D.L. Menard born 14 April 1932

D.L. Menard (April 14, 1932 – July 27, 2017) was an American songwriter, performer, and recording artist in contemporary Cajun music. He was called the "Cajun Hank Williams".

Doris Leon, the only son of Ophy Menard and his wife, Helena Primeaux Menard, members of a farming family, was born outside Erath in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. Most musicians from deep Cajun country are raised on the traditional sounds of accordion and fiddle and keening French love songs, but DL came to the music late; he didn’t hear a Cajun band until he was 16. What he listened to first was hardcore country songs by Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Ernest Tubb, borne on the airwaves from station XERA in Del Rio, Texas. 

When the family radio died, he had to wait for the next cotton crop to provide cash for a new battery. Hearing an uncle’s band practising, he fell in love with the guitar, ordered one from a mail-order catalogue, learned some chords, bought a better guitar, and played his first dance job with accordionist Elias Badeaux and his Louisiana Aces. Joining the band in 1952, he initially sang country songs, but in the revival of Cajun music during the 50s he started singing in French. 

                                   

In time, he also began song writing. “The band had this pretty waltz that didn’t have words to it, so I made up some.” They called it La Valse de Jolly Roger, after a dancehall where they played, recorded it in 1961 for Floyd Soileau’s Swallow label and had some local success. The following year they made another record, a rueful song about a loser’s life called La Porte en Arrière – The Back Door.

“The story came to me all at once,” DL told the Cajun historian Barry Jean Ancelet, “but I was working in a service station. It took only a few minutes to write it down, but they were stretched out over a long afternoon. I based the tune on Hank Williams’ Honky Tonk Blues, changed it some, and made up words in French. It’s about having to come in through the back door. Lots of people could identify with that.” Three days after it was released, the band played at the Jolly Roger and had to perform the song seven times. It would stay with DL for the rest of his life. His wife Lou Ella (nee Abshire), whom he married in 1951, told him that if he went on stage and didn’t sing it, it was like not going on at all. Soileau boasts that it has taken over from Jolie Blonde as the Cajun national anthem.

The Louisiana Aces disbanded in 1967, but the 1973 National Folk Festival in Washington seemed to open doors again. “After we played our last song,” DL remembered, “the people gave us a standing ovation. If you had given me a million dollars cash, I would not have felt better.” There was an Aces reunion LP in 1974, followed in 1976 by the magnificent LP Under the Green Oak Tree with two other Cajun master musicians, the fiddler Dewey Balfa and accordionist Marc Savoy. 

In the company of other folk musicians, Menard went on State Department tours of South America, the Middle East and east Asia. By then he had quit the service station and, looking for an occupation that left more time for music, had settled on chair-making. He and Lou Ella, who was skilled at caning (weaving) chair seats and backs, opened a small chair factory in Erath, and DL was now invited to folk festivals as both musician and craftsman.

In 1984 he was offered his dream session: a programme of his own and Hank Williams’ songs, accompanied by members of Williams’ Drifting Cowboys and Ricky Skaggs. “DL doesn’t imitate Hank,” Skaggs wrote in the sleeve notes to Cajun Saturday Night, “but he has that bottom-of-the-heart sincerity that Hank had, so people tend to remember Hank when DL sings.”

In the late 80s and 90s he joined fiddler Ken Smith and accordionist Eddie Lejeune to play classic Cajun songs and tunes. They were warmly received on several tours of France and the UK, made the albums Cajun Soul and Le Trio Cadien, and collaborated on DL’s 1988 album No Matter Where You At, There You Are, a characteristic mixture of Cajun tradition, Hank Williams-style honkytonk and original songs by DL such as La Pompe Du Puits (The Water Pump, literally a well pump).

In 1993, his album Le Trio Cadien was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Traditional Folk Album category. In 1994 DL received a National Heritage Fellowship award, in 2009 he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, along with Jo-El Sonnier, Doug Kershaw, and Jimmy C. Newman and in 2010 his album Happy Go Lucky secured a Grammy nomination. 

Throughout his career, Menard held performances in more than 30 countries and served as a good-will ambassador for Cajun culture. He gave his last public performance in July at an event in Erath celebrating the 55th anniversary of The Back Door. Menard, and his wife Lou Ella, had seven children, leading to 17 grandchildren, and 27 great-grandchildren. Lou Ella died in 2011. DL died at age 85 on July 27, 2017, in Scott, Louisiana.

(Edited from Guardian obit by Tony Rusell & Wikipedia)