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I'm the unknown.

Buy you match.

I hop aboard the top of the podium.

I feel Louisiana is a human gumbo that exists nowhere else in America.

Its founding predates the 13 Colonies, and its diversity comes from its European and African roots.

That gave rise to its existence more than five centuries ago, when New Orleans, not Ellis Island, not any other port, was the gateway to the New World.

It's the culture's stupid.

Yes, James, it's the culture that makes us different.

There's an exuberance here, a sugar, Davy, a love of life mixed with a religious zeal of multiple denominations.

Unlike other southern states, almost a third of us are Catholic.

That's why we have parishes, not counties.

Mardi Gras is a state holiday.

We spell our words differently.

Our food is spicy.

The Holy Trinity has a double meaning.

Our civil laws are based on the Napoleonic Code.

We have Drive-Through daiquiri shops and there's no ethnic majority.

40% of us are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, 32% are African-American, and 28% are everything else French, Spanish, Creole, and Cajun.

This is the story of our disproportionate contribution to America's music, art, sports, history, and politics, none of which would be possible without the mighty river that empties into the Gulf of Mexico through just one state, ours.

It's while Louisiana, eight Mississippi, or any place else.

A red river that.

Emotions.

All of any discussion of Louisiana must begin with water.

It buffers our bottom most rim.

It pools serenely in lakes and bayous and almost every parish of the state.

It nourishes the agricultural ground in which we're rooted.

Its manifestation is the mighty Mississippi River.

From its source in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, the river begins in a trickle, coursing its way through ten states, traveling more than 2300 miles before gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The name of the Mississippi rich, the river, water and the weather define us as Louisianans, I guess.

And this mighty river is really the reason we're here in the most fundamental of ways, starting with geology.

This very landscape here, to a degree of 100%, is the product of sediment deposited by that river.

And to put even finer point on it, you could go so far to say that if 70% of the human body is comprised of water and their water source is the Mississippi River, that if you live here long enough, 70% of your body is Mississippi River water.

Now, I'm hard pressed to think of a more intrinsic relationship of a river to its people.

The rest of it is Sazerac.

I was going to say coffee, but okay, a little mix of both.

Perhaps.

It is majestic, but it hasn't always been kind.

In 1927, the river overflowed its banks, puncturing the erratically placed earthen levees and 145 places 27,000mi² of America were inundated, most dramatically in Alabama, Mississippi and 20 of the 64 parishes in Louisiana.

Hundreds of people died.

Thousands more were displaced, and the national economy devastated by $400 million in losses.

Six feet of water in the streets of the Friends.

Also swept away was the levees only policy of the Mississippi River Commission.

What this policy entailed was a faulty understanding of river dynamics.

What they said is that what you want is strong, high levees to scour out the bottom and thus create more space to store excess water.

What it does is simply shift the bottom sediment to the next section of the river.

Instead of deepening the river, it raises the bottom of the river.

And so it's a tiger.

By the tail scenario.

You have to make the levees that much stronger and stronger as it raises Hollywood higher and threatens even more so eventually, this is going to lead to the moment when you have a mega disaster, extreme excess water that eventually starts breaching those.

A lot of it.

That's what happened in April of 1927.

In response, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928, in charge of the Corps of Engineers, with adopting other strategies to tame the river.

What this led to was the creation of spillways, like the Barnett carry spillway, the Morganza Spillway, ways of storing retaining water, routing them laterally as rivers like the Mississippi are want to do in the first place.

We haven't had a flood like 1927 ever since that it was man's effort to manipulate Mother Nature, and so far it's worked.

But it has deprived Louisiana of the nutrient rich sediment called alluvium, that has been deposited on both sides of the swollen river for 7000 years, where it was the life source of the first people to occupy this land.

Now to the end of it, no matter the brain is just many people now.

Many have moved to Vegas.

They know to fix and do they party.

All the ingredients that make a good gumbo are literally analogous to the human gumbo that shaped Louisiana's earliest days, and remain evident even today.

There's no better person to make a great gumbo and explain the origin of those ingredients.

And chef John Foale, it don't matter how.

Chef.

We all know Louisianans love their gumbo, but what is a gumbo?

What a great question.

Not a lot of people would say just a mixture of everything.

A mixture of culture, a mixture of, music, food, ingredients from the swamp land.

So, John, this was a pretty important early ingredient, one of the most important, because without this, the size of France or the leaves of the sassafras tree, which we grow out dry and ground into filet powder, as we call it, it's a thickening agent and a flavoring agent for our soup.

Without the native American gift of sassafras, we wouldn't have a gumbo.

What would Louisiana be without it?

Well, before we put the sea in there to thick and we got to have a stock.

Yeah, exactly.

And one of the great things about the stock in Louisiana, again, another great gift from all of those nations that came in.

But again, the Native Americans were the first to add to the stock, and it came in the form of fish bones.

They would eat the fish, but of course, the bones would be boiled in the Mississippi River water to pick up the flavor of the fish, and then any wild herbs and seasonings.

Just imagine, way back in the 15, 1600s, that these people were able to come up with these flavors that we're still using today.

Oh, we know Native Americans have been on this land longer than anyone else.

And some of the fascinating evidence of the sophisticated civilization they built.

Is it Poverty Point in West Carroll Parish?

We're reentering the ridge system.

So that was bridge.

I'm here with Doctor Diana Greenlee, an archeologist who has studied the ancient mounds at Poverty Point for years.

Poverty point, it's really just such a special place.

It's so remarkable.

Built by American Indians, has these earthen monuments, these mounds in a scale and design that's just not known anywhere else.

Although the early occupants who gathered and traded here have never been known as Louisianans, they were our first citizens.

Mound ape goes back 3500 plus years.

Yeah.

The mound itself probably dates to sometime after about 1350 BC.

And it's called mound A, but it was originally called the Bird Mound.

Right.

Why was that?

Well, the first archeologists here thought that it resembled a bird in flight.

Birds are important in the iconography of the southeastern Indians.

Is it correct that there's no evidence of agriculture on this site?

That is true.

Perhaps as many as 10,000 people came here at any one time.

You'd think there would be some evidence of agriculture and how they fed themselves and and how they live.

But no agriculture.

But this is Louisiana.

It's so rich.

The the resources were so abundant.

You had the floodplain, you know, just off the edge of the ridge.

You had these upland resources.

So, you know, you had fish and turtles and waterfowl, deer, nuts.

These folks were hunters and gatherers.

They went out and got things.

And what they got the most of was dirt or mud to build these mounds, these mounds didn't start like this.

They had to be constructed.

If you think about it in terms of 50 pound basket loads of dirt, that's probably about 15.5 million basket loads that crazy.

All right.

Well, let's go see mound A.

The escalators on the other side.

Yeah.

I'm glad we don't have to carry on a conversation the whole way up.

Yeah, yeah, because I'll be panting.

Yeah, I know.

Most of the speculation and I guess it's speculation centers around the fact that this was some type of ceremonial spot or gathering spot, either commercially or from a religious standpoint.

Right.

Our speculation is that it was some sort of ceremonial kind of thing, but usually when archeologists say that, it just means we don't really know.

The belief is that a mound this size took how long to build?

Well, there have been some archeologists who have looked at the dirt that's within the mound, and they have estimated it could have been, you know, as few as 90 days.

Come on.

You know what's really fascinating?

We can identify individual basket loads.

And within those basket loads of dirt, there is actually dirt that comes from different depths or different sort of locations on the site, all mixed together in one basket load.

It actually is engineered.

I want to see some of the stuff that you've dug up from around here.

All right.

Okay, let's head on back to the curatorial facility.

People tend to downplay how sophisticated these people were, but, you know, they knew their environment.

They knew where to get resources.

They had great craftsmanship.

These people had the time and the energy and the resources to do some amazing stuff.

What's behind the door?

That is our artifact storage area.

So you can see we have artifacts from excavations going back into the early 70s into the 80s, the 90s.

All right.

Let's go check this out.

That's an owl.

Well, they're all kind of little owls that have been found all over the the property.

They were a symbol, presumably, of this place, a calling card.

Yeah.

People took it with them to show where they'd been.

Here you can actually see little eyes and a nose.

So now you've got some arrowheads here, Actually, these would be darter spear points.

Something to hunt with, obviously.

Yes.

This is one of the sort of classic Poverty Point types.

It's called a motley point.

But the tip is very sharp and it's obviously some kind of stone.

It's chert.

Chert, chert chart is a combination of charcoal and dirt.

Sounds like it, doesn't it?

But no, it's kind of rock.

Okay.

And that's really interesting.

It's a figurine.

What's interesting is that they're female.

They're mostly headless torsos.

A lot of them look like they may be pregnant.

Was this some kind of a fertility symbol?

We don't know.

We don't know, but they're clearly defined where the arms would be and where the legs would be.

They're no heads.

They don't have heads on any of them.

No.

Some of them do have heads.

And there are also ones like this that don't appear to be pregnant.

There are, yes, that are slender.

Actually, I have one.

It's pretty awesome.

So you can see there's a little bit of a head.

Yeah, a belt or mount.

Wow.

Look at this.

This clearly legs and where the arms would be.

And there's a head and there's a belt.

But this doesn't look like she's pregnant.

We don't know what language they were speaking, and we don't know how they said, wow.

Or this is awesome, but this is pretty cool.

In 2014, Poverty Point became only the 22nd site in America and the 1001 site in the world to be named a Unesco World Heritage Site based on its cultural and historical significance.

What's even more interesting is the recent discovery that the mounds on LSU's campus are even older than those at Poverty Point, dating back some 11,000 years.

