By Claudia Loucks
Geneseo Current
Dennis Stroughmatt and his French Creole music will be featured at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21, at the Geneseo Public Library.
A spokesperson for the library said, “Please join us on May 21! It’ll make your soul jump, your head spin, and your heart glad to know that the Creole spirit in music is here. As they say in the hills: ‘On est toujours icitte: We are still here’!”
Stroughmatt is joined by two musicians with Creole ancestry to bring the French Creole music to audiences across the continent, in a band that keeps alive the creole Spirit, appropriately named “Dennis Stroughmatt et l’Esprit Creole’.
As a young man, he spent more than three years in southeast Missouri studying and learning to speak Illinois French Creole, playing the fiddle, and singing many of the traditional songs that have permeated the region for over three hundred years.
He earned a Master’s Degree in History from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, and a Certificate of French Quebecois Studies from the University of Quebec. In addition to a musician, he also is a passionate educator who entertains and teaches his audiences at the same time.
His speaking engagements, residencies and performances include The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, The Library of Congress, The Kennedy Center, The Missouri Folklore Society, and Festival Acadian in Lafayette, LA.
Information received in a press release states: “With his great-grandfather’s fiddle in hand, Stroughmatt spent every free moment immersed in learning the old French language, the heritage and customs, and the oral traditions of these private people. It is a way of life which traveled more than 350 years ago across the ocean and made its way along the rivers to settle in the (originally French) Midwest, once known as Upper Louisiana.
He would also go on to live, work and play music in the “Cajun country” of Louisiana, and to study in Quebec, thus completing the circle of French culture in North America. A medley of music, language, stories, and culture secreted away in the Missouri Ozarks now has a voice in the tapestry of this world.”
