Ghosts of Good Times: An Interview with John "Pudd" Sharp

John “Pudd” Sharp is the assistant director for research at the Center for Louisiana Studies. He is the primary contact for the Center Archives and was the treasurer of the Louisiana Folklore Society from 2011 to 2022. Sharp is also the curator of the website louisianadancehalls.com, an online collection of information relating to the dance hall phenomenon, from photos to film to a map of dance halls, past and present, around the state. He has unearthed many photos and primary sources once considered lost through years of personal investigation. His research contributed to the production of the UL Press book Ghosts of Good Times: Louisiana Dance Halls Past and Present, featuring photos by Philip Gould and various authors, including Herman Fuselier.

UL Press spoke with Sharp about the history of dance halls and what make them such a unique part of Louisiana's cultural landscape. (Responses have been edited for clarity and length.)

What led you to research dance halls in the first place?

The way I really got interested is that, as a person from Alabama who does not speak French, the songs that have English titles caught my eye. I would think, “What is this? How come this is one is in English, but other song titles are in French?" And then I started asking around, and people said, “Oh, that song is named after a dance hall.”  So I said, "I wonder what that place looks like?" I started looking for images and information and couldn't find it. That’s what sparked all this research. I was able to begin collecting rare photos of dance halls and little bits of history.

What factors contributed to the original rise of dance halls in the region?

The thing you probably need to talk about first is the house dance, which is the bal de maison. That was something like the original house party. Musicians played, people made food, and they cleared out furniture from their houses so that there was room to dance, and they invited friends and family. But that period of house dances didn't originate in the United States. Those were brought along with the traditional cultures that came and settled—or were moved—here: Acadians, Spanish, Germans, Caribbean, and African. Those were pretty popular for a while. Then, in say the '20s and '30s, commercial dance halls started to be built.

How did the concept of dance halls, a place where people could get away and relax at the end of a hard work week, impact the average Louisiana family?

They generally used repurposed buildings, some of which were barns. You open the window and hold it up with a stick, that kind of thing. Some of these places were just getting electricity. People were starting to go to these dances in large numbers, walking to them, riding horses to them, getting picked up in wagons and then cars and buses. Other than church and work, people didn't have a lot of opportunities for organized recreation, and I think the dances filled a need. We often refer to dance halls as the secular half of the social life at this time. Anything that didn't happen at church happened at dance halls. People courted there; there were fights. There was just a real need for entertainment and to meet other people, to interact with people other than family members. There was nowhere else you could really go, especially when you're an adult. All ages were welcome, so many people took their children, and sometimes there were designated spaces where children could sleep while the parents danced. Sometimes, dance halls of this era are referred to as a "fais do-do." Dance halls also gave a place to get news, a place to handle those beefs that you had with people, and a place to interact with the opposite sex. 

How did dance halls affect the history of zydeco and swamp pop?

Swamp pop started out as Cajun and Creole kids playing R&B music. These kids used the dance hall structure as a place to perform, and in their free time, white kids would visit the more R&B-based venues, the clubs that they sometimes call the Chitlin Circuit clubs. The Chitlin Circuit was a large, interconnected group of venues that served the African American community across the southern and eastern US from the 1930s through the '60s, where it was safe for black musicians to play, eat, and find a place to stay. 

In the early '50s, these Cajun kids started hanging around in some of these clubs and experienced the music firsthand. They incorporated that into not only their rock 'n' roll, but also swamp pop. So the R&B, early zydeco, and Creole clubs would have been very important in the formation of swamp pop music.

During the era of dance halls, segregation and Jim Crow laws were the norm. How did this effect the average dance hall?

In the era of Jim Crow segregation, it was definitely more common to see white people in black spaces than black people in white spaces (other than as service providers or entertainers). It's also worth noting that, in some areas, there was a large Native American population that had their own dance halls. There are many stories about these groups overlapping and people trying to "pass" as white. 

What gave rise to the rumors of violence being common at the weekend dance?