That makes them the oldest manmade structures, not just in Louisiana, but in the Americas.

And the descendants of these indigenous communities are still here today.

Still time to come on out, ladies and gentlemen.

You're going to be really entertained by the biggest grand entry here in Kingdom, Louisiana.

Man.

Some like the Tunica Biloxi tribe in Marksville and the cockatoo tribe in kinder, are federally recognized as sovereign nations within the territorial United States.

You know, a lot of times, people, they really don't realize there's an Indian tribe here.

There's four federally recognized within the state of Louisiana.

Down here in the corner of southwest Louisiana is the cash out of people.

And a lot of times it's just forgotten.

And mostly because people are just unaware.

We'll also bring in our ladies categories and all that category.

We'll explain it all.

We really try to push our culture.

We we just recently had our cash out of POW wow, which really put it on display when you have tribes from all over the country coming in.

Definitely.

If you haven't been to a powwow, try and go to one.

They have amazing food, love the music, really really interesting dancing.

When you're in your traditional regalia, you're showing your colors, which is a fun time to come out and celebrate your culture.

People think of Kushida and they think of our business down the road.

Casino.

However, just a few miles away, the birthplace of the Kushida tribe is right here.

I'm in Milton, Louisiana, the home of the Kushida tribe with Chief Jonathan Skurnick.

Chief, not a lot of people in Louisiana are going to believe that we have a buffalo herd right here in our state, but we do.

That's right.

Right here.

And, the corner of Allen Parish.

We actually have had these buffalo for close to two decades now.

How many are there?

We have a herd of over 20 now that were actually a gift to us from my tribe in Oklahoma.

Started the herd.

The herd has grown into what it is today.

You have some native born buffalo.

Buffalo right here.

We're so proud of it.

Matter of fact, we built a gas station convenience store to showcase Buffalo run Buffalo run opened in 2016.

Live Buffalo viewing patio in the back.

Cassadee cultural center inside that displays all of our, handmade Cassadee basket.

And you haven't yet put an E on the end of Buffalo.

Not yet, not yet.

But if we go up, I tend you never know, because that's the Cajun country.

The Homa Indians date back to at least 1686, when they settle in the area of Baton Rouge and near the current site of the Angola Prison.

Eventually, home, a tribe members migrated to Lafourche and Caribbean.

Thus, the name of the parish seat and Native American names remain important pages of any Louisiana dictionary.

Centuries ago, this very spot marked the dividing line between the hunting grounds of the Homa Indians and the Bayou Indians.

A cypress stick, a bloody cypress stick marked that dividing line.

French explorers sailing up the Mississippi River saw that bloody red stick and name this place like Baton Rouge.

The Baton Rouge Bicentennial Commission erected this sculpture by the late Frank Hayden to commemorate that sighting of the bloody red stick and the naming of Baton Rouge.

Even the Mississippi River itself has a respectful Indian name.

The word Mississippi is generally translated as Father of waters.

So it's a beautiful word, and I think every schoolchild realizes how fun it is to spell, and that you could almost see the sinuous channels of the river as you write it.

The river flow measures 3 million gallons per second.

If a levee were to be breached right here at Skip Bartmann Drive, God forbid the water would fill Tiger Stadium in 30s new meaning to roll tide.

Barely get them off.

Let me make two points right here.

I mean, right here.

Daniel's for the wind.

Got LSU.

Does it.

The volume and force of the Mississippi carries with it nutrient rich sediment known as alluvium.

The river actually filters 40% of the dirt in America, ultimately giving rise to the nation's largest floodplain.

And within it, Louisiana's alluvial valley.

That rich river sediment creates the finest farmland in the country, and it's made Louisiana an agricultural giant, and the production of beef and dairy cattle, cotton, corn, rice, and soybeans.

Oh, and who could forget crawfish?

We're the nation's largest domestic producer, 150 million pounds of the delicacies each year.

But the Mississippi River didn't build those fertile fields all on its own.

If the Mississippi had its way and the levee system had not been created to harness the river, it would eventually overtake the Atchafalaya River and hasten its race to the Gulf.

Hey, so much rolling over in.

The air flows south to the Gulf and 130 miles.

The Mississippi Serpentine Pass through Louisiana requires 315 miles before it reaches the Gulf.

It's a good thing for the economy that the two rivers remain separate and distinct.

Otherwise, Baton Rouge would not be a port city in New Orleans would become a saltwater estuary.

Of course, in true colonization fashion, it was a Spaniard, Hernando de Soto, who was credited with discovering the Mississippi River in 1541.

The Spanish were the first European outsiders with whom the Native Americans had to contend.

The Spaniards were explorers.

They wanted to expand their Catholic faith in the 16th and 17th centuries, traveling from Mexico and South America from what is now Florida and from what would become Texas.

But it would take another 100 years before the real roux and the human gumbo was introduced to the New World.

First, we gotta make a roux, though, That's exactly right.

Everything in Louisiana begins with the roux.

When you're talking about a dial, let's make a route.

Okay, good.

And a roux is equal parts of oil and flour.

And it's a thickening agent.

And without the oil in the flour combining, we would just have a watery dish rather than that.

Right.

Nice, rich, thick dish that we're going to, we're going to call a gumbo.

So I'm putting in oil.

In the old days, we would use animal fat.

We would use any kind of fat coming in from, and get one of these.

And I'm going to let you take this.

All right?

Now, equal parts of oil and flour, and you're going to see see the steam coming out of here.

The flour is going that water is going to evacuate that part quickly.

And you want to stir like crazy.

Yeah.

You don't want it to stick to the bottom of the pot.

And this is another one of our early gifts from the French explorers.

They came in and found the Native Americans doing this, and they said, you know, we like it, but let's thicken it.

And this is a snack.

And just like you wanted to do, and of course, as you start, it's going to change color because the flour is going to toast.

And through the toasting there's going to be a richness and flavor that's going to just be compounded when we add this beautiful, beautiful stock and you want to get all in the corners of that so you don't burn it.

And the more you cook it, the darker it'll get.

And of course, that's the secret to a good gumbo.

The French.

Their first expedition began in 1682, when Robert Cavalier sur de la Sal set sail from the Great Lakes in a canoe.

He disembarked near what is now known as Venice, Louisiana.

He started to smell and taste salt water, and he knew he was near the mouth of the river.

He landed and famously, planted the, the floor of the Lee, and the cross and claimed, the entire watershed, sight unseen, as the land of his king, King Louis and hence Louisiana, claim this land for King Louis.

Louis, Louisiana.

LaSalle comments as he begins to understand the nature of the lower Mississippi and how it relates to this vast basin through which he just sailed.

And these are his exact words.

A fourth or two here will make us messed us as a whole, as his compliments.

Less than a decade later, the French crown recognized that it needed to act on Lasalle's claim, or else the Spanish or English would.

They deploy once again out of French Canada.

The Lemoyne brothers, now Iberville, is the older brother.

He's 36 years old.

He's a war hero in French Canada, a battling the English on the Great Lakes.

Bienville is his younger brother.

Very interesting character.

He's a tough read.

I'd like to meet him, and I often wonder what he'd be like in person.

He's 19.

He's got got something to prove in front of his big brother in.

And they probe along the Gulf Coast.

They come to a little island, and there they see about 60 or 70 skeletons with bashed skulls and completely dismembered bodies.

They call it Massacre Island.

So they proceed along and they find, shallow draft, which is not good for these oceangoing vessels and fortuitous.

The come upon ship island off puts today's Gulfport.

So they use that and that region as sort of a jumping off point to try to find that river that LaSalle had discovered.

That great river, back in 1682.

Abbeville records excellent journals.

And he records every movement as he's penetrating up the river.

And it's so happened on March 3rd, 1699, they pull over at a certain meander that had a little bayou there, and gloriously, it's Mardi Gras I witnessed today, something called mud.

And he writes it in his journal, Mardi spells.

It was why Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras.

Never have I seen something so vile, so raucous, and so to buttress.

I must come back again.

He doesn't go into any more dimensions at twice, but the very fact that he took the time to note that it was Mardi Gras is really quite remarkable.

This is the first primary source clear reference to Mardi Gras.

In the early French colonial era, this so-called Mardi Gras mass is a combination of pomp, circumstance and lowered inhibitions that would make the kings and queens of Europe weep.

In 1699, while canoeing upriver, Bienville came upon an English warship.

Let's move aside for Her Majesty the Queen's Royal British Navy.

We must stay claim to this land for England.

I would not continue down this river if I were you.

You did the captain move?

You scoundrel!

You will meet 500,000 French soldiers.

For the teeth, which are themselves very sharp.

They will ambush you.

And you will be walking directly into certain death.

We are but a single vessel.

We would not survive an attack.

How can we trust him?

He's just surrendering a canoe.

Can we afford to not trust him?

Englishman, please turn around.

You're walking into an ambush and you cannot say no one warned you.

Would you help us, sir?

Turn around.

English.

Turn in English.

Turn right.

English.

Turn right, then turn good English, boy.

And that's how French trickery denied the British control of the river.

Bienville served as our second territorial governor.

Shortly after his governorship ended.

His successor ordered Louisiana's first land grant to the entrepreneur, sand and sand, and he made his way along the Red River and founded Natchitoches in 1714, making it the first settlement in the Territory of Louisiana, and in 1718, Choctaw Indians helped guide Bienville to a place that would change the course of history.

On the banks of the River road.

Bienville is a place very favorable for the establishment of a post with one of the finest crescents in the river.

Thus the Crescent City was born.

How did New Orleans get its name?

Well, it was named for Philip Duke, the earliest, who unexpectedly came to power when King Louis the 14th died.

