Cajun Radio History

KPFT website Founded by journalists Larry Lee and Don Gardner, Houston’s KPFT (90.1 FM) went on the air on March 1, 1970, as the fourth station in the listener-sponsored Pacifica Foundation network. Established as a noncommercial community radio outlet, KPFT embraced progressive politics, cultural diversity, and local programming ignored by mainstream media. In May 1970, just two months after its debut, the station’s transmitter was blown up by the Ku Klux Klan. A second dynamite attack targeted the transmitter in October 1970 while broadcasting Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” making KPFT the only US radio station twice bombed off the air. Returning to transmission in 1971, the station built a reputation…

Born in 1939 near Basile, Louisiana, Luke Collins worked farm fields at sixteen while dreaming of becoming a radio DJ. Despite early rejections from major stations due to his regional accent, he completed a six-month correspondence course in broadcasting and persistently lobbied KEUN manager Karl Derouen for airtime. In 1981, he launched the Luke Collins Black Zydeco Special on KEUN in Eunice, Louisiana, creating one of commercial radio’s earliest programs dedicated exclusively to zydeco. He told this story to Michael Tisserand; it appears in the book Kingdom of Zydeco. I reprint this photo in my own book, but it comes from Tisserand. (Thanks Mike!) Station policy required Collins to conduct…

Pete Bergeron became, almost by accident and then by long discipline, one of the defining French voices of Louisiana radio. A native of Eunice, raised in a French-speaking family, he first heard local French broadcasting through announcers such as Alden Sonnier on KSIG. His own radio life began early, when he and his brother played music on a weekly KEUN program as the Salty Dogs. After several years in the Navy, where he worked in communications, Bergeron studied broadcasting in Atlanta, then worked as a radio announcer in North Carolina and Tennessee before returning to Louisiana. Photo and article from Daily Advertiser (Lafayette) – Dec 13, 1983. Pete is second…

Fred’s Lounge in Mamou is less a bar than a broadcast site that accidentally became a shrine. Its story begins in 1946, when Alfred Tate bought the old family bar, then known as Tate’s Bar, and gave it the name by which it would become famous. A bronze plaque on the outside wall later made a large claim for the place: that the postwar French Renaissance of Cajun music, language, and culture began there. The statement is a little too neat, as local history usually is, but it contains a stubborn truth. The key figure was Revon Reed, whose Mamou Cajun Hour began around 1960 on KEUN in Eunice. In…

James Floyd Soileau, born November 2, 1938, near Ville Platte, Louisiana, stands as one of the quiet architects of modern Cajun, swamp pop, and zydeco music. Raised in Cajun French, he did not learn English until school, a detail that helps explain why language and music became inseparable in his life. As a high-school student, he worked at KVPI in Ville Platte, hosting the Cajun Rendezvous show because he could speak French. From that radio perch, he noticed a practical problem: local people wanted French records, but there were few places to buy them. He began selling records out of a room in the same building as the studio, until…

Dudley J. LeBlanc (1894–1971) was a consummate Louisiana politician, entrepreneur, and foundational figure in the preservation of Acadian culture. Representing Vermilion Parish as a four-term state senator, “Coozan Dud” understood the power of mass media long before the postwar ethnic revival. LeBlanc’s masterstroke of self-promotion came with Hadacol, a wildly popular vitamin elixir laced with 12 percent alcohol. Flooding the southern airwaves with grassroots French-language radio interviews, spot advertisements, and an elaborate traveling music show, he built a multimillion-dollar empire. When Groucho Marx asked what Hadacol was good for, LeBlanc famously quipped, “It was good for five million dollars for me last year”. Yet, behind the medicine-show bravado lay a…

Huey “Crazy Cajun” Meaux belongs to the Texas edge of Cajun radio history, where Louisiana music spilled across the border and found new microphones. Born in Wright, Louisiana, in 1929, he moved with his family to Winnie, Texas, as a child. His radio career began in the 1950s at KPAC Port Arthur, where he played drums in a band with a weekly show; his father, an accordion player, was also in the group. By 1959, Meaux had his own KPAC program and had taken the nickname “Crazy Cajun,” a showman’s title in the same spirit as the “Big Bopper.” Radio was only the doorway. Meaux became far better known as…

Cajun Music on Saturday Mornings on the Mustang, 107.1 Opelousas Fred Charlie (b. 1948) exemplifies the modern preservationist DJ, utilizing late-twentieth-century airwaves to anchor regional traditions in a rapidly commercializing world. A native of Chataignier, Charlie’s 1987 entry into broadcasting at Eunice’s KEUN epitomized the medium’s local informality: his training lasted mere minutes before his instructor fell asleep. Yet, his resulting Saturday morning program—later spanning Mustang 107.1 and 87.7 FM—became an institutional mainstay, reaching a global diaspora via modern digital streaming. Beyond the microphone, Charlie acted as a multi-hyphenate cultural engine. As a songwriter, leader of the Acadiana Cajuns, and operator of Acadiana Sounds Recording Studio, he captured the communal…

Revon Reed returned to Mamou with the kind of outsider’s clarity that often sharpens love for home. A World War II veteran, he had used his French as a military interpreter overseas, lived for a time in Boston after the war, and then came back to rural Louisiana to work as a schoolteacher. Alongside Paul Tate, another veteran, Reed became one of the central figures in the postwar effort to revive Cajun language, music, and ritual life, including the Mamou courir de Mardi Gras. Radio was his most powerful tool. Around 1960, Reed began The Mamou Cajun Hour on KEUN in Eunice, despite having no previous radio experience. The show…