Cajun Radio History

Johnny Janot carried Cajun radio into the Texas Golden Triangle, where Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange had long been receiving migrants from southwest Louisiana. Born in Eunice, he first stepped into public life not as a disc jockey but as a singer. For a time, he dropped the silent “t” from his name and performed as the rockabilly artist Johnny Jano, a small act of show-business streamlining before he later returned to the fuller Cajun spelling. His radio path began at KEUN in Eunice, then moved through KLOU Lake Charles, where he played rock-and-roll records. In 1975, he joined KLVI in Beaumont, first in advertising. Three years later, he launched…

In 1938, Louisiana State University organized the French Radio Project, the first serious coordinated attempt to broadcast in French to the rural people of south Louisiana. The effort was not merely nostalgic. LSU was a land-grant university, and its Extension Division already understood radio as a practical tool for reaching farmers, homemakers, and scattered communities. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the university hoped to deliver agricultural advice and other educational material to listeners whose daily language was still French. From The Acadian Tribune, Rayne Louisiana, Feb 17, 1939 The project also contained a tension that would reappear throughout the history of Cajun radio. Its stated goal was to “perpetuate…

Camey Joseph Doucet (b. 1939) represents the quintessential postwar intersection of Cajun musician and localized broadcaster. Born in Crowley, Louisiana, Doucet’s entry into radio epitomized the era’s grassroots nature: he first lent his personal amplifiers and speakers to AM 1560 KAJN before being hired as a salesman and, eventually, the host of his own Saturday afternoon French program. As an airwave mainstay, Doucet’s distinct voice anchored regional stations for decades, including an extensive tenure at KSIG and later at KROF in Abbeville. His broadcasting charisma seamlessly fed into a prolific musical career. Recording under Floyd Soileau’s legendary Swallow Records label, Doucet achieved regional immortality with his 1976 autobiographical ballad, “Mom,…

The Liberty Theater show was Cajun radio dressed for a stage, but not made polite by it. From a historic theater in downtown Eunice, built in 1924, the program joined live music, French announcing, comedy, storytelling, local pride, and public broadcasting into one Saturday-night ritual. It ran for roughly thirty years on KRVS, KJJB, and other stations, with some public-access television airings as well. The project came out of the mid-1980s, when the National Park Service was developing what became the Jean Lafitte Acadian Cultural Center in Eunice. Mayor Curtis Joubert saw the theater as a tourist draw, while Marc and Ann Savoy, Dewey Balfa, Barry Ancelet, and other local…

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.”…

Official Site = www.wwoz.org WWOZ New Orleans is not a Cajun station in the strict geographic sense, but it belongs in the story because New Orleans cannot claim local music honestly without making room for Cajun and zydeco. The station went on the air in 1980 from a makeshift studio above Tipitina’s, the legendary music club, and was licensed to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Its musical world has always been broad: jazz, blues, world music, Cajun, zydeco, and whatever else sounds like Louisiana in motion. Hurricane Katrina knocked WWOZ off the air for weeks, but online programming continued, proving what scholar Vanessa Murphree called the station’s power…

KVOL in Lafayette was as a pioneering force in southwest Louisiana’s early broadcasting landscape. The station was born out of a common mid-twentieth-century trend where local print media expanded directly into the airwaves. Operated by the Evangeline Broadcasting Company, KVOL’s foundational leadership was deeply intertwined with print journalism; its officers included T. M. Callahan, editor of The Daily Advertiser, alongside general manager and newspaper co-owner George Thomas, and partner Morgan Murphy. Officially opening on July 29, 1935, KVOL featured a striking glass-enclosed studio on the first floor of the Evangeline Hotel, giving pedestrians on Jefferson Street a direct window into live radio. Though much of its daily schedule consisted of…

Official site = https://www.krvs.org/ KRVS began as a small university station and grew into the most ambitious French radio project in modern Acadiana. Its official start came in 1963, after years of lobbying at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The new FM station had only thirty watts, enough to serve campus and the nearby city, and its first duties were practical: public service for the community and radio experience for students. By the late 1970s, the station was becoming something larger. A new tower and a boost to 3,000 watts widened the signal, and Paul Casey, an architecture student with a love for Louisiana French culture,…

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…

KVPI AM, The Legend = https://kvpionline.com/ KVPI FM = https://classichits925.com/ KVPI Ville Platte is the great exception in the modern story of Cajun radio. It began in 1953, part of the postwar spread of small local stations across Acadiana, when towns like Crowley, Opelousas, Eunice, Jennings, and Ville Platte no longer had to rely on faraway signals from New Orleans, Shreveport, or Texas. Even in the late 1950s, when station manager Chris Duplechain predicted that French would disappear from KVPI within ten years, the station refused to follow the easy path of decline. Today, the station is one of staunchest proponents of French-language radio. In fact, Ray Duplechain (a grand-nephew…

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…