POP MUSIC REVIEW : Bayou Fiddler Starts Out With a Sizzle--but Ends With a Fizzle : Cajun: Doug Kershaw has been doing the Acadian thing for decades and is still doing it with gusto.

While things cajun--from the sublime music of Beausoliel to the cultural bastardization of “cajun” potato chips--have become a minor rage in the past few years, fiddler Doug Kershaw seems somehow to have missed the bayou boat.

When he first came to national attention in 1969 (after some regional successes in a performing career that began in 1953), the Acadian culture was such an unknown quantity that Kershaw was perceived more as a singular oddity than as an exponent of a long and rich tradition.

It’s an understandable judgment, given his wild performance style and that era, when his sawing fiddle and swamp yells scarcely called for more exposition than the quirky byways his rock peers were then exploring. Even the major Warner Bros. label, for which Kershaw recorded, promoted such unique and uncommercial stablemates as Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, Wild Man Fisher and Van Dyke Parks.

In any case, now that it’s known that there are plenty of folks sawing and hollering down along the bayous, Kershaw seems to have been all but forgotten by the media (a situation perhaps to be amended by his appearance at the Super Bowl halftime this Sunday). And while not scorned in Acadia, neither have they erected monuments to him--perhaps because he presented the music as such a sideshow attraction.

But if Kershaw’s star has waned, he evidently hasn’t been told, for he took the stage at Hamptons in Santa Ana on Thursday with an undimmed demonic glee. Sporting a fringed cowboy shirt and flared trousers that looked like he’d last gone shopping in 1971, the 54-year-old still had an utterly crazed gleam in his eye and still moved like three eels. He stomped and shimmied throughout his hourlong performance and, rather than cocking his fiddle under his chin, he flung the fragile instrument about like an unwilling dance partner.

Though abused, the fiddle certainly wasn’t neglected, as Kershaw bowed it at a furious pace on the opening “Diggy Liggy Lo,” a manic version of Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” “Louisiana Saturday Night” and others. It was all his four-piece band could do to keep up with him.

Reportedly competent on about 31 instruments, Kershaw also took turns on acoustic guitar and diatonic button accordion. His work on the latter proved to be no great shakes, but he provided some excellent picking on Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya.” Seated at the edge of the stage for his guitar part of the show, he also sang a strangely uninspired version of the cajun anthem “La Lousiane.”

Had Kershaw stoked, or even maintained, the fire that he opened his show with, he truly could be regarded as one of our nation’s neglected resources. But from the point when he abandoned his violin at midshow, much of the verve seemed to go out of his performance, so much that his closing signature tune “Louisiana Man” and the encore “Mama’s Got the Know-how,” were downright tepid.

During the show Kershaw remarked, “Writers always ask me, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of doing “Louisiana Man”?’ Hell, no. I wouldn’t have written it if I was going to get tired of it.”

Yet the song did indeed seem to suffer from the wear of years (even before their pop success in 1969, both “Louisiana Man” and “Diggy Liggy Lo” were regional hits for Kershaw and his brother Rusty). If he were to spice his shows with material that would be more challenging to him--drawing perhaps more from his rich, emotion-filled tradition--or at least with the fresher offerings of his current “Hot Diggity Doug” album, Kershaw might better run the race that his starting gate fervor promised.