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This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to the ethnic, race, and hillbilly markets, are examined to illustrate the cultural intersections between the Bayou Country and America writ large. The pioneering recording careers of Joe Falcon, Cleoma Breaux Falcon, and Leo Soileau are also offered as further examples of the recording industry’s impact on local traditions and perceptions of Cajun music.

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three factors encouraged heterogeneity in the Louisiana’s musical traditions: a musical network that stimulated exchange between musicians, thereby diversifying Louisiana’s soundscape; the historical idiosyncrasies and ethnic variation shaping cultural production in rural enclaves; and the tension between traditional and innovative tendencies within the genre. Residual colonial song structures performed by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, Dennis McGee’s enigmatic fiddling that crossed stylistic and racial boundaries, the friction between conservative and progressive inclinations in regional Cajun popular culture, as performed by Leo Soileau and Moïse Robin, and Cajun readings of American popular culture as interpreted by accordionists Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire are used as points of departure in this discussion of heterogeneous musical expression on 78 rpm record.

Shellac discs were quickly eclipsed by the new “Vinylite” LP records after the 1950s and, eventually, discontinued entirely. Yet the hyper-plastic medium lived on, generating a number of widespread and enduring resonances in twentieth-century affective and material cultures. This chapter is about these lives and afterlives of shellac, focusing especially on marginal and deregulated (but not necessarily demonetized) markets since 1950. This chapter argues that repurposing shellac records may ultimately be seen as an act of unlocking, transforming, and liquidating recorded sound. Shellac can thus be interpreted as an allegory of the passages between solid and liquid modernities, where modernity is understood in terms of ceaseless material renegotiations. The chapter explores two main perspectives on material reshapings of history, power, and cultural memory. To study waste and its infrastructures prompts us to examine process-based aspects of culture, considered as an intricate entwinement of natural, historical, geological times. In doing so we may also release “a vitality intrinsic to materiality.” Indeed, this chapter deploys infrastructural analysis “as a political, deconstructive gesture of investigation into the scars, textures, and structures of the contemporary as it dynamically incorporates the past (without ‘resolving’ it).”