Earl Robicheaux and the Atchafalaya River Basin
August 2011
The Atchafalaya River Basin has fascinated me since the 1970s, when I lived as a marginally employed musician in New Orleans and, during my many off-hours, rambled around south Louisiana, exploring the rich natural environment and lively culture. When I left the state for different work, I merely crossed over into Texas, and though I’ve lived in other places since, I’ve mostly resided within a day’s drive of the Atchafalaya, the heartland of Acadiana and North America’s largest rain forest. Somehow, the region has always called to me.
In time, I found reasons to write about the Atchafalaya—in a piece of travel literature, in a lyric text for a musical composition. But in 2005, I felt compelled to try something more substantial, inspired by the memory of an old friend, Louisiana musician and naturalist Earl Robicheaux, who had some years before introduced me to the natural sound sources in the basin’s bayous, swamps, fields, and forests. By the time I sought to track him down, Hurricane Katrina was plowing through New Orleans. When we spoke, I learned that, in the years since I'd seen him, he had devoted himself to preserving the Atchafalaya in sound, through raw nature recordings, oral histories, soundscapes, and compositions combining the three.
So between fall 2005 and May 2010, when he and I drove around Atchafalaya Bay looking for damage from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, I made countless visits to the Atchafalaya River Basin, gathering material for River Music: An Atchafalaya Story, with Earl as my guide to the region, the stories of his life and sound work in counterpoint. Together we dragged his Nagra into the swamps, listened for birds in agricultural fields and cemeteries, rode an airboat into the new Atchafalaya Delta, marking heron calls and petroleum rig groans against the motor's roar. I met the Acadian, African American and Native American people he had interviewed for oral histories and soundscapes, their voices as central to the Atchafalaya's auditory profile as mockingbirds and frog choruses. I learned to carry a world within my ears, as Earl has.
All of the following widlife voices are integral to and active in the Atchafalaya Basin. The recordings were made in spring. This first recording, from Bayou Felix, north of Morgan City, Lousianna, is nocturnal with green tree frogs, northern cricket frogs, Cope's gray tree frog, squirrel tree frogs, pig frogs, bronze frogs, and Gulf Coast toads. Squirrel tree frogs dominate this soundscape.
Bayou Felix
The following recording, done at the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area (part of the Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge), features a lone bullfrog and two bullfrog choruses as well as northern cricket frogs. A juvenile indigo bunting is also predominant and a yellow-crowned night heron passes through.
Sherburne Wildlife Management Area
And the following recording, done at Lake Martin, Cypress Island Preserve (protected by The Nature Conservancy),
features thousands of nesting cattle egrets along with great egrets. The wingbeats of roseate spoonbills, common moorhen, and an alligator mating call are also heard.
Lake Martin
SITES
EMF :: Arts Electric :: EMF Productions :: Ear to the Earth :: CDeMusic :: EMF Media :: EMF Institute