Sisters doing it for themselves

When Grace Babineaux, 14, and her sister Julie, 12, were asked last summer to contribute to the fall release En Français: Cajun ‘n’ Creole Rock ‘n’ Roll, Vol. 2—a compilation of mainstream rock classics translated into Cajun and Creole French and Cajun/Creole music styles—the girls decided almost immediately on Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” But it wasn’t enough to simply translate the songs into Cajun French. Instead, they turned to their maternal grandfather, who lives in Forked Island (pronounced “Fork-ed”) southwest of Abbeville that until 1975 was separated from the North Country by the Intracoastal Waterway. This isolation kept the town’s residents hanging on to a less-modernized form of spoken Cajun French and culture.

Their results were so spectacular that En Français, Vol. 2 co-producer Louis Michot chose the Babineaux Sisters’ version of “All Along the Watchtower” (“Le Tour de Garde”) as the lead track ahead of contributions by the likes of BeauSoleil, Terence Simien and Geno Delafose. When asked about that decision, Michot, leader of The Lost Bayou Ramblers, said simply, “They’re just natural-born musicians. The tracks they did are my two favorite tracks on the whole album.” High praise indeed, especially from a leader of the Cajun music revival that also includes Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys, The Pine Leaf Boys, the all-female Bonsoir Catin, young folk-rockers Feufollet and zydeco visionary Cedric Watson.

And now, the barely adolescent Babineaux Sisters.

When I asked the girls to send me a copy of their self-titled debut CD, recorded last summer and released this past fall, with it came a handwritten note from Grace that said, “We hope you enjoy our first CD, which seems so different from us now.” When I spoke with her just before their first appearance as a main stage act at Lafayette’s Festivals Acadiens et Creoles last October, Grace explained, “That CD contains some of the first material my sister and I wrote. Now we’ve found ourselves more … It’s really shocking how different it sounds to us now.”

The Babineaux Sisters have been making music for almost a decade now, ever since Grace began singing and playing guitar at five. She eventually moved on to accordion and fiddle, while Julie followed on rubboard, eventually moving to rhythm guitar and back-up vocals.

But while the girls have drawn attention, they are also remarkably adept at valuing musical growth over the pursuit of music-business success, a focus reinforced by their parents, as well as Steve Riley, who first gave Grace accordion lessons.

When I asked her about working with musicians like Riley and Michot, Grace displayed the unworldly kind of maturity that has come to mark their music, saying, “All the people we’ve worked with have told us just to follow our hearts and do what we want to do. And they’re doing that, so I think we should, too.”