Blues a catin CD review
by Dan Wilging
Offbeat Magazine, February 2007

You never know what is going to happen at a Balfa Folk Roots music camp. Kristi Guillory (accordion) and Yvette Landry (bass) knew they were in the midst of a transcendent jam but their jaws literally dropped when afterwards, Christine Balfa remarked, “I want to be in a band with you!” Balfa must recognize chemistry when she sees it because with the addition of fiddler Anya Burgess, everything seems to be a natural fit. Like the Cajun super group Racines, whose members hail from several Lafayette ensembles, the members of Bonsoir, Catin (BSC) also play in the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, Magnolia Sisters and Balfa Toujours as their primary gigs.

Even though BSC is coincidentally mostly an all-women’s group (male drummer Jude Veillon heats the beat), they never wear their femininity on their sleeve. Instead, they sing about battered old trucks, jukeboxes, rambling from place to place and boozing it up so much that the Prozac wears off. They aren’t afraid to rock their instrumentals (“Tiger Rag Blues”) or pound their waltzes (“mémoires dans mon coeur”). With guest Terry Huval’s tasty steel guitar, they gang tackle several numbers that fall on the country side of Cajun. Guillory sings in a gusty, uninhibited voice while Balfa’s projecting, piercing vocals have been missing from recordings for too long.

Yet, as much as they fit the mold of a Saturday night dancehall band, what’s even more intriguing is the stuff Guillory, whose day job is a university archivist, folds into their repertoire. “La Sainte Catherine,” originally an a cappella ballad culled from the Lomax archives, is transformed here into a full band arrangement. Another hidden track, “dans mon chemin,” is another such Lomax discovery. Just by chance, Guillory was singing it in the studio when producer Dirk Powell pounced on piano, making it sound like something from ancient Nova Scotia, the ancestral home of the Cajuns. Like the songs they transform and perform, BSC is among the newer bands breathing life into Cajun music.

 

 

 

 

 

Hot Under the Collar 
by Mary Tutwiler
The Independent, January 2007

Conni Castille may be the first director ever to make a film about ironing. It’s such an unlikely topic, when cinematographer and co-director Allison Bohl tells people what the documentary is about, they usually respond “Irony?” and Bohl has to pantomime ironing a shirt.

Shot in Breaux Bridge, I Always Do My Collars First: A Film About Ironing, follows four women — Rookie LeBlanc, Gay Castille, Aunt Be Guidry and Georgie Blanchard — as they talk about why they iron. And they iron everything: shirts, pants, underwear, sheets, pillowcases, handkerchiefs, even dish towels. “Many Cajun women grew up poor,” Castille says. “It was a source of pride at a time they were growing up, in the 1930s and ’40s, to keep your family clean and neat. These women take note of whose husband and children were allowed to go to church in wrinkled clothes.” Quietly competitive, the women’s stories are often humorous digs at their neighbors as well as fond remembrances of family occasions.

The film is the first release from UL Lafayette’s new Cinematic Arts Workshop. Workshop Director Charles Richard oversees the interdisciplinary program, which offers courses and a hands-on learning opportunity to UL students who want to learn filmmaking.

 Castille and Bohl were able to collaborate because of the special nature of the workshop, which encourages students from all departments to experiment with digital media projects. Castille is in the master’s degree program in folklore, and Bohl just graduated from UL with a bachelor’s degree in visual arts. Neither woman had any training in documentary filmmaking before they began working on this project. Usually, a master’s degree thesis is a scholarly paper. “By making a film, it let the women see themselves,” Castille says. “They never would have read my paper.”

 Ironing as folklore will reach a much broader audience at the film’s local premiere this week. It’s only the beginning, Castille says. “Dishwashing’s next, baby.”