On the final afternoon of the Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette last April, the Fais-Do-Do tent-usually the scene of the Festival’s Cajun, Creole, and zydeco performers-rang with the music of Native Sons, an acoustic combo whose folk-oriented songs owes little to Cajun, Creole, or zydeco music despite the local roots of the four musicians who make it.

According to Danny Kimball, one of Native Sons’ founding members, the warm reception the group received that Sunday has been reflected in the sales of Native Sons, the group’s recently released debut CD. “A guy at Raccoon Records said, ‘I know when you all are playing because the next week people come in and buy [the disc].’ At Christmas, one guy bought five and shipped them all over the place.”

In many ways, the music of Native Sons is particularly well suited to such dispersal. Both the plaintive singing of Mike Hanisee and the evocative playing of Kimball (drums), Bruce MacDonald (guitar), and Gary Newman (upright bass) bear witness to the group’s immersion in several decades of American roots music, plugged and unplugged.

Its pedigree doesn’t hurt either. Coteau, the Red Beans and Rice Review, Rufus Jagneaux, Big Cheyenne, and Ebeneezer are just five of the combos in which Kimball, MacDonald, and-or Hanisee have played key roles. And Newman, the son of the Louisiana-music legend Jimmy C. Newman, is a pedigree unto himself. For Native Sons, which the group recorded at Dockside Studios last fall and which Kimball describes as “a senti-melancholy album,” the quartet was joined by its fellow native sons Sonny Landreth, Sam Broussard, Michael Doucet, David Ranson, and the late Tommy Comeaux. “Tommy was the fifth member,” Kimball recalls. “He did his [Clickin’] Chickens deal and other things he did, but we were working it out. He said, ‘I will be there for that one night and work towards gigging these tunes.’ It was just starting to happen. He spent every minute he could in the studio with us, even when he wasn’t playing. There was something magical going on. Then he was gone.”

But not forgotten. According to Kimball, Comeaux was as much a part of Native Sons’ Festival International performance as the group’s four corporeal members. “Tommy was floating around in the air somewhere. We’d look at each other and say, ‘That’s Tommy.’ Not a day goes by that we don’t think about him.”

Other departed loved ones haunt the band’s music. Dedicated to Kimball’s and Hanisee’s late brothers, the Native Sons album consists of a dozen songs that to one extent or another embody the mystery of loss. “Michael and I both lost our big brothers within months of each other,” Kimball explains. “The song ‘One Step Behind’ is about them, and ‘Homebound Train’ is about letting them go.”

The letting-go theme reaches its peak in the especially poignant “Only You,” especially the verse about Dana Breaux, the guitarist who with MacDonald deployed the twin-guitar attack that distinguished Coteau from the rest of the local competition 20 years ago. “He had a lot of demons,” says Kimball, “but he was a brilliant guitar player. And he and Bruce together! In Coteau they set up on separate sides of the stage. They each had an amp, and they ran an extension speaker to the other side, right next to the other’s amp so that when they’d play, they played in tandem. It was like the Allman Brothers. We used to call them the Alleman Brothers. They had a magic together that was unbelievable.”

After abstaining from public performing between 1988 and 1993 to pursue business and educational opportunities respectively, Hanisee and Kimball began writing together last year. A visit to the Rocky Mountain Folk Festival in Lyons, Colorado, convinced them to get serious about their collaboration. “We saw Gillian Welch, Patty Larkin, Bruce Cockburn, and a lot of people from the Boston songwriting scene,” Kimball remembers. “By the end of the last day, Mike and I were looking at one another going, ‘We’re in the ballpark. Our stuff’s good. Let’s go make a record.'”

Five months later Native Sons was finished. “There’s no B.S. or jive on it. Michael and I are where we are-beyond middle age-and we’re writing about things that effect us and about our journeys. It ain’t narcissistic. It’s just straightforward kind of stuff.

