{"id":779,"date":"2017-09-09T08:38:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-09T08:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2017\/09\/09\/dl-menard-the-cajun-hank-williams\/"},"modified":"2017-09-09T08:38:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-09T08:38:00","slug":"dl-menard-the-cajun-hank-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=779","title":{"rendered":"D.L. Menard, the Cajun Hank Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\"D.L.America's greatest Cajun singer, D.L. Menard, died this month from heart failure that was probably caused by cancer.  Twenty-five years ago, he suffered his first heart attack and 16 years ago, his wife died of a heart attack associated with her diabetes. <\/div>\n
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\n\tMenard was widely known as the "Cajun Hank Williams," and one folklorist said that his most famous song, "La Porte d'en Arriere" (The Back Door) should be recognized as "the Cajun national anthem."   It's a song about a man who gets so drunk one night that he has to sneak home through the back door. Menard sang it from his wheelchair on the 55th anniversary of its release, just a few weeks before his death.   He specifically requested that he did not want "La Porte d'en Arriere" sung at his funeral.  He said that he was "planning to go into heaven happily through the pearly gates and not sneaking in through the back door."<\/div>\n
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\n\tEarly Life<\/strong><\/div>\n
\n\tDoris Leon Menard was born in 1932 in rural southern Louisiana, where the Acadians ("Cajuns") settled after being expelled from French Canada by the British more than 250 years ago.  His father was a poor farmer who played the harmonica.  D.L. said that he learned to sing by listening with his family to a battery-powered radio where he heard country songs by Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Ernest Tubb from a Texas radio station.  When the radio batteries died, they had to wait for the next cotton crop harvest to be able to buy new batteries.  <\/div>\n
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\n\tThe Cajuns in Louisiana clung to their French language which gradually evolved into a distinctive Cajun dialect that was mostly French, but all the songs on the radio were sung in English.  Later when he was famous, Menard told reporters that he wasn't allowed to speak Cajun French in school because the authorities were trying to Americanize the Cajun children. He said, "Sometimes you were paddled or whipped if you spoke French in school."  When he was 16, he heard his first live Cajun music, fell in love with it, and learned to play the guitar. Within months, he was playing nights with a local dance band, but times were tough and he had to work at menial jobs during the day. <\/div>\n
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\n\tIn 1951, he met his idol, Hank Williams<\/a>, who gave him song-writing advice and told him to stick to his Cajun roots.  In 1952, he married Lou Ella Abshire and over their 49 years of marriage they had seven children, 17 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.  In the early years he could not earn enough money from his music to support his family, so he kept a regular day job at a gas station. <\/div>\n
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