Folks should start bugging Rachou at La Louisianne records to releasee those Ambrose LP's on CD. Maybe he's got a humongous cache of the LP's he's trying to sell first, but it would be nice to have them on cd.
I digitized them myself, but my hearing is a bit off, and when I set the equalizer for the recording, everything was a bit "hot".
All you gotta say is "When you gonna release those Ambrose LP's on cd?" and "What other stuff are you converting to cd?" But Ambrose for sure.
Ambrose Thibodeaux recorded the four LPs on La Louisianne and a fifth LP on the Bee Label. I have never seen it, though - even though I keep looking.
Last week, I happened to see Reggie Matte delivering sausage to the restaurant in the Four Deuces Truck Stop in Duson. I spoke to him, and when I told him that I was from the Washington, D.C. area, he told me that he had appeared on a radio program in Bethesda, Md., in 1972 with Ambrose Thibodeaux. He mentioned that the disc jockey had an Ambrose song for his theme song. That DJ was Damian Einstein, and the radio station was WHFS. Damian is now with a radio station in Annapolis; and as far as I know, he still has the same theme song - Musician One-Step, I think.
Then we started talking about the recordings. He said that he played guitar and did some of the vocals on at least two (maybe three) of Ambrose's recordings. One of them was the LP on the Bee label. I thought that was interesting.
I have made a lot of attempts to find the Bee LP, but never succeeded. We talked a good while, and I learned a lot more than I previously knew about Ambrose and also about Reggie. He has quite a long history, not only with Jambalaya and Ambrose Thibodeaux, but with D.L. Menard and Dennis McGee, among others.
I have Radio Free Omaha (1970-1971) and WHFS out of DC(1971-1973) to thank for taking me out of the AM mainstream of radio hits into the Long John Baldry, Leon Russell, Buffy Sainte Marie, Jethro Tull, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys, and I guess, Cajun music that I didn't recognize as such at the time. How a double-knit wearing suburban boy got his (pale, diluted) funk!
The April 2011 Dewey Balfa Cajun & Creole Heritage Week
