At Fred's Lounge in Mamou, the Cajun Dance Starts on Saturday Morning and Goes Out Live on the Radio

By 8:30 on a Saturday morning, the red-brick bar in Mamou is already crowded. Couples are waltzing across the floor, a Cajun band is set up with accordion and fiddle, and the drinks on the bar include Budweiser and Bloody Marys. This is Fred's Lounge, which according to its website is open Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and for a couple of hours every week, the whole morning goes out live on the radio.

The broadcast belongs to KVPI, "The Legend," 1050 AM out of Ville Platte, which also streams online. The station's call letters stand for Keeping Ville Platte Informed, and it is one of eight stations in south Louisiana that still broadcast partly in French, NPR reported. When NPR's John Burnett visited in 2022, he found rice farmers, bikers from New Orleans and French tourists sharing the room, and the announcer working from a small table under a hand-lettered sign that read, "Please do not stand on the chairs or cigarette machine." The announcer that morning was Mike Perron, who reads sponsor spots in what he called Franglais, "little bit of French, little bit of English." According to the lounge, Perron takes the stage at 9:15 and starts things off with a hearty "laissez les bons temps rouler."

The bar is named for Alfred "Fred" Tate. Born in 1912, one of 13 children, he bought the bar from his twin brother, Alphan, in 1946 and made it a family business. The building at its current location went up in 1960. When the Mamou Cajun Music Festival honored the lounge in 2005, Tate's daughter Sandra Tate McClelland gave a short history of her father. She said he had a hand in getting the Legislature to declare Mamou "The Cajun Music Capital of the World" and in reviving Mamou's Courir de Mardi Gras, according to an account in Evangeline Today.

The radio show came out of the 1960s and a Mamou educator and writer named Revon Reed. Accounts differ on the exact year, but the basic story is consistent. Reed began playing Cajun records on the air from Fred's, a three-piece band was later hired to play live, and the music has been part of the Saturday broadcast ever since. When the original station, KEUN, moved in 1987, Tate took the show to KVPI. Reed's son Seth is a Saturday regular. "This is the only bar that's still old-school," he told NPR. "Nothing has changed since it was built."

For decades, the person people came to see at Fred's was Tante Sue. Carina Alice Vasseur married Fred Tate in 1948, and they stayed close after their divorce. She came back to help him run the bar and helped keep it going on Saturday mornings after he died in 1992, working weekdays as a legal secretary. When the bar changed hands in the late 1990s, she stayed on as manager. She wore a holster with a bottle of Hot Damn, a cinnamon schnapps, and newcomers were expected to take a shot. Her motto, as Evangeline Today recorded it, was "At Fred's, nobody is rich and nobody is poor; nobody is pretty and nobody is ugly; everyone is here to have a good time."

Tante Sue died on April 1, 2025, at 93. Her obituary noted that she made sure the radios of homebound people and care home residents were tuned to the Saturday broadcast. Her funeral plans included a "last pass" at Fred's on the way to her burial.

The lounge has new owners again. According to its website, Tricia McGee and her son, Christian, bought the business in 2023 and have added a weekday happy hour from 4 to 8 p.m. while staying devoted to Fred's traditions. The site says music still runs from about 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Saturdays and the bar still sets out samples of boudin from T'Boy's for the crowd. McGee told Voice of America that visitors come from as far as Germany, Australia and France.

The French language that fills the broadcast is getting harder to hear elsewhere. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimated about 77,000 French speakers in Louisiana in 2020, down from 136,000 a decade earlier, NPR reported. KVPI still runs news, weather, a swap shop and even obituaries partly in French, and the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters gave it a Uniquely Louisiana award in 2022.

Folklorist Barry Jean Ancelet, a professor emeritus of Francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, told NPR that Cajun French "really has become a language of performance, a language of choice." He said he is heartened that young musicians are writing songs in French. Anyone who cannot make the drive to Evangeline Parish can listen on 1050 AM or stream KVPI starting around 9 a.m. on Saturdays.

Photo: Megan Romer / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.