Perhaps the most significant of Cajun Breakdown's many welcome contributions is the acknowledgment, made early and repeated often by Brasseaux throughout this fascinating study, that the Cajun society of Louisiana was not nearly as isolated or homogeneous as often portrayed; in fact, as can be gleaned from a study of the popular music associated with the region, “Cajun-ness” interacted with, influenced, and borrowed from “mainstream” American society with definitive cultural and societal results. This book seeks to locate the particular points of contact between recognizable traits of Cajun cultural expression and those of the American popular music canon, with a view not simply to providing a technical, hermetically sealed taxonomy of Cajun music as it developed over several decades in the early twentieth century, but to placing that development into a broader social context that regards racial, sexual, political, geographical and economic factors as being of primary importance. In his own words, Brasseaux sets out in the Preface to illustrate how “the intricate and complex cultural transactions that reshaped the Acadian, and later Cajun, community and the whole of America over time developed in such nuanced ways that a superficial summary … would be insufficient” (xii).

The book, one of eight in Oxford University Press's American Musicspheres ethnomusicology series, takes the form of eight primary chapters, essays which deal with various aspects, specific and general, of the development of Cajun music through 1950. Perhaps the piece which best exemplifies Brasseaux's central thesis is the third, “A Heterogeneous Tradition,” in which diverse, apparently “contradictory” influences – French and “Anglo,” rural and urban, contemporary and traditional – inform a genre that becomes simultaneously revered as authentically “folk” music and also commercially successful. Later chapters explore this apparent contradiction between artistic authenticity and resultant commercial success, an issue which has been the consideration of musicologists since the era of John and Alan Lomax. Brasseaux frames his interrogation of this problem along lines which, although not unfamiliar, do serve to support his primary aim of bringing Cajun music back from the rural isolation to which it is customarily excluded. The question of what it means for American popular music and our understanding of it that authentic, “real” cultural expressions are required to be representative of a homogeneous and excluded whole is at the heart of this book, and it is an issue with which Brasseaux engages in a persuasive and thoughtful manner.

Along with such general and wide-ranging discussions, Cajun Breakdown examines in depth some specific exemplars of Cajun music with a view to illustrating the complex matrix of influences brought to bear on the form. His essay on what is termed the “Cajun National Anthem” (chapter 7), the 1946 recording by Cajun fiddler Henry Choates of “Jole Blon,” takes Choates's version as a starting point and goes on to map the development and appropriation of that particular piece through the Cajun musical tradition, its influence on more “mainstream” American popular music, and twenty-first-century fiction, among other things. Aside from that again, the book presents insightful and wide-ranging histories of several key figures and movements crucial to the evolution of Cajun musical expression, from the pioneering efforts of such performers as the gender-role challenging guitarist Cleoma Breaux and fiddler Leo Soileau through Hank Williams Sr. and on to Bruce Springsteen. Also included is a contextualized and useful discography in the form of an appendix, thoughtfully presenting the availability and importance of a range of the works alluded to throughout the book.

Brasseaux has managed, through his coherent interweaving of general musicological history, sociological consideration and specific case study, to present a work which is persuasive, engaging and learned in equal measure. The lucidity of Cajun Breakdown, along with its exhaustive annotation, serve to make it an engaging and enlightening intervention.