KEUN Eunice

KEUN Eunice is one of the places where Cajun radio becomes hard to separate from the life around it. The station has now absorbed a different FM station in town (which was originally known as KJJB), and KEUN operates two different stations on the AM and FM bands.

In the modern survey of the book, the station is described as the prototypical contemporary Cajun station: AM talk radio, FM country, and then a strong Saturday block of Cajun music, local festivals, pageants, and sports.

But its older importance rests on the way it carried live Cajun culture out of Mamou and Eunice and into the surrounding prairie. Revon Reed gives KEUN its deepest cultural weight. Around 1960, with no radio background, he was trained by the station staff and began what became The Mamou Cajun Hour. He sold the ads, hosted the show, and used French for much of the announcing and local commercial copy. The program moved through bars, Lakeview Park, and other locations before becoming identified with Fred’s Lounge. Reed’s purpose was not casual entertainment. He believed, “When the language goes, the music goes,” and used KEUN to give old-style Cajun music a public home when it had fallen from fashion.  Chris Strachwitz, of the famed Arhoolie record label, stumbled upon Reed, Paul Tate, and a group of musicians in the early 1960s after hearing them on KEUN’s airwaves.

Some GREAT photos here, plus audio of Strachwitz talking about KEUN

Beginning in the late 1980s, KEUN (and KJJB on FM) were the first on-air homes for the legendary Rendez-Vous des Cajuns program. In fact, The Saturday Cajun Music Show starts each week at 5:00 am with a condensed, one-hour version of an older Rendez-Vous episode.

Houston LeJeune supplies the station’s more homespun, comic echo. Listed in Pierre Daigle’s 1987 roster as a KEUN Cajun DJ, LeJeune also hosted live music programs, including The Basile Hour and The Church Point Hour, the latter broadcast from the Boiling Point. Later announcer Sterling Burleigh (now of KBON) remembers Houston and “Miss Carolyn” warmly from their KEUN days. In fact, KBON regularly plays a clip of LeJeune’s nonsense catchphrase, “Let the meatball roll!” In Houston’s later years, he found working the tiny buttons for digital radio equipment challenging and his wife Carolyn gradually took over.

Photo of Houston LeJeune from Elizabeth Roberts’ 1959 master’s thesis. Even in this blurry photo, you can tell he was wearing thick glasses. His poor vision became an issue later in life

Here’s another cool site with historical information on KEUN – https://acadianahistorical.org/items/show/152