Breaking news today, September 1st, 1715.

King Louis the 14th has died in Baci.

He ruled France for 72 years, and now all eyes are on his successor since Louis.

Louis, as his friends called him, outlived his son and eldest grandson.

The throne will be passed his five year old grandson, the deceased king's nephew Felipe the second, will make decisions until the boy comes of age.

In studio now is Duke of Orleans, Felipe the Second, his mother Elizabeth, and famed writer Voltaire.

Felipe, I'm so sorry that this happened.

Are you up for the job?

Thank you for having me.

You know, I do not think I will do well.

So you'll step aside, then?

Never know.

I'm never giving up power.

I'm just letting everyone know I'm going to look out for number one and lower expectations.

But your mother's here.

Surely she believes in you.

The fairies have given him every gift except that of how to use them.

Yikes.

That's his mom.

Folks saying he was born on third base and doesn't know how to run home.

Well-Put.

Do you understand what they're saying about you?

No.

Thank you.

Voltaire.

You're a prominent French writer, a wizard of words.

How would you describe Philip the second?

We've had many unscrupulous kings.

Philip, however, is a man of few scruples.

In fact, scruples themselves prefer not to be mentioned in the same sentence as elite.

Well, I think you hold out, sweetie.

That's that's.

It's not a compliment.

We'll be back with more after this message from our sponsor, Marie's Cakes.

Let them eat it.

And that, my friends, is for whom New Orleans was named.

France had a strategic military interest in protecting Louisiana from the British, who were seeking to expand in the New World.

The Duke de earlier appointed Antoine Crozet for the job five years into his 15 year contract.

Crozet relinquished the property back to France, promising that tobacco would be the top crop in the territory, perhaps confirming that he was smoking something long before it became legal.

In certain states, the only tobacco that would be grown in Louisiana turned out to be Perrigo Tobacco, a particularly powerful strain still grown exclusively in Saint James Parish after its failure.

Along came John Law, an economic theorist and financial wizard who had the skills and savvy to woo wealthy investors.

But law had one fault he could live up to his name.

He was the Bernie Madoff of the 18th century, making off with everyone's money.

John Law is almost a cinematic character.

He was brilliant as a Scotsman and he was a gambler, was also a womanizer.

He was a hobnob.

And he knew that the way you got things done was by hobnobbing with the powerful.

And so he was one of the first to conceptualize the use of paper currency rather than a real wealth, such as gold.

It's called a stock.

It's better than real money.

This was an exciting new concept.

And investors, buyers of stock in this company went wild for it.

They didn't just go wild for in the streets of Paris, they went wild for it.

In Leipzig and Berlin, throughout the continent.

Everyone wanted in on this deal.

Law established a national bank in France and in 1717 created the company of the West.

The French government gave the company control of trade between France and its Louisiana and Canadian colonies.

That territory of trade stretched for 3000 miles and gave rise to the company's more popular name, the Mississippi Company.

The lure of gold and silver brought out many eager investors aristocrats with names like New Planche, Destrehan, Dough Tree, Gallery della Ronde della who say the Laboratoire Live a de Mandeville, Mora, Paul and Poythress are familiar names in Louisiana today, and all joined by a single German family named Darren's bird.

These wealthy aristocrats were accompanied by moralists and misfits, moralists in the sense that there were nuns and priests to provide for the spiritual guidance of these Catholic pioneers and misfits.

Well, as one historian noted, they ransacked jails and hospitals looking for incorrigible and those with social ills disorderly soldiers, paupers, prostitutes and unsophisticated peasants.

Our ancestors again paid the price of their shares, kept rising like a balloon, and then suddenly it popped.

Things start to sour within a year or two, when rumors start to make it back from Louisiana that things are rough going, that things are slow going.

And just like a run on the bank, rumors get are out there that you better cash out now.

And there's panic.

By 1731, the company is now all but bankrupt.

The sordid saga is referred to as the Mississippi Bubble.

As for lore, he is exiled.

He dies poor, I believe, in 1729.

But his impact is made.

And today we have something called monetary policy.

And we have stock and we have corporations, and we have commercial wealth, and we don't think twice about it.

Among the new arrivals were also those who did not come voluntarily.

I mean, when Louisiana was part of the triangle of trade between North America, Europe and West Africa that began in the 1700s, the nature of the slave trade during colonial times was mostly the story of the Middle Passage, like the two main waves during French and Spanish colonial times, one entailed about 5000 victims who survived, and that was in the 1720s, during French colonial times, and they disproportionately came from the Senate.

Gambia region.

There were many others, but the next major wave was in the 1780s, during Spanish colonial time, and they tended to come from the Spanish colonies in Africa, which tended to be the bite of Benin and the Congo region.

And it's a big mistake to think of them as just Africans or just West Africans.

They're really as varied in their ethnicity and their cultures as other groups, coming under their own volition.

Co-operative tribal leaders in Africa profited by providing men, women and children to be bound in bondage on the coast of Africa, people being held in cells to be transported over the Atlantic.

The purpose of the ship was to transport as many people as possible.

As people are getting sick, people are dying.

There is a very brutal legacy with the transatlantic slave trade.

In that journey across the Atlantic, the slave trade became an established part of the Louisiana economy, and the practice was regulated in Europe by a code of laws known as the Code Noir or the Black Code.

Code noir is a group of laws put in place by the French to govern mostly enslaved people, but black people more generally.

These things restrict the movement of enslaved people.

How many enslaved people can gather at any given point in time?

They also demand that you convert enslaved people to Catholicism, and so you end up with this very large black population of Catholics.

Thus, the ultimate irony teaching Christianity to those imprisoned by human slavery.

The code also dictated that a master who has a child with the slave girl must free both the child and the slave.

It's a situation that was far too common.

Let's be real.

You know, the prevalence of sexual assault, of young girls and young women who then go on to have mixed race children.

If you go back in some of the the records, you'll see people identified or characterized as mixed or mulatto.

These forced unions became the topic of a 1971 Rolling Stones classic, Brown Sugar, a song that probably wouldn't be recorded today.

Since slave ships have a kind of be sold in a market, there's a new all day used to discern the debauchery, evidenced by the treatment of natives and slaves, as well as the presence of prostitutes created tension between the government and the church.

Early on, New Orleans was known as the City of Sin.

A new Sodom.

One of the nuns, Sister Madeline Marie Hazzard, observed, the women here are extremely ignorant as to the means of securing their salvation, but they're very expert in the art of displaying their beauty.

The territorial governor lamented, if I send away all these loose females, there would be no women left here at all.

Eventually, Bienville pleaded with the leaders in France, hey, friends, send me wives.

When my Canadians.

Meanwhile, Sister Hazard sent an urgent message to the church elders.

Bear in mind there were no telephones, faxes, emails or other means of communication aside from sending a note on a boat to the homeland.

Her message, nevertheless, was quite urgent.

The devil has a vast empire here, which she hoped to overcome with God's love.

But overcoming yellow fever ultimately proved easier.

The Ursuline nuns arrived soon after to civilize the city.

They also built themselves a convent.

It is really exceptional because it is our sole remaining whole, fully documented French colonial era structure and a whole quarter in not just the quarter, but the city, the region.

Amazing that here we are in a modern American city and it is still standing.

And that's the treasure of living in a neighborhood like this, in a city like this, of that tactile experience of history, emphasis on neighborhood, this is a neighborhood.

It is where people live as well as you have the craziness of the French Quarter and Bourbon Street, and they all seem to get along just like Louisiana seems to get along with this, this interesting mix of culture.

It all works despite it all.

The arrival of the nuns help the church, but it did not provide respectable wives for the lonely soldiers going to the chapel.

And we're gonna get married.

The solution was the arrival of young ladies with small chests called cassettes, which later morphed into caskets.

They came to be known as the Casket Girls, literally the mothers of the New World.

To the church.

The foundation of European influence on the territory of Louisiana was shared by the French with the Spanish.

The territory was ping pong back and forth between French and Spanish control throughout the late 1700s.

I'm going to make my rounds.

My grand papa.

Remember a Spaniard, Hernando de Soto, discovered the Mississippi River and the first settlement in Louisiana, Natchitoches, was controlled by the Spanish.

When the Frenchman Santini arrived.

Now, Santini was an entrepreneur who developed a good relationship with the Spaniards, who already occupied the area which bordered on what is now Texas.

He also had the good sense to marry the granddaughter of the Spanish general who control the territory.

My grandfather is the Spanish general who controls the entire territory.

Well, I did not know that, but, I will not hold it against you.

Will you marry me?

Oh.

He then established Fort Jean-Baptiste in Natchitoches and became a wealthy man.

And what became the crossroads of the El Camino Real?

The road of the Kings, as it was known, extended across Texas into Mexico.

This was the route traveled by Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie to reach their fate at the Alamo.

In the Pirate Army.

It will surprise many Texans to know that this historical landmark Loza Dyess near Roebling, Louisiana, stood as the capital of Texas for 40 years before Texas statehood.

More on the want to address Cuatro?

And the Spanish influenced our 20th century music to the lead singer of that group, Sam the sham of the Pharaohs was actually Domingo Sam Odio, who had a Tex-Mex band in Ville.

The band played regularly on the border until the release of Willie Bullae, which was supposedly the name of his cat.

It became a huge national hit, and at right, more than one whatever now.

Spanish influence later moved westward from New Orleans to parishes like Assumption and Ascension.

There you'll travel through towns named Galvez and Gonzalez and made family's name Martinez Diaz.

So Vario, Hidalgo, USO and Falcon.

Even more notable is the Spanish influence in Iberia Parish, Spain sits on the Iberian Peninsula.

