Doucet wild

Michael Doucet is dressed in a silky blue Hawaiian shirt and a straw farmer’s hat, as he and the other five members of BeauSoleil take the stage in Lafayette’s Girard Park. The Heritage Stage at Festivals Acadiens et Créoles is finally catching some shade. It’s early October, and on other stages around the festival, musicians can be heard mentioning Doucet’s name, talking about their collaborations on this song or that one. Now he’ll be playing his own stuff in front of a much thicker crowd. TV stations, absent all day, show up for this. But that’s not why the two-time Grammy winners are here. After an illustrious introduction, Doucet probably rolls his eyes behind his black sunglasses. He’s just here to do what he does best—perform. Suddenly half the festival has converged on the stage. Words are spoken in French and English; accordions, fiddles, electric guitars and even African drums name their tune. BeauSoleil’s fans, from creoles to workers fresh off the farm to yuppies in cowboy hats to powdered-sugared children, kick over pastry plates and stake out a place to dance in the dust.

The day after the festival, Doucet invites me to his Lafayette home to talk about what’s next for BeauSoleil. He’s just returned from a dentist appointment during his brief stay at home between tour dates. “No cavities!” he says, laughing as he strides up his hidden driveway to meet me. He could be imposing, with silver-white hair and mustache and unbridled black eyebrows, and he looks me right in the eye when I speak. But the lines on his forehead immediately relax to warmth.

This is an artist who’s led a Cajun French music group into the homes of mainstream America and all over the world, played at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, spent his life conserving Cajun French culture and picked up two Grammys and more than 10 nominations along the way.

The world-renowned, Lafayette-based musicians have been on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and visited radio’s A Prairie Home Companion multiple times. Their repertoires include elements of Cajun French music, zydeco, blues, rock’n’roll, country—and the list goes on.

But their favorite place to be is home, and they’ll be rolling into downtown Baton Rouge’s Manship Theatre on Dec. 29.

“It’s a great time because it’s not New Year’s Eve,” Doucet says. “It gives everybody a kind of reprieve. It’s such a nice theater to be in.

While he says the heart of Cajun French music is in Acadiana, the 1973 LSU grad loves performing in the Capital City, where he’s played everything from Live After Five to frat parties.

“I love Baton Rouge,” he says. “It’s amazing to go back to campus and see the oak trees and what’s going on. (LSU) is just one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen.”

Growing up, he and his brother David learned French music just like other children learn Christmas carols—he can’t remember when it began, but it’s in his DNA.

The band will kick off a cross-country tour in March celebrating its 35th anniversary. Their latest studio album, 2009’s Alligator Purse, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album, a true honor for his real life’s work of preserving Cajun French culture. In high school he tracked down old masters of French music, trying to learn from them before they died, lest their roots disappear—or worse, become diluted by American pop. He says BeauSoleil never called their music “Cajun.” It was and is French music. “Our base is strictly traditional, one-on-one, kitchen-style music,” Doucet says. “But then everything on top of that, it’s a palette. We’ve just got a large palette.”

His stories of experiences with South Louisiana masters are full of what he calls “real characters,” and he’s no doubt one himself. In his spare time he grows fruit trees, he says, pointing to the imposing tropical plants that skirt his porch and the massive oaks in his yard. These prove Doucet is a caretaker of many things, not just music, and that he has little interest in so much of what passes for the music industry these days.

Hidden beyond the field is an oasis of architecture and landscaping. There’s a red 1820s Acadian-style house with stairs up the front that he bought for $100 in the 1970s, fixed up and added on to. He gave it to his son Matthew. In the past year he’s finished an adjacent Creole-style house with a high porch—the most appropriate place for our interview. Across the way is a garage modeled after the thatched African House on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, completing a building menagerie of South Louisiana cultures.

“All I need now is Jean Lafitte’s blacksmith house,” he laughs. He’s probably serious.