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Many of the recurring motifs found in south Louisiana's culture spring from the state's rich folklore. Influenced by settlers of European and African heritage, celebrated customs like the Courir de Mardi Gras and fabled creatures like the Loup-Garou grow out of the region's distinctive oral tradition. Joshua Clegg Caffery's In the Creole Twilight draws from this vibrant and diverse legacy to create an accessible reimagining of the state's traditional storytelling and songs.
A scholar and Grammy-nominated musician, Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse that is both well-researched and refreshingly inventive. Paired with original pen-and-ink illustrations as well as notes that clarify the origins of characters and themes, Caffery's compositions provide a link to the old worlds of southern Louisiana while constructing an entirely new one.
About the author
Joshua Clegg Caffery, author of
Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana, is a native of Franklin, Louisiana, and is currently a visiting professor in folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington. He was a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a longtime member of the Louisiana French band Feufollet. In addition to being nominated for a Grammy for his work on the Feufollet album
En Couleurs, he served as the 2013-14 Alan Lomax Fellow in Folklife Studies at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.