Thus the parish name.

They very soon began speaking French, because they were outnumbered by French speakers and intermarried with the local population.

And so you have a lot of, even today, a lot of people with Spanish last names that can be traced back to 1779.

Romero da Taz.

Migas.

Segura.

And yet, you know, since at least the early 19th century and into the mid 20th century, their primary language was French.

But the surnames persist to the to the present.

While under Spanish control from 1766 to 1803, Louisiana prospered, in particular New Orleans.

The French Quarter burned twice during this period.

The French Quarter was restored, as we see it today, and there's little French about it.

It is Spanish in design.

The wrought iron flat roofs and colors are reminiscent of Havana, Cuba, and Quito, Ecuador.

The great Louisiana novelist James Lee Burke, perhaps best described New Orleans in his book The Tin Roof Blowdown when he said Traditional New Orleans is like a piece of South America that had been sawed off of its moorings and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.

Now we're making our way to perhaps the most historically significant plot of land in the city, Jackson Square, plus two arms, the absolute historical and psychological heart of New Orleans.

And everyone knows it, and probably one of the best preserved, most symmetrical plaza ensembles in the nation.

If you feel like you might be in France or Spain or Latin America as you arrive here, and it is spectacular.

The good stuff.

Who do you think you are?

The Spaniard Don Andre Salomon Astor is considered the true developer of New Orleans.

He built the first public school, the Charity Hospital and Saint Louis Cathedral, among other structures.

It's his daughter.

However, the Baroness Pont Albert who made the biggest mark.

She designed and built the first apartment houses in America.

The Pont Alba apartments flank the Saint Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo and the Presbyterian and Baroness Pont.

Alba probably was at the forefront of a trend of the circa 1850 that has since come become iconic for the French Quarter, and that is the spectacular cast iron balconies, as opposed to the more modest wrought iron balconies that you saw previously, and make much more elegant shapes and scrolls.

And if you look carefully, of course, you could see the initials of the Alma Noster and Ponce Harbor families there, too.

And at the same time, the prior Saint Louis Church, now Cathedral, was largely disassembled except for the first 30ft of the front wall and rebuilt in the form that you see today, and eventually the statue of Andrew Jackson was placed.

Then it was renamed Jackson Square.

What you're really seeing here is a very inspired, woman led transformation of circa 1850.

Nowhere in Louisiana, however, is the Spanish influence more clearly celebrated than in Saint Bernard Parish, which was settled by Canary Islanders known as this Llanos.

Their familiar surnames read like a roll call of well-known elected officials.

Nunez, Perez, Fernandez, Hernandez, Alvarez, Barrios.

There are six words that put fear in the heart of Louisiana.

There's a storm in the Gulf.

Saint Bernard Parish was virtually destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 to miss New Orleans, when the very lifeblood of Louisiana engulfed the state's southeastern coastal parishes in a 27ft storm surge.

Massive evacuations.

For the first time in history, the city of New Orleans under soon after, the nation and indeed the world watched in horror.

This is absolutely a catastrophe as the levees in and around the city of New Orleans buckled under the pressure of catastrophic rains ushered in by 115 mile per hour winds governed by.

Wealthy homes along the lakefront and in Uptown were equally as devastated as homes and working class Saint Bernard and the Lower Ninth Ward, proving that water knows no racial or political boundaries, you can probably gauge exactly how high up the water is.

However, social and economic frailties and inequities quickly took center stage.

Police and firefighters are still trying to reach people in largely poor black areas ravaged by flood waters ten feet deep, or more people who are just literally stranded.

More than 1800 Louisianans died.

Rita sustained high winds, and one month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita devastated southwest Louisiana.

Hurricane Laura slamming ashore as a monster category for a season eclipsed by Hurricane Laura.

15 years later in 2020, Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana, into New Orleans, and one year later, that destruction was replicated yet again when Hurricane Ida struck on the anniversary of Katrina, rescuers unable to reach them over the last 50 years, 20 hurricanes and dozens of tropical storms have taken a disastrous toll on our state, causing billions of dollars in damage.

Then I miss New Orleans.

Arguably, the greatest loss we suffer is to our coastal marshland.

Harnett cane described this part of Louisiana in an apt way.

It is a place that seems unable to make up its mind if it will be earth or water, so it compromises.

The big loser in that compromise is land.

On maps, Louisiana resembles a boat.

In reality, its soul and heal are in tatters.

The two critical resources that fluvial deltas like southeastern Louisiana critically need, to stay land and not water.

One of them is occasional doses of fresh water to push back the saltwater wedge, and the other one is the deposition of new sediment particles alluvium, sand, silt and clay particles.

Both of these need to happen in order to to build up delta topography and to keep it fresh, so that there are cypress forests and other vegetation holding this all in place by straight jacking the river in these artificial levees, we eject both of those resources uselessly out onto the continental shelf.

Since 1932, when the construction of the levees on the Mississippi River, 2000mi² have been lost.

That's 25% of the state's landmass.

It's the equivalent of losing a football field of land every 90 minutes.

If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the United States would have only 49 states.

Right now we are on Lake Barrett.

Leverett is on the outside of the jar for libation.

Now, the 1940 year built to leverage shortage area in Florida.

And it looks like the last 20 years we've been sinking our water levels from when I was a young kid.

These cypress trees to start growing in water.

They were growing in mode and our water higher, and now they're into water.

With the rise in sea level, which is already disappearing quick because we've got too much coastline.

So you know, your hurricanes are going to cause more damage because they're going to come for the energy.

And all your Gulf Coast states are going to be impacted.

I think Louisiana is going to be the worst.

And even the East Coast, you know, all the way up to New York, all your low lying areas.

I mean, I don't care if you're on the East Coast or the Gulf Coast, you're going to be in trouble.

Efforts are underway to stem the tide and rebuild the coast thanks to settlement diversion projects like this one.

You're looking at the newest land in Louisiana.

If you walk four feet in there, you will disappear.

Not forever.

You can turn around and walk back, but.

This was all open water.

All of it.

See, all the birds.

There's 184 species of birds here in the winter time.

On other side, ten.

So my name is Captain Ryan Lambert.

I mean, God in these waters for 45 years.

Nine years.

Louisiana.

And watched the land on the west side with no diversions completely disappear.

100% devastation at the same time, with a very few little crevasses and diversions on this side.

And watch the grow.

See, that left me over there in 1969.

Hurricane Camille blew holes all through here.

19 holes in that levee that opened up these little crevasses.

And since then, they've been growing land.

And that's how I've learned.

Everything I know about restoration is watching those little crevasses and little diversions build land.

I mean, we did this by building the levees after the flood at 27 for flood control and navigation of the Mississippi River.

But we didn't have a mandate for restoration.

We didn't know what it was going to do.

For 90 years now, we haven't replaced.

It is just sinking out of sight.

Here we are.

We lost 20 400mi² of Louisiana.

Look at all the hermit crabs, Phillip.

Crabs on the bank.

Look at that.

Look at that.

So all this land that we're seeing here to the left, this is all new.

Oh, brand.

And how how long ago?

Two years.

Just two years.

Jeez.

This was Bay Denise.

It was a bay, as far as you can see.

Those trees back there, this will all open water.

And within two years, we've built all this.

When you have river sediment, you can manipulate it, slow the water down, expedite the growth ten times.

And what we're seeing right here is just that.

That's the sediment that has been deposited from the river as a result of of this diversion.

Within another month, all this will be vegetated all the way to the end.

And then it just extrapolates and it just keeps growing and growing and growing.

You build in landfills for habitat.

And this tidal surge, this is a win win any way you look at it.

So what we're seeing here is, is a double impact for Louisiana.

For every mile of marsh you have, it knocks the storm surge down one foot.

Louisiana and New Orleans in particular cannot survive if we don't do this because the water is lapping it, it's going to break that marsh down to there's nothing left to protect us.

This is awesome because we've talked so much about the land loss we've suffered in Louisiana.

We're now reversing that and building land in areas that used to be land, then became water and is now being restored to land again.

Man, I thought this was all existing already.

This is all new to, well, look at this thing popped up like last month.

This was underwater because not a river dropped out.

Jump out and go.

I called them.

I'm four miles out from the Mississippi River in quarantine Bay, and I'm standing on a sandbar that stretches for about a mile.

Its newly created land sediment from the Mississippi River.

Man made, Mother Nature made.

And this is what we need to do to save Louisiana.

This will be our next barrier island.

However, it's a massive challenge not only to Louisiana, but to the nation and the world.

In fact, it is as important to the people in Chicago, Sheboygan, Shanghai and Shreveport and Changa Lu as it is to those in Shaq Bay, Schriever, and Chauvin.

Many facets of Louisiana life, and the many contributions Louisiana makes to the world are dependent upon the viability of the coastal marsh.

Unlike our neighbors to the east who beckon tourists to their white, sandy beaches, Louisiana has a working coast, and it feeds the nation in more ways than one.

Angela the state quenches the nation's thirst for oil and gas.

We're the second largest producer of oil in the country, goes on.

We also generate 25% of America's natural gas and petrochemicals, most of which are manufactured and shipped from the coastal marsh.

The Louisiana.

Louisiana Louisiana also satisfies the world's hunger for seafood.

We're the second largest commercial fishing state in America, and the number one producer of shrimp, oysters and crawfish.

We've yet.

To process the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge are engines of the South Louisiana economy.

In addition, the port of South Louisiana, which is centered in Laplace and stretches for 54 miles along the river parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is the largest tonnage port in the western Hemisphere, as well as the largest grain exporter in the STAT.

Many distinct.

