Here is the exciting story of swamp pop, a form of Louisiana music more
recognized by its practitioners and their hits than by a definition.
Drawing on more than fifty interviews with swamp-pop musicians in south
Louisiana and southeast Texas, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and
Blues finds the roots of this often overlooked, sometimes derided sister
genre of the wildly popular Cajun and zydeco music. In this first book
to be devoted entirely to swamp pop, Shane K. Bernard, son of the
notable swamp-pop musician Rod Bernard, uncovers the history of this
hybrid form invented in the 1950s by teenage Cajuns and black Creoles.
Putting aside the fiddle and accordion of their parents' traditional
French music to learn the electric guitar and bass, saxophone, upright
piano, and modern drumming trap sets of big-city rhythm-and-blues, they
created a spicy new music that arises from the bayou country.