Cajun-Zydeco Bands to Strike Up in Long Beach : Festival: One performer, D.L. Menard, has been called “the Cajun Hank Williams” for his plaintive vocals.

D.L. Menard and John Delafose, key figures in modern Cajun and zydeco music, will headline the fourth annual Southern California Cajun and Zydeco Music, Food and Dance Festival May 26 and 27 in Long Beach.

Other Louisiana performers on the lineup include accordionist Bruce Daigrepont’s Cajun Band and Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas. All four acts will play both days.

Also on the schedule is Danny Poullard & the California Cajun Orchestra. Folk musician Carolyn Russell of Garden Grove will be one of the festival’s organizers and a performer as a member of Wilfred Latour’s Zydeco Good-Time Aces.

The event, which has been held in various Los Angeles area locations, moves this year to the Rainbow Lagoon in Long Beach, near the convention center. Festival organizer Franklin Zawacki said the shift in location and a name change (from “Los Angeles Cajun Festival”) reflect an effort to make the event a truly Southland-wide celebration.

Furthermore, the new site will cost the promoters less, which should help keep costs down both for ticket buyers and for concessionaires who sponsor booths featuring Cajun and Southern cooking, Zawacki said. “I don’t want to sound like I’m purely altruistic about this, but I really do want to get the ticket price lower for patrons,” he said.

Last year’s admission fee, $18.50 at the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills, wasn’t considered unreasonable by festival-goers already familiar with the music, he said. “But a lot of people have never heard Cajun or zydeco ... It’s too hard for them to jump in. I’m way more interested in widening the audience.”

Zawacki’s previous festivals, which have drawn crowds of up to 2,000 people per day, have featured higher-profile acts including Beausoleil, Queen Ida & Her Bon Temps Zydeco Band and Buckwheat Zydeco.

“In the last few years it’s been getting stickier to put the schedule together. A lot of these bands are getting more popular--some of them are now going to Europe,” said Zawacki, who sponsored his first Cajun festival in Rhode Island in 1980 and has since expanded with similar events in San Francisco as well as in Southern California.

Not that Zawacki had to scrimp on Cajun and zydeco artists of stature this year.

Menard, from Eunice, La., has been called “the Cajun Hank Williams” for his plaintive vocals that, when he sings in English, share an uncanny resemblance to Williams’. Most of his repertoire is sung in Cajun French; it includes “La Porte D’en Arriere” (The Back Door), a Menard composition that has become so popular in Louisiana music it is known as “the Cajun national anthem.” He will appear with his band, the Louisiana Aces.

Delafose, also from Eunice, and his band, the Eunice Playboys, typify the more animated, rhythm-and-blues infused zydeco strain of Cajun music. The group, which includes several members of the Delafose family, hasn’t appeared at the Southland Cajun festival since the first one, in 1987.

Daigrepont, a musician and historian from Metarie, La., will be making his first appearance at the festival and only his second Southland appearance. Nathan Williams and his band, from Lafayette, La., made their Southland debut at last year’s Cajun-zydeco festival. For ticket information, call (714) 638-1466 or (213) 867-2215.