Iry LeJeune - Viens Me Chercher [2LP Blue & Red]

Viens Me Chercher brings together the few recordings that Iry LeJeune made before his death at twenty-six, now pressed on 2 opaque blue and red vinyl LPs.

LeJeune grew up nearly blind on a sharecropper farm near Church Point, Louisiana, and learned the accordion while chasing the sound of Amédé Ardoin, the Creole musician whose records he played. By the time he began recording in the late 1940s, Cajun dance halls had moved on to string bands imitating Western swing, with the accordion relegated as out of fashion. LeJeune brought it back with a bang, just when nostalgic veterans returning from war wanted music that sounded like home. He barely had seven years to prove himself before a car hit him while he was changing a tire on the side of the road in 1955, three weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday.

Love Bridge Waltz was the single that launched the whole revival, a waltz so plaintive it still interrupts conversations, and Jolie Catin, taken directly from Ardoin, proves that LeJeune could pay homage while sounding entirely like himself. Evangeline Special takes a tempo that can easily be danced in a two-step, while Church Point Breakdown seems to have been recorded live at the dance it names.

Seventy years later, it's still this sound that has brought Cajun music back from the brink.