Overview

Louisiana's Atchafalaya River Basin, the heart and soul of Acadiana, or Cajun country, is the focus of this compelling narrative by Ann McCutchan. A masterful weaving of cultural and environmental history, River Music also tells the life story of Louisiana musician, naturalist, and sound documentarian Earl Robicheaux. With Robicheaux as her guide, McCutchan embarks on a musical, visual, literary, and historical tour of the Atchafalaya, where bayous, swamps, marshes, and river delta country have long sustained nature and culture, even as industry has changed both the landscape and the people. Along the way, she and Robicheaux pay homage to distinctive voices of the region's singular soundscape, including Acadian and Native American elders, birds, frogs, alligators, wind, water, and weather, which Robicheaux chronicles in archival recordings and musical compositions for museum exhibits, radio programs, and repositories such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A CD of Robicheaux's soundscapes is included with the book. In counterpoint, McCutchan recounts Robicheaux's remarkable struggles as a jazz and classical artist, Katrina victim, cancer survivor, and steadfast son of the Basin devoted to remembering, preserving, and sounding out the ecological and cultural riches of his home. An original blend of nature writing, music history, biography, journalism, and memoir, River Music: An Atchafalaya Story eloquently celebrates the one-and-half-million watery acres that have shaped the lives of the people there - and been transformed by them in return. An epilogue written in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the disastrous oil spill that followed provides a fitting and poignant coda to this memorable book.

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9781603442893

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Reviews

Intelligent and richly engaging, this book is an eco-cultural exploration of Louisiana s dreamy and disaster-prone Atchafalaya Swamp as it washes through the life of one of its most curious creatures, the composer and acoustic ecologist Earl Robicheaux. --David Abram, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous

Musician Ann McCutchan brings with her a fine sensibility as she tells the story of the Atchafalaya basin and its culture through the mesmerizing character of Earl, who, like the place, is engaged in a herculean struggle. Despite all odds, both the Atchafalaya and Earl hang on. The Prose here is brilliant and clean. Reading this gentle, lyrical book feels like poling effortlessly along the Atchafalaya, listening to Bach. The book sings. --author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood --Janisse Ray author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (07/07/2011)

Here is wonderful book that takes the reader on a journey to the Gulf Coast and to the rivers and the bayous of Louisiana where as child, Cajun musician and composer Earl Robicheaux learned to love the natural sounds of the wind in the mossy cypress trees, the bird songs and calls, the hums and buzzes of insects, the splash of the river, and the sounds---songs and music---of the people who made their lives there. Years later these were the sounds Earl Robicheaux recorded and used to compose his sound poems and symphonies. Within Earl''s personal story of becoming a musician and composer there are more stories---histories of the rivers and swamps and how they''ve changed, histories of the people and cultures of the Gulf Coast, from long ago to the present. Bravo! --Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony and The Turquoise Ledge <br><br>

River Music - An Atchafalaya StorySwede White, WRKFOctober 25, 2011Baton Rouge, LA <br>Ann McCutchan discusses her new book River Music An Atchafalaya Story. At the center of the narrative is Earl Robicheaux who after a life changing event turned from musician to chronicling the Atchafalaya Basin through field recordings that are archived in museums and institutions such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW<br> LEARN MORE ABOUT ANN MCCUTCHAN <br>WHITE: You started as a musician and became a writer. Can you tell me a little bit about what led to that? <br>MCCUTCHAN: Yes - a short story, perhaps. I was a clarinetist and finishing a doctorate in clarinet playing at the University of North Texas - this is 30 years ago - and I came up with a hand injury [from] over-practicing, moved to Austin, was married there, and one morning my husband said, Look, the music critic is retiring. Why don''t you go apply? and I hadn''t written anything, but I went d

Here is wonderful book that takes the reader on a journey to the Gulf Coast and to the rivers and the bayous of Louisiana where as child, Cajun musician and composer Earl Robicheaux learned to love the natural sounds of the wind in the mossy cypress trees, the bird songs and calls, the hums and buzzes of insects, the splash of the river, and the sounds---songs and music---of the people who made their lives there. Years later these were the sounds Earl Robicheaux recorded and used to compose his sound poems and symphonies. Within Earl's personal story of becoming a musician and composer there are more stories---histories of the rivers and swamps and how they've changed, histories of the people and cultures of the Gulf Coast, from long ago to the present. Bravo! --Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony and The Turquoise Ledge

Author Information

Award-winning writer and musician ANN MCCUTCHAN is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas and the author of three previous books. In 2010 she was writer in residence at the Thinking Like a Mountain Foundation in Fort Davis, Texas.

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