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Louisiana Saturday Night

Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana's Juke Joints, Honky-Tonks, and Dance Halls

by Alex V. Cook

256 pages / 6.12 x 8.00 inches / 38 halftones, 1 map

ebook available

Music

  Paperback / 9780807144565 / March 2012

From backwoods bars and small-town dives to swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns, Louisiana Saturday Night offers an anecdotal history and experiential guidebook to some of the Gumbo State’s most unique blues, Cajun, and zydeco clubs. 

Music critic Alex V. Cook uncovers south Louisiana’s wellspring of musical tradition, showing us that indigenous music exists not as an artifact to be salvaged by preservationists, but serves as a living, breathing, singing, laughing, and crying part of Louisiana culture. Louisiana Saturday Night takes the reader to both offbeat and traditional venues in and around Baton Rouge, Cajun country, and New Orleans, where we hear the distinctive voices of musicians, patrons, and owners—like Teddy Johnson, born in the house that now serves as Teddy’s Juke Joint. Along the way, Cook ruminates on the cultural importance of the people and places he encounters, and shows their critical role in keeping Louisiana’s unique music alive.
 
A map, a journal, a snapshot of what goes on in the little shacks off main roads, Louisiana Saturday Night provides an indispensable and entertaining companion for those in pursuit of Louisiana’s quirky and varied nightlife.

Alex V. Cook is a Baton Rouge writer whose work has appeared in the Oxford American, The Believer, The Wire, and DownBeat.

Advance Praise for Louisiana Saturday Night

“Combining his prodigious knowledge of America’s indigenous music forms with a finely tuned nose for what’s real, Alex has written a terrifically informative, highly entertaining, compulsively readable guide to discovering the high notes in Louisiana’s musical landscape, wherever they may be. So whether you are inspired to get in the car at five next Saturday morning or simply to live vicariously through the power of Alex’s prose, read Louisiana Saturday Night. It'll make you glad to know this place.”—James Fox-Smith, editor of Country Roads magazine

Spotify Playlist

Alex Cook has created a Spotify playlist to go along with his book

SOURCE: Spotify

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