songwriter an enduring reputation as “the Cajun Hank Williams.” The revival of the fortunes of traditional Cajun music owes much to Menard’s love of country music, and his warmly nasal voice. Menard died July 27 in Scott, Louisiana, at the age of 85.
Doris Leon Menard was born into a farming family outside Erath, Louisiana. His father played some harmonica, but there was not much singing at home. He learned songs primarily from listening to a Texas radio station on a battery-powered radio. Every year the battery would die a month or two before the cotton had been sold: “I couldn’t listen to the radio then because we had to wait to sell the first bale of cotton to have money to buy a new battery. That was the hardest time, without the radio.”
That rural poverty had always played a part in shaping Cajun music. The Acadians expelled by the British from what is now Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century brought their French musical heritage to Louisiana and incorporated local Anglo-American styles into their fiddle-driven dance music. The advent of the diatonic accordion from the mid-nineteenth century reduced the melodic scope of the repertoire (unlike the violin, the accordion is limited in key and in available notes) and gave the music its rhythmic drive.
This music was first recorded commercially in the 1920s, but economic factors were bearing on the culture that produced it. Oil had been discovered locally in 1901, which…