Cajun and Creole Music Collection — Dupré Library

Over 11,000 commercial recordings, beginning in 1928, when Cajun and Creole musicians first entered studios and pressed sound into shellac. The Cajun and Creole Music Collection at Dupré Library holds the full commercial arc of the music that came out of Acadiana — the region where French-speaking Acadian refugees settled after expulsion from Canada, intermarried, and built what became Cajun culture. The collection spans 78rpm records, LPs, 45s, cassettes, CDs, and video, tracking Cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, and Creole music from first pressings to contemporary artists. This is where you go to hear Amédé Ardoin's 1929 recordings. Where you go to hear the early Balfa Brothers. The shift from format to format — 78 to LP to cassette to CD — marks changes in who could record, who could distribute, who could hear. What remains constant is the catalog itself: what was played, sung, pressed, and saved. Beyond the recordings, the collection includes instruments, photographs, posters, recording studio artifacts, and the Louisiana Folk Roots archive. It is open to the public for listening and research, with audiovisual playback stations available at the Edith Garland Dupré Library on the UL Lafayette campus. You can sit and work your way through the timeline, decade by decade, hearing the music that traveled from house dances and church halls into studios, then back out into the world.