Kristi Guillory

The new breed of Cajun musicians had no more promising a representative at the close of the 20th century than Kristi Guillory, who grew up in the heart of the Acadian nation and was fiddling with the buttons and keys on an accordion at an age when many other little girls are dressing Barbie dolls. There are Cajun fans who love her music simply because she represents a long-overdue wave of female musicians in a genre that has always been an exclusive male turf, but what really gives her music staying power is her personal fascination, and literal immersion, into the French-American culture. Her probing mind and well-above average intelligence, combined with firm grounding and love of the tradition, seems like it could be something of a requirement for survival as Cajun music rocks on into the 21st century. But although Guillory never seems to shut music out of her life completely, she has also been pursuing an academic career complete with its requirements of massive time outlay. Whether her true life's work would be in music or an academic field related to the French language was so unclear in 1997 that columnists on the Cajun music scene were joking about her being in "semi-retirement" from music at the ripe age of 18. She began playing at the age of 11 and the story has been romanticized to the point where the music just came pouring out of her one night when she decided to fiddle with her mom's accordion at a social gathering. As soon as she started learning to play, she began attending jam sessions, particularly the events held at Rex Champagne's Gas Station in Judice, LA. This was actually a gas station, not a venue with a down-home sounding name, and the proprietor of the same name is a legendary Cajun character known for his harmonica playing as well as drumming....