Vin Bruce - Cajun Legend (CD)

All Music Guide

With a recording career reaching the halfway point of its sixth decade, Vin Bruce deserves an album title like Cajun Legend more than just about anyone. This 20track set features recent recordings, but only the highfidelity recording quality betrays the vintage of these songs. The arrangements are strictly traditional, simple smallcombo style, featuring acoustic guitar, electric bass and drums alongside the essential fiddle and accordion. A few of the ballads, such as the weepy "Si Jaurais des Ailes," also feature pedal steel, which makes plain this style's connection to traditional country. (Although the popular imagination links the terms "Cajun" and "zydeco," the popular music of the French Acadians of southwestern Louisiana is its own thing, related to but dissimilar from "My TootToot.") Bruce is in excellent voice throughout, with a relaxed but deeptoned delivery that recalls a Frenchspeaking Johnny Cash, and the primarily Francophone tunes are so comfortably familiar in their ...Cajuncountry style that it comes as a shock when Bruce slips in a verse or two of English. Graceful, elegant and homey, this is traditional Cajun music at its purest. - Stewart Mason, All Music Guide Read more Less