But it's not just people who depend on Louisiana's coast for survival.

Louisiana's wetlands also provide sanctuary to some 300 species of native and migratory birds.

The sights and sounds have drawn millions of bird watchers over the years, including former President Theodore Roosevelt filmed walking the once flourishing habitat in 1915, a mere century ago.

We learned today the coast is a mere fragment of its former self.

When French explorers first arrived, the Grand Isle is the only habitat barrier island that remains, and it was decimated by Hurricane Ida in 2021, when yet those who call the coast home are filled with the same tenacity and perseverance of those early settlers who braved the New World.

Ever resilient in the face of change and the challenges wrought by Mother Nature.

Who I believe and so stand the second wave of French immigrants to make their way to Louisiana.

Those we call Acadians did not come directly from France.

Cajuns are the descendants of exiles from Acadia, Acadia, what's now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island in Canada, who originally came from France in the 1600s.

So Cajuns are the descendants of those people, some of them who came to Louisiana for more than 100 years.

These French Catholics flourished.

But when the British won the Seven Years War, also known as the French and Indian War, things took a tragic turn towards black.

The British victors became convinced that the settlers had sided with their French countrymen.

They demanded the residents to renounce their French identity and their Catholic faith, and pledged never to take up arms against the Crown.

The settlers said May, no, I don't think so.

And the British government began an ethnic cleansing designed to destroy the Acadians identity.

Beginning in 1755, Le Grand Derangement, the Great Expulsion, began.

Thousands were drowned, starved, or even murdered.

It would take the British crown almost 250 years to apologize for the brutality inflicted on our Acadian ancestors.

You are looking at the Queen's Royal Proclamation of 2003, which is signed by Adrienne Clarkson at the Upper right, who represented the Queen as the Governor-General of Canada.

And on the left, it's an English.

On the right.

It's in French.

It is the first time in the history of the British Empire that they admitted the deportation of the Acadians was done in the name of the Crown.

That's number one.

Number two, it's an admission that many Acadians died and suffered as a result of the British action.

And thirdly, and most importantly, it expresses sorrow and regret and finally establishes a day of commemoration.

July 28th of every year as a day of remembrance of the suffering of our ancestors and the fact that we survive today as a culture in North America and throughout the world at this time.

This is the sixth apology ever rendered in the name of the British Crown in 1200 years.

It took nine years, from 1755 to 1764, for many to make the trek.

They came to the port of New Orleans and other makeshift ports along what came to be known as the Acadian Coast.

At the time, the area was known as Attack Park, after the Native American tribe already living there.

The legislature eventually identified 22 parishes to comprise Acadiana included our seven parishes, named for Saint John, Charles, Bernard, Helena, James, Mary, Martin, and Landry.

And then there's the Eighth Parish.

There's one interesting parish that has a saint name that we say all the time today, but was not a canonized Catholic saint.

And the Saint Tammany Parish and many people refer to him as kind of this indigenous American saint who was a peacemaker and advocated for peace.

And there's certain elements of mythology here, and there's certain elements of truth.

But this notion of a Saint Tamara and and Saint Tammany came out of that.

If another parish were to be added, it would no doubt be named Saint Drew.

The exiled Acadians were led by the legendary Joseph Beausoleil Broussard, who had commanded the resistance in la de, but one.

Wasn't.

Louisiana was the perfect fit.

They were a close knit, family oriented group.

They were French speaking, the language already spoken here, and they were Catholic.

They became a part of the religious majority, not the unwelcomed minority.

The Acadian people ultimately became known as Cajuns.

It seems the word Cajun is a corruption of the word Acadian in Louisiana.

French, the word was cardia.

And then that became Cajun.

The Acadians had found the Promised Land.

Early settlers lived solely off the land, hunting, trapping, and fishing.

The swamps, marsh, and bayous were fertile ground, and the bounty of South Louisiana overflowed like a bowl of shrimp stew, and their age old skills of seamanship were handed down through generations, laying the groundwork for what would ultimately become Louisiana's billion dollar seafood industry.

The Cajuns could not easily escape their perceived status as second class French people, but they overcame it with the tenacity and independence and utter joie de vivre, that love of life which permeates Louisiana today.

Oh, food!

Whoa, whoa!

Move the ball!

Get your big one.

Oh, you're making it your big one.

I'm the 10th generation Landry from French and the eighth generation from Nova Scotia.

Oh.

Still okay.

And the Cajun, the people that live in these bayous that shattered here a couple of hundred years ago.

They didn't have no choice.

There wasn't.

Didn't Chateau here.

There were two right here hoping that they wouldn't survive.

Well, welcome.

Help you both.

Okay.

One.

Two.

Three.

So, you know, we've been back here all our lives, and we just do what we gotta do to make a living.

You know what to do.

You can survive off the land real easy.

When my grandpa done what my dad had done.

And even what I'm doing now is always changing.

And that's my problem.

I'm kind of old school.

I don't like to.

I like to change you know?

Their unique dialect is a wonder to the world and even to some in Louisiana you ain't got no fight left in.

It often blends broken English with their own brand of French.

More foreign from sat scourge say come retail with a two flusher my mom or bought a grandma.

My grandpa from Russia to a robbery I a cookie out.

In other words I say Chuck, Marty Taylor.

We are probably on good.

I like, Parma to polish them more coral.

I'll call you for like, a father and over the keeper defied all the rain.

Plus our Lord.

Don't all with you on Pieta.

Yeah, yeah.

Cake.

Okay, I could you fat on the blue.

Good ocean two party.

I've been real busy.

Cajuns love to tell tales.

And they love to laugh both at themselves and about the world's foibles.

I ran into my cousin last week.

You said, how's your wife?

I said, oh, she's an angel.

But I told her, I said, Angel, I am now a star.

Oh, she said, you're right.

Because if you look up star in the dictionary, it says that it's a mass of compressed gas.

Where Cajuns have long infused Louisiana's culture with Mary Murray, our state hosts more than 400 festivals every year, most of which are in South Louisiana, making Cajun country the festival capital of the world.

We have two going on here just chicken and sausage, a little TLC.

Hey, got a little roadkill, little fly.

If something walks, crawls, flies or swims, we have a festival to salute it.

And then we throw it in a gumbo and eat it.

What's often thought of today as the most quintessential Cajun dish?

It's really arguably a Creole dish.

Which is not to say the cages didn't add to it, but if you look at the ingredients that go into it, the roux comes from, you know, pre-revolutionary France.

The red pepper comes from the Spanish, who got it from Native Americans, the sassafras, which is what Philly is brown sassafras came from the Native Americans here, and the okra came from Africa.

And the name gumbo came from Africa.

It's got a beautiful roux.

It's make.

You close.

That's the one.

Oh, it's close, even though it's a little bit hackneyed to use gumbo as a metaphor for South Louisiana, it's incredibly apt in ways that people don't often think of, because when you look at what goes into making the actual dish called gumbo, the ingredients come from several different ethnic groups.

Perhaps the biggest festival of them all is the Cajun Mardi Gras, known as the Career Day.

Mardi Gras.

This celebration is completely different than the traditional parades in Louisiana's large cities, but no less entertaining, dating back to the earliest days of the late 19th century.

Towns like Eunice Church Point in Mamou featured masked riders on horseback, chicken chasing, general revelry, and no shortage of adult beverages.

Is what we're going to do.

We get on the road, we're going to one guy's house now.

When we get there.

When you are going, you going to Axum, you're going to want to chicken.

You're going to want a guinea.

You don't want to be a rice out in some crossroads, maybe $0.50.

Whatever they got.

Y'all don't walk up.

And you don't like that with no piece of paper, no yoga saying you're going to get you a crow.

Are you going to beg?

You do whatever you got to do so we can give what they got, what?

I got is.

I.

Just does it that.

Let's get you back to Messiah.

Let's go get that bird.

If they need a bass drum.

No.

There is no question Cajuns have left their indelible mark on Louisiana.

From their infectious music to legendary politicians to their spicy food.

I all know I'm glad you dizzy me.

I guarantee literally larger than life characters like Justin Wilson.

We're going to cook a pot raw.

Should we take this wine?

No.

Half a cup of chili powder, smoked salt or touch our sauce?

It's smell good.

All right.

Who was really a faux Cajun from Livingston Parish.

And Paul Prudhomme, a true Cajun from Opelousas, became celebrity chefs long before the Food Network whetted viewers appetites much more.

Better, I guarantee.

They, in turn passed the torch to Susan Spicer, Donald Link and John Foles.

I was lucky to be born and reared in the swamps of Louisiana.

Saint James Parish.

That torch also got passed to a wannabe native Massachusetts transplant, Emeril Lagasse.

Lessons like that bam bam bam bam bam bam all made names for themselves, blending Cajun cooking, usually fried or blackened with Creole.

Largely a product of New Orleans kitchens run by pioneers like Dooky Chase and his indomitable wife, Leah.

I went there to get a chance to get some meat and we Louisianans love to eat.

From Po'boys to Rockefeller's oysters, that is.

There's gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish, too.

Fay, cochon, delay.

Catfish.

Redfish, boil, broil, blackened and fried bread pudding.

Bananas foster Benny's pralines, meat pies and tamales washed down with a wide variety of beverages like Dixie Jack's, A of beer and barks, root beer, and a host of other craft beers hurricane, Sazerac, cafe au lait, and multiple brands of coffee and one of Louisiana's tastiest creations and the least photogenic dish in world history.

Boudin.

Things are changing in kitchens everywhere, and some of Louisiana's most iconic food products come from Cajun country.

Of course, there's Tony sashimi seasoning.

