BRUCE, Vin
Dans la Louisianne

1-CD DigiPac (4-plated) with 36-page booklet, 20 tracks. Playing time approx. 54 minutes.

Long overdue set of Cajun icon Vin Bruce's very first recordings for Columbia Records spotlights a fascinating time and place in the development, popularity and rise of Cajun music and its inevitable collision with country and western at its mid-century apex. Hank Williams was so endeared to Bruce's music that he invited him to play his public wedding ceremony at New Orleans' Municipal Auditorium. Produced by Don Law, Vin's Columbia sides represent the first time a Cajun artist was accompanied by Nashville's legendary session players. Among the highlights are Grady Martin multi-tasking on guitar, mandolin and fiddle, Owen Bradley on piano, Chet Atkins and Jack Shook and Tommy Jackson on guitars, and other leading lights of the early Nashville era. For the first time ever, these groundbreaking sides are brought together with flawless sound quality, including four never-before-released tracks. Highlights include the hit 'Dans la Louisianne', the plaintive hillbilly blues 'My Mama Said', songs from the pens of Bruce, Atkins, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and Autry Inman, and the unreleased Cajun bopper 'Le d Atkins' stellar proto-rockabilly guitar picking.

Often called 'The King Of Cajun Music,' Vin Bruce is a South Louisiana treasure of unparalleled significance. His signing to Columbia Records in the early fifties was positively historical in more ways than one. The first Cajun artist to be marketed to the widespread record buying public by a major record company, his first single, 'Dans la Louisianne b/w Fille de la ville', was sung purely in French, but, like Harry Choates' 'Jole Blon' before it, that didn't keep it from becoming a country music sensation. Hailing from Bayou Lafourche, below New Orleans, Vin and his peers Leroy Martin, Gene Rodrigue and Dudley Bernard developed their own stripe of Cajun music; an accordion-less string band style that was as much hillbilly as it was French. Vin's Columbia sides brought that sound to the jukeboxes, airwaves and the Grand Ole Opry. Hank Williams was so endeared to Bruce's music that he invited him to play his public wedding ceremony at New Orleans' Municipal Auditorium. The authoritative booklet by Louisiana musicologist Michael Hurtt is the most detailed history of Vin Bruce and the Bayou Lafourche sound yet to be published, bringing together years of research, illuminating interviews and never-before-seen photographs. This set is a revelation for Cajun and country music fans alike.