This album was why we moved to Louisiana.
New digital liner notes —
with lots of photographs
J’Étais au Bal:
Music from French Louisiana
Produced, written and photographed by Ron and Fay Stanford
Swallow Records 6020 · 1974
currently out of print
Produced with a Youthgrant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
The following liner notes first appeared as a booklet accompanying the LP record. The text is unedited from the original, but we have inserted many photographs that were not in the original booklet.
Cover photo: Clement “King” Ned. Album hand lettering and ink drawing by Fay Stanford.
©1974 and 2020· Web site text, photographs and illustrations by Ron and Fay Stanford. All rights reserved.
Not long after finishing our liberal arts degrees, we moved to southwest Louisiana in 1972 to make this LP. Just after we left in 1974, the record was pressed and became the newest and most eclectic offering in Swallow’s rich catalog of Cajun, Zydeco, and what is now call Swamp Pop.
The essays you’ll read here accompanied the record and are as they were printed. Each essay is written by one of us, with all misinformation or youthful prejudices intact. We did want accuracy in our work, especially in transcribing and translating the song lyrics. My high school French was helpful, but we had expert help from Dewey Balfa and Pierre Thibaud. Pierre was a French teacher at Mamou Elementary, sent there by the French government as part of a sort of Francophone Peace Corps. Pierre lives in a small town in the Dordogne region of southwest France, where he is a cultural historian and author.
Of course, mistakes happen, and new facts are learned over the years. For that, we’ve added a page where we’re assembling comments spurred by our re-release of the liner notes. When you see the word (lagniappe), you’ll know to click for clarification or correction.
Or the old school booklet — from the ville platte print shop.
In the late spring of 1974, after the record was recorded and edited and our articles and photographs were finished, Fay and I spent a day at the print shop of Swallow Records in Ville Platte. We worked with a technician to lay out the computer-set columns along with a few pictures. We obviously didn’t know much about design and production, but it was our baby, and we felt wonderful about it, especially when we received copies of the finished piece in the mail a few weeks later.
