KJEF Jennings

KJEF Jennings went on the air in 1950 as an outgrowth of KSIG Crowley. The same ownership group—Max Thomas and the Bailey brothers, Hillman and Clovis—sought the license for a new station in Jennings, roughly twenty miles from Crowley. The proposal was practical and strategic. Some of the equipment for the new operation would come from KSIG, including material that was only needed for special broadcasts such as the annual rice festival.

In the FCC application for the new station, the owners promised newscasts and other public service programs in French, “consistent to required demands.” This phrase reveals an important truth about postwar radio in southwest Louisiana. French-language broadcasting was not merely sentimental. In many rural areas, it remained a practical necessity.

Roberts’s 1959 thesis identified the Jennings station as one of the outlets carrying Cajun-oriented programming, including the music show Allons Danser, or “Let’s Dance.” FCC files also mention KJEN Kapers, a title that played on the sound of the station’s call letters and the word “Cajun.” KJEF was also connected to several important radio personalities and musicians. Jerry Dugas, later remembered as one of Cajun radio’s major announcers, worked at the station and expressed a strong desire to “keep it Cajun” and “keep it French.”

Here’s a great photo of Lionel Cormier and the Sundown Playboys in the KJEF studio, a reminder that these small-town stations were often performance spaces as much as broadcast outlets. A young Jerry Dugas is at the mic on the right.

For nearly fifty years, mostly at KJEF, Dugas made that stubborn preference into a career. Pierre Daigle’s 1987 list called his Allons Dancer the longest continuously running Cajun show on the air, dating it back to 1951. By the 1990s, KJEF still carried his show and remained part of proposed French radio networks. The end came quietly, through ownership consolidation. In 2000, KJEF’s operations shifted to Lake Charles; Dugas retired rather than make the forty-mile commute. Later, KJEF disappeared from the airwaves, surviving as CajunRadio.com, an online echo of a station whose greatest signal had been Jerry Dugas himself.