“To me,” says Kimball, “that’s what folk music is supposed to be.”

Two other Lafayette-area musicians concerned with what the music of the region’s folk should be are Rick Lagneaux and Philip Knowlton. Together they’ve established Gulf Coast Entertainment, an umbrella operation at the heart of which is their small but efficient, versatile, high-tech, and increasingly busy Lafayette recording studio.

“The reason we built the studio and started Gulf Coast Entertainment,” Lagneaux explains, “was that I saw so many bands in Louisiana go and record elsewhere and sign with record labels from up North because there wasn’t anybody around here that was doing a good or a fair job. I think it’s been a problem for a long time. We wanted to do something different – right the supposed wrongs.”

The most visible step in Lagneaux and Knowlton’s crusade so far has been the release of Too Hot to Handle, the recent live album by Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band. The irony of using a live recording, albeit a sonically impressive one, is not lost on Lagneaux. “When we talked about starting a record company, the first artist we decided on was Chubby. I knew he was on Blind Pig, and I didn’t understand why his records didn’t sound good because his live show was great. So when his deal was up with Blind Pig, I said, ‘Chubby, your live show is wonderful, but your records kinda suck. Why don’t we do what you do best? Let’s do a live record!” And he said, ‘Great, man! Cool!'”

Since signing Carrier, Gulf Coast has also inked deals with Richard Lebouef and Two Step and the former Basin Brother Danny Collet. Those who’ve recorded at the Gulf Coast studio include the traditional Cajun Mamou Prairie Band and the swamp-pop saxman Willie “T” Trahan, whose album Lagneaux describes as “Fats Domino-oriented.” “There are a lot of Fats tunes and a couple of originals that I wrote.”

Lagneaux and Knowlton are no strangers to supplying other artists with songs. Lagneaux, for instance, is perhaps best known for his multifaceted contributions-writing, keyboard playing, engineering-to Wayne Toups’s albums. And Knowlton, as an engineer at Sun Records, a member of the “Keep On Dancin'” Gentrys, and a member of the touring bands for both Expose and Stevie B, has spent the last thirty-plus years familiarizing himself with nearly every angle of the industry.

He takes, however, as much satisfaction from his current low-profile responsibilities as he ever did from his more high-profile ones. “I would’ve been just as happy behind a console, to be honest with you. I have just as much enjoyment and just as much thrill from listening to something that I’ve put out when it’s really done well as going out and playing before 40-to-80-thousand people.”

And, when asked what has made him devote so much of his life to the long hours and claustrophobic conditions of the recording studio, Knowlton replies “the creative process.”

“This is where it really all starts,” he says. “An artist’s career begins right in this room. Their careers are in our hands. Rick and I both know what it’s like to be on this side of the glass, so we try to make it interesting, exciting, and as pleasant as possible for them, and also to turn out the product that they want. That way they won’t have to listen to a record that they cut, say, five months ago, and go, ‘Oh, I could’ve done this a little bit better.'”

Word has reached us from Chicago that Mr. Mojo of Mojo and the Bayou Gypsies has recently been hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. “Although he is facing major surgery and a lengthy recovery,” writes Emile Joseph, Mr. Mojo’s publicist, “his spirits are high.” So high, in fact, that his doctors O.K.-ed his August 8 concert at the Arbor Amphitheater (three days before his surgery) in support of his just-released longplayer, Mojo Gonna Git’ Ya!

The visit he was to pay to his hometown of Lafayette, however, has been put on indefinite hold.

As of this writing, the resilient Mr. Mojo was still planning to proceed with his September 12 concert at the College of DuPage in Glenn Ellyn, IL, a performance made possible by a “special device” that Mojo’s doctors have come up with to enable him to play the accordion. According to Joseph, Mojo hopes to be home for Christmas.

Fans and well-wishers may send their cards and letters to Mojo, P.O. Box 6883, Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181, or leave a phone messages at 630-415-1405.