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

Viens Me Chercher gathers up the handful of records Iry LeJeune made before he died at twenty-six, now pressed across 2LP opaque blue and red vinyl.

LeJeune grew up nearly blind on a sharecropping farm near Church Point, Louisiana, and learned accordion by chasing the sound of Amede Ardoin, the Creole player whose records he wore thin. By the time he started recording in the late 1940s, Cajun dance halls had mostly gone over to string bands aping western swing, accordion pushed aside as old fashioned. LeJeune brought it roaring back, right as homesick veterans coming home from the war wanted music that sounded like home again. He barely got seven years to make his case before a car struck him changing a tire on the roadside in 1955, three weeks shy of his twenty seventh birthday.

Love Bridge Waltz was the single that started the whole revival, a waltz so plaintive it still stops conversation, and Jolie Catin, lifted straight from Ardoin, proves LeJeune could pay tribute and still sound entirely like himself. Evangeline Special picks the tempo back up into something you could actually two step to, while Church Point Breakdown sounds like it was recorded live at the dance it names.

Seventy years on, this is still the sound that brought Cajun music back from the edge.