KAPB Marksville
KAPB Marksville sits on the northern edge of Acadiana, where the border between Cajun country and central Louisiana begins to blur. The station went on the air in 1954, part of the same postwar growth that gave many small towns their own local signal. In Elizabeth Roberts’s late-1950s survey, KAPB was the only station in its immediate region with French programming. Its early manager, Willie Bordelon, hosted The Cajun Hour in the afternoons, mixing French news and music, while the station also carried ten minutes of French prayers each morning.
KAPB is also small-town radio in the old sense. Laborde uses voice tracking, but feeds his remote family DJs lunch specials, church fairs, fundraisers, weather, and local details so the station still sounds rooted. The Swap Shop may be its clearest proof: ordinary people selling furniture, auto parts, school uniforms, or a chicken cage, making classified ads feel like community theater.
The modern KAPB is Todd Laborde’s station. The original AM outlet gained an FM counterpart in 1980; eventually the AM license disappeared, and KAPB became 97.7 FM. Laborde, a Marksville native, bought the station in 2017 after years in Navy communications, embassy communications work, and radio jobs in Virginia. He renovated the studio and branded it plainly as “97.7 The Cajun.”
The logo says much of what the format sounds like: a cowboy hat and a crawfish boiling in a pot. KAPB is mostly classic country, but with Avoyelles Parish seasoning. The Saturday Morning Get Together gives six hours to Cajun music, swamp pop, zydeco, and some French news. Pat Tassin, a longtime station hand whose first language was French, hosted Pat’s Place on Sunday afternoons, focused strictly on Cajun music. His announcing moved between French and English, not as theory, but as habit. He stopped his KAPB work for health reasons after the research for the book was completed.