Tony sashimi makes everything taste great, and there are countless hot sauce brands, most notably the original Louisiana Hot Sauce and the world famous Tabasco manufactured on Avery Island near New Iberia, to name just two.

And who could forget that sweet, sticky goodness manufactured right here in the heart of Cajun country?

I'm talking about stains, cane sirup.

This is the next ingredient to go in the Holy Dryads, the Holy Trinity.

And of course, we call it the Holy Trinity because it's omnipresent in our pot onions, celery, bell pepper, garlic, and a lot of it.

And this stops the roof from cooking, but it automatically adds the grape flavor that's necessary to to know that we're making a good traditional South Louisiana gumbo.

So the Trinity is in the pot.

And the Holy Trinity, of course, has a double meaning in Louisiana because of our Catholic origins, as well as these ingredients that that represent what the human gumbo contributed to the real goal.

Right.

And I think the early cooks were basically saying like, the good Lord in our life, he's everywhere in South Louisiana.

So is onions, celery, bell pepper in the cast iron pot.

With their exodus to south Louisiana, the Acadians also brought with them a love of music.

Saturday night and the moon.

Despite its catchy beat, Cajun music is rooted in the ballads that describe the suffering of the Acadian people.

We know that the Acadians, when they came here starting in 1764, they did not have accordions.

I mean, that would not be introduced to them until much, much later.

You know, they had lost a lot of their property when the British kick them out and burned their dwellings and destroy their crops.

So we don't really know what they but they showed up with.

They may have been performing a cappella, obviously.

Eventually they got their hands on fiddles.

And guitars and added the accordion.

Cajun music later transformed to dance and became essential to the Cajun lifestyle.

Small get togethers on the front porch, balls, the mason and public dances and dance halls called fado.

Those were essential.

After a hard weeks work.

In the 20s and 30s, early Cajun legends like Harry Showed and I'm a Day are Duran made the lilting love song Joli Bilan, the unofficial Cajun national anthem.

She was a white Acadian born on Cat Island.

He's generally considered the godfather of Cajun music.

Ardoin was a Creole born near Bazil who fancied the accordion like Iraq's legendary D.L.

Minard and Eunice Dennis McGee.

Cajun musicians through the years have been mostly white, but the Acadian population is rich with Creole influence.

I don't give a shit all the benefits of French speaking blacks in Acadiana, some slaves and some Jean de color leave for free.

People of color also contributed to the culture of their Cajun co habitants.

Collectively, they created new genres of music.

First there was la la, the forerunner of Louisiana's truly original genre zydeco.

An eighth generation Creole.

Born and raised in Saint Landry Parish.

With the bayou.

Meet the prairie I go until I go.

I need a Louisiana Creole is the people who create zydeco music.

Zydeco music throughout the years have evolved.

And a lot of people don't go back far enough to explain to where people can understand where it actually comes from.

In the moment they do it.

I mean, being on the bus by five in the morning.

But zydeco music started off from people singing in the fields and at gatherings.

There was a gathering called As you're Come On today, you go up and to see that this jury stuff was done just by using your voice, clapping your hands and stuffing your feet.

The jury gatherings were done around a fire in a circle and they'd pass around a jar.

And if you took the jar and took a drink out of it, then you had to add a verse to the song and it was like, you know, sometimes even more that supposedly all of them zydeco.

So personally, you know, zydeco supposedly came from the jury.

There's a little song to call the zydeco Parsley.

This is no salt in your snap.

Been.

Clifton Chenier was the father of zydeco.

He was an accordionist who teamed with his brother Cleveland to introduce the Francois, or rub board, worn around the shoulders and rubbed with a spoon.

The triangle and the fiddle were added later, along with other instruments.

Clifton Shiner received a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammy organization in 2014 for his role as the King of Zydeco was filled by bouzouki Chavez and then Stanley Darrell Junior, known as Buckwheat Zydeco, a Queen of zydeco, also emerged in Ida Guillory, a Grammy winning accordionist.

But it was Sidney Simeon known as Rock and Sidney who elevated zydeco to the national stage when Don't Mess with My do to don't mess with my to do that song won a Grammy in 1985 for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording was born in.

It feels I can't even describe it mean.

In recent years, multiple Louisiana Grammy winners have celebrated the Cajun and zydeco sounds on the national stage Chubby Carrier, Terence Simeon, Geno, Delphos Joel, Sonia, Wayne, Tubes, Michael Doucet and Beausoleil, and the Lost Bayou Ramblers.

Perhaps the most beloved of all Cajun music performers is a rock star in Quebec and Nova Scotia, from where the Cajun people were exiled.

Zachary Rishard is a songwriter, a poet, a storyteller and historian.

Zydeco also bustling, whose eloquence and love of his ancestry make him the Cajun ambassador par excellence that goes up our Sunday babies.

I think those of us out there, all Louisiana musicians, are my brothers and sisters, and for me to be part of this community is very inspiring.

There's great crossover country.

Cousins Sammy and Doug Kershaw also cemented their places in history.

Captain Sammy Kershaw hit number one on the country chart with She Don't Know She's Beautiful in 1993.

You know you see the power we're pushing on and she's beautiful.

It.

Relentless mom and pop up told a little boy named Doug, who didn't speak English until the age of eight, but mastered the fiddle at five, put Cameron Parish on the map when his autobiographical Louisiana man became a top ten country hit.

I make a living, he's a Louisiana man, gotta make a living to do the album.

But the song was broadcast back to Earth by the Apollo crew as they were about to land on the moon.

In 1969, the port au Prince program under fire.

Gotta make a living.

He's a made.

Yeah, I.

Came out of the marshes and swamps of Acadiana rises the Louisiana prairie.

Well, wait a minute.

You say Louisiana doesn't have a prairie?

Well, yes, we do.

The great flat grasslands that begin in Canada and stretch all the way through the heartland of America actually end in the southernmost part of the state in Veal Platt, otherwise known as Flat Town in the American Midwest.

The chief crops of the prairie are wheat, oats, and barley.

And Louisiana, our grain is rice.

On Interstate ten, you'll see this exit for Iowa, mispronounced by those Midwesterners who settled there in the late 1880s, the president of the Iowa State School of Agriculture came south to confirm that the land was suitable for rice growing.

There was more than a grain of truth to that theory.

Like the Midwest, our prairie land is flat, but unlike the Midwest, Louisiana gets a lot of rain.

The proven formula for success when growing rice.

The I-10 corridor from Lafayette to the Texas border is lined with rice fields, which double as crawfish ponds during the off season.

Of all, parish is the northernmost tip of Cajun country.

The geographic center of the state is three miles north of the parish seat of Marksville.

If you're at a convention in New York City and you see a nametag identifying someone as Bordelon Coco Cuvee are those on the sill?

Gremio, Laborde, Lemoine, my you Morrow, Roy Rabelais or Tarzan?

Write it down.

You can be assured their immediate forebears are from of oil's parish.

And if you're at that same convention and you see a nametag reading our doyenne Bonta, no foray, LaFleur, swallow or margarine, you can know that their family roots traced back to Evangeline Parish, now the parish seat of Evangeline, is Ville Platte.

It's only 25 miles from Marksville.

As the crow flies.

But back in the day, when there were phone books, if you compared the two, as I have done, you would find in Marksville the word dozens of Laborde, not a single virgin, and only nine font in those.

But in the Ville Platte phone book there were only two LA boards and 185.

The drains, and more than 500 font and O's.

It's like the Berlin Wall between those two communities.

Who could forget the other evangelists synonymous with Louisiana?

Nearly 90 miles south of Marksville is Saint Martinville, the setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow classic poem Evangeline.

Where a lonely Cajun girl awaits the arrival of her long lost lover, Gabriel.

The site is memorialized by the magnificent evangelist Oak.

This historical evangelist is believed to have been an orphan girl named Emmeline Lubitsch, who was said to have been separated from her fiancé, Louis Arsenault, during the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia.

The whole romance about the Cajuns was really tied up in that poem, and that went international.

So everybody felt like they knew South Louisiana and to a degree, they did.

So when you have that kind of history and that kind of romance surrounding the state's history, I mean, what state can really compete with us on that?

They really can't.

I mean, there's no state that has stories like that.

You know, Texas has its revolution and Mexican and all that.

Okay.

But you ain't got Longfellow's poem.

A nearby statue was commissioned by the actress Doris del Rio, who played evangelist in the 1929 movie of the same name.

Nearby Saint Mary Parish was the location of the very first Tarzan movie in 1917, Tarzan of the apes, starring Elmo Lincoln, was filmed in Franklin.

The bayous of Saint Mary Parish replicated the African jungle long before special effects and CGI members of the New Orleans Athletic Club actually dressed up as apes to round out the cast.

Elmo actually killed a lion that went berserk during filming.

That's true.

Afterwards, the cast and crew retired to the local Casey Hall to enjoy a lion saw speak on not really.

Tarzan was the precursor of what is now a thriving film industry in Louisiana, where everything from Steel Magnolias to Pitch Perfect and 12 Years a Slave has been filmed in recent years.

Raising horses and racing horses are part of life on the Louisiana prairie and throughout Cajun country.

Small towns like Erath, Morris, New Iberia and Catahoula, and through that stretch, win number 142 for Randy Romero, sired Randy Romero, Kent Desormeaux, Eddie DeLuise and Calvin Burrell, all Hall of Fame jockeys and Triple Crown winners.

And speaking of races and winners, politics has been a contact sport in Louisiana for decades, and many of our most colorful politicians come from Cajun country like Representative Emil Correll.

He would never vote for a tax, but always wanted to bring home the bacon to Evangeline Parish.

