I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country

Co-produced by Joel Savoy and Joshua Clegg Caffery, and based on Caffery's scholarly tome, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings (2013), this set of four albums, each containing six tracks focused on a particular theme, offers a fascinating historical analysis. All of the songs were originally recorded by John and Alan Lomax in 1934 during their travels in central Louisiana. ‘Eighty years after the Lomax trip… we can see that the songs they recorded have had a major impact on the character and form of Cajun and Creole music,’ the liner notes explain. Attesting to that impact are 24 interpretations of the Lomax material by leading native and Louisiana-influenced artists including Joel Savoy himself, Michael Doucet, Wayne Toups, Zachary Richard, Tiffany Lamson, Cedric Watson, David Greely, Anna Laura Edmiston, Kristi Guillory, Megan Brown and Aurora Nealand. The range of styles spans the swamps and bayous, parlours and honky-tonks of a polyglot land. On Disc Two: Love & Death, Broussard's ‘When I Die’, a butt-kicking blues-rocker inspired by a spiritual, is followed by the operatically staged ‘Amour et Fanatisme’, a lover's lament sung by Claire Caffery, featuring Carl Brazell as an Islamic soldier bidding farewell to his Christian girlfriend – it evidently was a hit song in Europe in the 1850s.