Sunday, March 4, 2018

1000 SONGS - DAY 369 SONG #400

DAY 400: Allons Danser, Colinda!

"Colinda" is a relatively well known Cajun-Song, at least for being part of the soundtrack of the movie "The Big Easy" in a more or less Reggae-ized version by Zachary Richard. My favorite version is by the Tail Gators, featured here - I have it at home, on vinyl The song was made popular by the 1962 version of Rod Bernard, with its mix of French (Cajun) and English lyrics. There has been a recording of the song with English lyrics only, by Jimmy Davis, the man who allegedly wrote "You are my Sunshine", two-times Governor of Louisiana.
Originally, this seems to have been a song with French lyrics. The song is about a girl called "Colinda", the best one on the Bayou. Nevertheless, as scholarship has shown, it has formerly been a song about "Calinda", a dance of Afro-Americans in Haiti and elsewhere. So, initially, "Allons danser Colinda" has meant "Let us dance the Calinda" and not "Let us dance, Colinda". It has been "poped" later to the one and only theme of "boy and girl".

If you want to know more about that, read the paper:
Shane Bernard and Julia Girouard,  "Colinda": Mysterious Origins of a Cajun Folksong. In: Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 29, [1992], 37-52.

The truest Cajun version was done by Lawtell Playboys, which unfortunately has been taken from YouTube lately. For the sake of inclusiveness (it doesn't match up to the Lawtell Playboys' or Tail Gaitor's version in any way) I also feature the rendering of the song by Rod Bernard, the "swamp-pop" version, or so…