KPLC Lake Charles

KPLC went on the air in April 1935 from the Majestic Hotel, a fittingly public location in a city where radio ownership was growing faster than in much of Acadiana. The same location had been used a remote studio by KFDM, a Beaumont Texas station, and hosted regular radio performances by the Hackberry Ramblers before Lake Charles got its own station.

At first KPLC had only 100 watts, then 250 by 1938, but even that modest signal helped pull Lake Charles into the early map of French and Cajun broadcasting.

From the start, music mattered. KPLC aired French music and featured Leo Soileau, later called the “Godfather of Cajun Swing.” His Four Aces appeared in KPLC program logs in the late 1930s, and a 1937 schedule listed the wonderfully named Community Coffee Playboys. Like many stations of the era, KPLC filed such music under “hillbilly,” a broad label that could include Cajun, country, swing, and other rural styles not yet sorted into clean commercial categories.

KPLC also carried French political speech and wartime news. In 1942, Grover Vidrine addressed Seventh Congressional District voters in French over both KPLC and KVOL. During World War II, military censors questioned KPLC’s French newscasts after being told the language was “Cajun.” The station manager answered that Cajun could not be written, a revealing mistake: the issue was not impossibility, but the fact that announcers were speaking a learned home language from English material. Once procedures were clarified, KPLC was allowed to continue.

Ad from Church Point News, Sept 4, 1942

After the war, KPLC became even more important to local music. Eddie Shuler of Goldband Records had a show there and used the station’s facilities to record musicians, including Iry LeJeune and Nathan Abshire’s landmark “Pine Grove Blues.” KPLC later became KLCL in 1971, now talk radio, but its older signal still echoes through Cajun music history.