Coming in January!

ACCORDION DREAMS: 

A JOURNEY INTO CAJUN AND CREOLE MUSIC 

Music/Memoir

University Press of Mississippi

An outsider's account of her transformative obsession with Louisiana's joyous music.

  
By age thirty-nine, Blair Kilpatrick had settled into life as a practicing psychologist, wife, and mother.  Then a chance encounter in New Orleans turned her world upside down.  She returned home to Chicago with unlikely new passions for Cajun music and its signature instrument, the accordion.  Captivated by recurring dreams of playing the Cajun accordion, she set out to master it.  Yet she was not a musician, was too self-conscious to dance, and didn't even sing in the shower.

Kilpatrick's obsession took her from Chicago's Cajun dance scene to folk music camp in West Virginia, back and forth to south Louisiana, and even to a Cajun festival in France.  An unexpected family move brought her to the San Francisco Bay Area, home to the largest Cajun-zydeco music scene outside the Gulf Coast.  There, she became a protégé of renowned accordionist Danny Poullard, a Louisiana-born Creole and the guiding spirit of the local music community.

Engaging, uplifting, and illuminating a unique corner of the American cultural landscape, Accordion Dreams is her account of the possibility of passion, risk-taking and change--at any age.

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Blair Kilpatrick has an independent practice in psychotherapy.  She also performs and records with Sauce Piquante, a traditional Cajun-Creole band she founded in the late 1990s.