He made a profound statement about Louisiana politics when he said, my friend, let me tell you the first and most important rule of politics never, ever let the cold, clammy hand of consistency rest upon your shoulder.

Louisiana native James Carville, who is the lead strategist for president Bill Clinton, knows a thing or two about politics.

I invited him to sit down for a chat about some of the state's greatest political legends.

James, first of all, I want to thank you for dressing up, for helping me.

You know, you know, I never miss an opportunity to bring an award or direct share.

I don't wait to press.

We're we're in the secret tunnel room of the Heidelberg, the old Heidelberg Hotel.

It's now the Hilton in Baton Rouge, where a tunnel leads to the King Hotel across the street.

Huey long used it for private purposes and to escape the press.

Let's fast forward to, Edwin Edwards, because, he's the he's the first Catholic governor elected in the in the 1900s.

You talked about the Protestant governors of what had to carry the Catholic population.

But here comes Edwin Edwards, totally different in messaging and in style and in personality than all of his predecessors other than Bill Clinton.

I've never been around a politician that had in age skill that Edwin never would've had.

I had a brand name.

His father came from Scottish origins.

His mother's family was blue, yet they came from, continental France.

So they didn't come by way of Nova Scotia.

And truthfully, Edwin Edwards was never Cajun.

Who built the Kingdom, who paved the parking lot of the football stadium, foosball.

And in the hall went out the them.

But because she taught him French, Cajun culture and language and he could talk it fluently, then everybody assumed he was Cajun and he just let you believe that heat, energy and housing.

Just as the pirate John Lafayette captured the imagination and admiration of New Orleans in the early 1800s, Edwards captured the hearts of Louisiana and maintained his electability throughout the last three decades of the 20th century.

He was the greatest politician you've seen in Louisiana during your lifetime.

My lifetime?

It would have to be.

Every time I shave and look in the mirror, I see him.

The state was seemingly infatuated with the lovable rogue, despite the cloud of federal investigations and brazen womanizing that dogged him as both a congressman and a governor, many people in Louisiana considered me to be shady, dishonest, crooked, slick.

What it was what you have.

And it's something that I'm prepared to live with, if for no other reason.

Because my mother and I know it's not so, but she's probably the only other person who's who fully believes that.

A flamboyant populist champion, Edwards never shied away from his flashy lifestyle as a gambler and ladies man.

So, you know, so he became known as a silver zipper.

Edwards quick wit and political savvy have proven unparalleled in Louisiana history.

He gave us memorable quotes early, early when he was running against David Train.

He said, my opponent, Dave Train, is so slow.

It takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 minutes.

And I've just been asked by a reporter what they think my chances are winning.

And I told him, I think it's pretty good because at this point I could not be defeated unless I was caught in bed with either a dead girl or alive boy.

What politician?

Anywhere could get away with a line like that?

Edwin Edwards Edwards did win that election with 62% of the vote.

Equally as memorable was when he compared himself to his 1991 gubernatorial opponent, KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, when some reporters asked, nobody is more diametrically opposed politically than you and David Duke.

Is there any place conceivable where you two could be alike?

And without even thinking, Edwards says yes, as a matter of fact, there is.

We are both wizards under the sheets, and there was the subsequent Edwards Duke runoff that prompted the state's most memorable bumper sticker ever vote for the crook.

It's important, ladies and gentlemen, the governor of the state of Louisiana.

Edwards.

Well, enough people did.

Edwards won again in a landslide.

When I first got elected to the state Senate, Republican from Baton Rouge expected to be very conservative, I went and saw him.

This was when he was elected for his final term, and he told me, he said, I know your district better than you know your district.

He was he was right.

And he said, you're not gonna be able to vote with me very much.

But when you can, I hope you'll do so.

And I hope you'll you'll listen and help us where, where we can.

And that's the way he treated his foes or his perceived foes.

The idea that he would not like you because you were a Republican.

Are you a black?

That you were Jewish, or you were anything else that didn't?

He really was pretty much absent of any kind of prejudice.

Been being a little more than a decade later, a Catholic Cajun lady married to a Spaniard was elected governor.

Today marks the first time that an honor such as this has been earned by a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother.

Another one of Acadiana's most colorful political legends was a perennial candidate who was never elected.

Still, he could have made the hatchet Man Hall of Fame.

This is Warren J.

Boogie Modine, number 66 on your voting machine.

His name was Warren J. Moti of New Iberia, but he was better known as Pookie.

He ran numerous times for Congress insurance commissioner in the state Senate.

He was usually in the race to attack a candidate on behalf of another candidate.

The trigger man against me.

Carlos Marcello, is against me, although this was never admitted by any of the principals, but it became fairly obvious who benefited from his antics.

You always knew who he was against, but you never knew what or who he was for.

Oh, what a jolly Visalia sheriff for Saint Martin Parish is against me.

The court chiefs of Iberia Parish.

Jerry Whatley, is against me.

I'm in downtown Winfield, Louisiana, at the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame.

Let's check it out.

Another one of a kind Cajun politician was Dailey Joseph Cat Doucette, who served off and on from the 1930s to the 1960s as sheriff of Saint Landry Parish.

He couldn't speak English fluently until he was 19 years old, but he spoke perfect Cajun French.

He hired someone to help him with his pronunciation and diction when he decided to run for office.

I'm not sure it worked.

In one of the reelection campaigns, he pounded on a podium and said, me, I'm going to win this race.

I'm going to win by landscape, he said.

My opponent over there, he got all kinds of things wrote down, and he read them to you.

Me?

When I talk, I talk out of my head.

One time the press asked the sheriff, what do you think about juvenile delinquency?

He thought for a moment and said, well, I don't know too much about it, but if it's good for the kids, I'm for it.

And then he was asked what he thought about the civil rights bill.

He said, well, if we owe it, we ought to pay it.

Doo doo doo doo doo.

There political posters and memorabilia everywhere, even in here.

You can lay here.

Well, some 30 miles south of Saint Landry Parish, approximately 10% of the population still speak French.

Of course, that's down in Lafayette, the unofficial capital of Cajun country with a 65% Catholic population.

Lafayette Parish has the distinction of having the highest number of Catholics of any parish or county in America.

Lafayette is one of 21 cities in the country named for the Marquis de Lafayette, an aristocrat who became a general in the Revolutionary War.

At age 19, he counted George Washington among his closest friends.

He was one of three European transplants with Louisiana connections who had a profound impact on America's victory in the Revolutionary War.

The second was a Spanish governor, Bernardo de Galvez, who led victories over the British in Mobile, Natchez in Baton Rouge.

The only battles outside the 13 Colonies.

The third was an Irishman, Oliver Pollock, a wealthy New Orleanian who contributed today's equivalent of $1 billion to the war effort.

He was also responsible for creating the dollar sign with poor penmanship, writing the dead is pesos.

The pennies ran together, resulting in the modern day symbol of money.

Lafayette Parish is also home to one of the most unusual characters in Louisiana history, Dudley J. Loblaw.

If you had to tell me the most interesting person of that era in Louisiana politics was Cassandra Dudley Jacob, what he always supported Protestant dominant because he knew he could get anything that he wanted, and those Protestant governors needed his support.

He carry South Louisiana.

They were lending to character.

They needed to get they need to get 40%.

I mean, they'd get 80 and everything north of Bunkie.

He was a native of Youngsville, outside of Lafayette.

He represented southwest Louisiana for one term in the House of Representatives beginning in 1924, and then served four terms in the state Senate from 1940 to 1964, interrupted twice by unsuccessful runs for governor.

Dudley made a profound impact on Louisiana in three distinct ways.

First, politically, he literally served in elected office from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

The newsroom.

Every Sunday from 12 to 1230.

Dudley J. Loblaw had the news in French, and he added, and people would stop and turn the radio on, quit eating lunch to listen to cuz I had the.

He gave the news in French, but a lot of times it was injected with politics.

Secondly, Dudley was proud of his Acadian heritage and was a champion of the French language in Louisiana.

This is hard to believe, but it was against the law to speak French in the public schools of Louisiana until late in the 20th century, because he elected John McKesson governor, McKesson returned the favor by creating the state agency Code of Film Council for Development of French in Louisiana, and so he was very close to his and he knew he was going to France for a big Acadian reunion.

And he asked McKesson to introduce to get him a meeting with Pope Pius the 12th in Rome.

And so here's a photograph of Dudley LeBlanc greeting Pope Pius the 12th.

And shortly after this was taken in 1996, Dudley pulled out a rosary and asked the Pope to bless it.

So he has a picture of the Pope consecrating Douglas rosary.

As soon as Dudley got back to Louisiana, he bought three cartons of rosaries, and he spent the next two years telling women, look, I'm going to give you this rosary.

It was blessed by the Pope.

But thirdly, and most importantly, Dudley made his mark as an entrepreneur.

He became a salesman supreme and started several companies and developed and poise carry on was for prostate problems.

He'd sell toys.

He had comics, T-shirts, had a call man, pay the marketing.

This man did was just phenomenal.

Ultimately creating an elixir 14% alcohol call had a call.

As a jokester.

They'd ask him, why did you call it?

Had a call, he says.

I had to call it something.

Actually, the name comes from this poster here.

Happy day company started a headache medicine and so he took h a d a c o.

And that's how to call comes from Happy Day company.

What he did, he knew the Cajun diet wasn't the healthiest.

So he used a combination of vitamins that he had gotten from a doctor, and he added 14% alcohol and at that time he had blue eyes where he certain days and in many places you couldn't buy alcohol, but you could buy had a cough and you could get just as drunk with 14% had a cough as 14% white.

But he was a genius.

