Mark Meaux
Mark Meaux formed The Bluerunners in 1987. This was an especially inventive musical era, even by South Louisiana’s high standards. Lafayette and environs were cresting a heady wave of cultural resurgence that began swelling in the late 1970s. The region’s French music and dialects, scorned and suppressed for decades, came to be revered, celebrated, and documented. A collective weight lifted from Cajun and Creole shoulders as conformist assimilation into America’s mainstream was replaced by ethnic pride.
Young musicians – such as Michael Doucet and Zachary Richard – embraced the rich local repertoire of Cajun music and zydeco. They honored this legacy, once dismissed as passé, with verbatim performances of obscure archaic classics that became favorites once again. But they also blended Cajun music and zydeco with a wealth of far-flung contemporary styles to invent a vital new sound that evolved constantly. All genres were fair play for this creative process, and Mark Meaux chose to meld his Cajun roots with punk rock.
"I loved bands like X and The Blasters. We heard all that, growing up here, we picked up on everything that was popular nationally." Meaux reflects. "It wasn’t until a few years later when I was a teenager going out to hear live music, people like the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, and bands like The Red Beans and Rice Revue, that it started to sink in how unique this area really is. And later, when I formed the Bluerunners, we did the ‘harder, faster, louder punk rock thing’ but we could also hear the local musical and cultural elements that kept popping up in our music. I can see that it’s been a long trip of learning about ourselves, and where we come from. The greatest gift we’ve had is the long line of musical "teachers" that live or have lived among us."