Swamp pop

by Shane K. Bernard

Here is the exciting story of swamp pop, a form of Louisiana music more recognized by its practitioners and their hits than by a definition. Drawing on more than fifty interviews with swamp-pop musicians in south Louisiana and southeast Texas, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues finds the roots of this often overlooked, sometimes derided sister genre of the wildly popular Cajun and zydeco music. In this first book to be devoted entirely to swamp pop, Shane K. Bernard, son of the notable swamp-pop musician Rod Bernard, uncovers the history of this hybrid form invented in the 1950s by teenage Cajuns and black Creoles. Putting aside the fiddle and accordion of their parents' traditional French music to learn the electric guitar and bass, saxophone, upright piano, and modern drumming trap sets of big-city rhythm-and-blues, they created a spicy new music that arises from the bayou country.