He'd do a caravan show, they would go all over the country.

The how to Call caravan was an extravaganza.

It was a ride to the show and they had movie stars like Dorothy Lamar, Mickey Rooney, Carmen Miranda to name a few.

And the way to get into the show was with a box top.

And my dad used to always say, if you didn't like the show, well then we will refund you all about the box.

Stop!

We selected a housewife from our studio audience.

Mrs. Audrey Cooper, her partner, is a special guest, Senator Dudley LeBlanc, and Dudley became a national figure.

He was a guest on the Groucho Marx show You Bet Your Life.

Do you know who your state senator is?

Oh, no, I, I don't, Senator.

What do you think I'm a I'm a voter who doesn't know who the senator is.

Well, it's not necessarily her fault.

There must be something wrong with him, because everybody in Louisiana knows who I am.

A senator, do you have any particular political philosophy?

I've always advocated the idea of helping the poor and shocking the rich and make those able to pay pay the taxes.

But do you still believe in that?

Oh, I tell you, I still believe in that.

So I'll tell you.

Not so much.

Now.

Well, what caused this sudden change in your political philosophy?

Yeah.

Well, you know, last year I made $5 million.

How did you manage to make $5 million in one year, Senator?

Well, you know, I own the Le Blanc Corporation.

The maker that makes how to call.

We manufacture how to call Attica.

Oh, what's that good for?

Well, it was good for $5 million for me last year, and that's good enough for me.

Well, the next year it was $25 million.

And by the time the Federal Trade Commission came in and shut down the production of had a call, Dudley had pocketed a small fortune.

What was had a call good for.

Well, the promotional brochure enclosed in the box said that had a call cured diabetes, paralysis, epileptic fits, delirium tremens, neuralgia, migraines, arthritis, rheumatoid is high or low blood pressure.

And that rundown condition following colds.

Of course it did nothing of the sort, but at 14% alcohol by volume, it didn't much matter.

Bill Nettles and the Dixie Blue Boys performed a little ditty that was Dudley's not so subtle way of marketing, had a call as an aphrodisiac down in Louisiana in the bright sunshine.

If we kept playing that song, you'd hear the second verse.

I went down to the farm to rest about a week, but the farmer's wife, she started walking in her sleep.

She did the had a cow boogie woogie all the time.

Or the third verse.

If you're radiator leaks in your motor, stand still, give her hat a collar and watch her boogie up the hill.

It's not hard to see why many see coups and dud as the most interesting louisianan of them all, although others might argue that top billing goes to a New Orleans woman who could cast a spell on you.

Down in Louisiana with the Black Tree, the third wave of French immigrants to Louisiana occurred in 1809, when the islanders arrived in New Orleans.

Like the Acadians, they did not come directly from France.

They were inhabitants of Caribbean islands like Martinique and San Domaine.

The present day Haiti undergone after the Haitian Revolution left, said Maine's plantation economy in shambles.

Many relocated to Cuba and then Louisiana.

America had banned the importation of slaves in 1808, but a congressional exemption allowed entry to these 10,000 refugees, including slave owners both white and of color, and the enslaved people who had fled alongside them, doubling the population of New Orleans.

They brought with them the voodoo religion, which they added to the city's preexisting version of voodoo, a synthesis of African and native American rituals and worldview, and Roman Catholicism.

Though it's unclear how voodoo originally entered Louisiana.

The problem is, under the Code Noir in colonial French Louisiana, it's illegal to practice any religion that's not Roman Catholicism.

So even if somebody was practicing a different religion, they wouldn't tell you for fear of prosecution.

We get a lot of stories about voodoo going all the way back to the 18th century, but those are all from people who don't practice voodoo, who talk about things that they claim to have seen.

These people are all outsiders.

They're invariably white and hostile racially to the practitioners.

Man, you better stay with her.

Marie Laveau, the legendary voodoo queen, was a prosperous Catholic Creole woman, one of the many powerful property owning women of color who dominated the French Quarter in the 1800s.

Marie and other spiritual leaders use the unique blend of African, native, and European folk traditions that make up New Orleans Voodoo to heal those in need and honor the spirits.

Both she and her daughter of the same name enthralled and entertained spectators on Sundays in Congo Square.

Now Louis Armstrong Park, Congo Square is sacred ground.

This was the place where Africans started to gather in the 1700s on Sundays for markets and for gatherings, because Sunday was the free day for people who had slaved under this brutal system of slavery in the South, so they knew that this was a free day.

They could trade, they could make some money and things like that.

But it was also a time over the whole hundred year period or more that Africans gather here where they did their dances from Senegal and the dances from the Congo and the dances from Benin, which was Dahomey, or the dancers from Haiti or Cuba.

So people dance.

They tried to create the drums or the instruments that they had in Africa.

So this is a probably a place that Africans did not want to miss.

On every Sunday throughout the year.

The great.

The other contribution offered by these former island inhabitants was a crop sugarcane, that had been introduced into the Louisiana economy in 1751 by a Jesuit priest.

But the influx of sugar farmers from the Caribbean helped make it a giant crop in the American economy.

Every year at harvest time, when the black smoke filled the sky, Louisiana produces approximately 13 million tons of cane yearly in 22 parishes, generating an overall economic value of $3 billion.

Burning.

Consider this.

The very first mayor of New Orleans was an islander named Etienne Baret, but perhaps Mayor Burridge greatest contribution was that he invented the process of granulated sugar.

Thank you.

Yes, the word from Mayor Baret.

We'd all be stirring our coffee, but a stock, a sugar cane.

While the French may have settled in Louisiana and waves from the early aristocrats to the Acadians to the islanders, Louisiana remains a wash in that heritage today.

Again, just take a look at the most common French surnames in Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Atlas of Louisiana, surnames of French and Spanish origin.

Although the list has not been formally updated.

I have informally reviewed phone books and voting records, and believe it remains a fairly accurate ranking.

So here's the top ten.

Thibodaux coming in at number nine is Breaux e r a u d a Boudreaux, Richard Fontaine, no.

Guidry.

LeBlanc.

Broussard.

Landry.

And number one Arbery.

What I'm asking for in the study resolution, which was the a bear clan, was represented in the legislature in the 1980s by Representative Murray, a bear who was once accused of being two faced.

A colleague remembers a bear's response.

Two faced, two faced.

If I had two faces, you think I'd be using this one?

Speaking of two faced, the greatest example of two faced consensus building actually comes from, well, Mississippi.

But the story is just too good not to tell.

In the 1950s, our neighboring state was dry.

It was illegal to sell alcohol.

There were some counties apparently ignoring the law and realizing significant revenue from the sale of whiskey.

Well, the legislature was called into session to determine once and for all where the whiskey should be legalized.

Representative Noah Sweat was one of the leaders of the legislature.

His nickname was soggy and tried soggy sweat.

He was called upon to deliver an address at the opening of the session, in order to provide the definitive answer as to whether or not whiskey should be legalized.

In so doing, he gave the greatest example I've ever seen of a politician being two faced and talking out of both sides of his mouth.

All my friends.

I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time.

However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy.

On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be.

You have asked me how I feel about whiskey.

All right, here is how I feel about whiskey.

If when you say whiskey, you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocents dethrone treason, destroys the family.

It literally takes bread from the mouths of little children.

If you mean that evil drink that topples a Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation and despair and shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But if when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale it is consumed when Goodfellas gathered together, puts a song in their hot laughter on their lips and a warm glow of contentment in their eyes.

If you mean Christmas cheer, if you mean that drink that puts a spring in the old gentlemen step on a frosty, crisp morning.

If you mean that drink that enables a man to magnify his joy and happiness and forget.

If only for a moment.

Laughs, heartaches and sorrows and tragedies.

If you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasury untold millions of dollars to provide the tender care we need for our little crippled children, a death, our dumb, our blind, our pitiful, aged and infirm.

To build highways, hospitals and schools.

Look, certainly I'm for it.

This is my stand.

I will not retreat.

I will not compromise.

Well, soggy sweat certainly could have been elected in Louisiana with his ever so colorful reminder that there are always two sides to every story.

Hey, you know, we're different.

Yeah.

Hey.

Hey.

Coming up, more flavors in the gumbo.

If you didn't know how to make meatballs by the time you were five years old.

Maybe you're not Italian.

A man stopped me, said you're a generous word.

Yes, but who is your distributor?

I said the Holy Spirit.

He said the Holy soup and the pot really begins to boil.

Do you remember when you were given the name the soul Queen of New Orleans?

Okay, pick it up.

But it just.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Kosher.

Bye, Louisiana.

Excited that you're back.

This is the only place where people at the airport will gather around a TV to watch a college baseball game.

It feels to me like people should know more about your contribution to Louisiana history.

I'm kind of a big deal.

Louisiana's disproportionate impact on music and sports and the arts, for our size and for our population, the impact Louisiana made on the world is, is unparalleled.

How do we do?

Where do you get down the and you get down the bow.

Kick off your shoes and you throw them on the floor.

Dance in the kitchen till the morning light.

Louisiana Saturday night waiting in the front yard.

Sitting on the longest single shot rival.

Anyone I know y'all come up.

King folk in the moonlight Louisiana Saturday night.

Where you get down the middle and you get down the boat.

Kick off your shoes and you boom in the flow.

Dance in the kitchen till the morning light Louisiana Saturday night.

And.

Kick off your shoes and you throw em on the floor.

Dance in the kitchen till the morning light.

Louisiana Saturday night.

Yeah.

You get down the fiddle and you get down the bow.

Kick off your shoes and you throw em on the floor.

Dance in the kitchen till the morning light.

Louisiana Saturday night.

You.

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