The oddity of Harry’s song is that you don’t have to speak French to understand it. You know immediately it’s about mortality and a lost way of life. Cajun culture is parodied and ridiculed; it is also treated as quaint and commercially exploited and vulgarized. But the travail of the Acadians was real, and so was the love affair of Evangeline on the banks of Bayou Teche, written about by Longfellow. Whenever someone asks me what southern Louisiana used to look like, and what has been despoiled by industrial polluters and Louisiana’s corrupt politicians, I suggest they listen to Harry’s
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