WWOZ New Orleans
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 to create “a universal audience for hyper local content.” This is a great article – totally worth seeking out for those seriously interested, title = “Universal Localism: WWOZ Community Radio, 1980-2006” in the March 2020 issue of Journalism History.
When regular operations resumed from the French Quarter after Katrina, two Sunday programs were merged into the plainly named Cajun and Zydeco.
The show airs Sundays from noon to 2:00 p.m., opening with Bruce Daigrepoint’s “Perrodin Two-Step.” Charles Laborde handles the Cajun side and sometimes speaks French; Jim Hobbs, a retired university librarian and record collector, brings deep zydeco knowledge. Earlier, fiddler Allen Fontenot hosted Cajun music on WWOZ, but Laborde and Hobbs now carry the long thread forward. They are not museum guards. They play older music, but also artists such as Louis Michot, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, and Jourdan Thibodeaux, so long as fiddle, accordion, and French lyrics keep the music tied to home.
Here’s a video of Noah Arceneaux on WWOZ in June 2023.
And for even more New Orleans radio history ….