A part of cajun ancestors were acadian. This acadians were from France and I wonder if they bring their old tunes with them when they landed in Louisiana. So I wonder if there are Mazurkas, polkas, bourrees, jigs, gavottes...that still exist by having through the centuries?

do Some of you braves know something about that? Do you know some very old acadian tunes like that?

thanks,

Greg

Ask Gérard Dole. Gérard is THE SPECIALIST!! Barry Ancelet Also.
http://gerarddole.free.fr/index.html
Sorry I don't find his e-mail address.

Marc.

Like Jon said, there were definitely a majority of those dances, include some valse à deux temps, glasiers, contradanses, ballads, lanciers, square dances, one-steps, breakdowns, Baisse bas, and others I'm brobably missing.

and don't forget that when you talk about dancing to a reel that there are multiple forms of dance for a reel. So the genre reel has many dances in and of itself.

Man people were doin some dances back then whew !!! It would be awesome to see a resurgence of some of these dances !!

Listening to a polka right now on Neal's website (http://npmusic.org/artists.html) called the New Iberia Polka by the Segura Brothers. Pretty cool!

http://npmusic.org/Segura_Brothers_New_Iberia_Polka.mp3

(Also added as Link 1 and 2, respectively)

Marc, jon, christian and tcadien, thank you very much for all your answers

@Jon, yeah, that's new iberia from the Seguras is very cool for sure,thanks for sharing it!

@christian I don't know yet The gérard Dole CD, but after having read the title of the records, I could really found some good examples here!
About "la veuve de la coulée" played by the deshotels brothers. From what I know, you are right, the tune is at least 300 years, maybe created in canada (when acadians where still here), or maybe it could be traced back from France (earlier than acadian settlers). Whatever, it is a real old tune!

@ Tcadien, great, you should be very intel about this subject and it seem to interested you too, please let me know if you could be able to play one of this old tune with you fiddle, I'll be very glad to heard that!

@Marc, Tcadien have already suggest to me (in a pre-discussion about country/blues adds in cajun music) to read books from Barry Ancelot and Gérard Dôle in order to learn more about what cajun music was before its evolution since radio, records... so I should buy it quickly...it seems very very interesting and totally in the subject I want to learn more...so you finish to persuade me!

greg, here is a link to a video clip of an old school house dance I did at my place. There are 3 fiddlers playing reel de Joie. The video is crappy, but the audio is decent.

Anyway, it will give you an idea of what a reel sounds like played cajun style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68xFtP7_GA