They weren't rumors; violent incidents were frequent. I once asked DL Menard about violence in the dance halls. He said, “If you went out on the weekend and you did not see some violence, some kind of a fight, it was like you didn’t really go out.” A weekend of recreation at these rural halls without witnessing a fight was unheard of.

People took advantage of these settings to act on their problems with each other, from business to interpersonal issues. Stories of violence are prevalent in newspapers of the time—really crazy (and possibly exaggerated) stories of shootings, knife fights, and extreme bodily harm. Stories of people walking into a bar, sticking their knife into the wall, and hanging their hat on it as a display of willingness to fight.

If there was a fight, there were these legendary bouncers in these places who could pick up a man in each hand by their belt, walk them outside, and throw them. That kind of stuff, as you can imagine, is very memorable. But on the other hand, if you ask people who the band members were, they don't remember. It's common to find that the details we find interesting today weren't that important to them then. When they went to dance halls, they didn't care who the band was, they were mainly interested in the dancing, fighting, and hearing the news of the day.

So, I don't think it's an exaggeration [to say there was always violence]. But it also makes sense to remember that "bad news spreads like wildfire; good news travels slow."

 

What happened to dance halls? What caused such a popular weekend phenomenon to dwindle?

It depends on who you ask. In my estimation, the height of dance halls was just after World War II, with soldiers coming home to lean times in the US. There's the book Frenchie [recently published by UL Press], which is about young men from south Louisiana serving in Europe during the war. They had been taught to be ashamed of their culture and language, but they saw a larger picture of French culture through their deployments, and they realized they were not alone in the world—that their heritage was worth celebrating. The soldiers came back proud of their culture and it helped to inspire a French-speaking renaissance back home.

Over time, as the broader American culture intruded through mass media, fewer people taught their children to speak French, which led to even fewer people enjoying French-speaking Cajun music. There was everything in the world competing with that type of entertainment. Some people say that casinos killed the dance hall. Movie theaters, skating rinks, arcades. There were simply more options for entertainment and social interaction outside work and church.

Also, early dance halls were cash businesses, usually run by one person. When the owner's family inherited the establishment, they often did not know how to operate the hall as a business, and they did not appreciate all the hard work that went into running it. The original owner had really been the glue keeping it all together. More recently, owners have told me that a dance hall is really a part-time job with full-time responsibilities. It's a tough business. When I ask them if they have a picture of their dance hall, many reply, “No, why would I have taken a picture of it? Do you take a picture of your workplace before you go in?" Dance halls were so common that people took them for granted.

How does the legacy of dance halls live on to this day?

If you get somebody to start talking to you about dance halls, they are reliving their glory days. Even people who are typically quiet—people you think maybe don't have a whole lot to tell you—have a whole life that the people around them might not even know about.

I had done work with a group of quilters I used to go sit with, all older ladies. One day, I asked, “Does anybody have a dance hall story for me?” And this lady everybody said was very prim and proper told me the craziest story about how she went with her girlfriends to this dance hall. There was an old man who was very drunk at the bar. The ladies stole his keys and took his car on a tour of all the local dance halls for several hours. When they came back, the old man was still sitting there in the same place, drunk. They put his car back where it had been and nobody ever knew anything about it. Her friends, who she'd quilted with for all these years, were aghast. 

Then there were breakout artists that people loved. They became famous and are well known, like Clifton Chenier. A lot of people got into Cajun and zydeco by seeing the bands perform in dance halls. Some of those same people were important to the origins of Festivals Acadiens et Créoles and Festival International, along with many other smaller festivals around Acadiana. Dance hall culture really informed all those things. All this, along with New Orleans hosting the World’s Fair in 1984, really led to Cajun culture and food spreading across the country and around the world.

How can we preserve this legacy?

Well, you know, the book Ghosts of Good Times is a great example. Buy the book and soak in those great stories and images! My website, louisianadancehalls.com, is an attempt to do the same thing—to get people to share their information and stories. There are also numerous memory-sharing social media groups that I love, like “Opelousas Memories” or "You Might Be From New Iberia If...." This history is all around us—you just need to take notice of it.

For more information and photographs, see Ghosts of Good Times: Louisiana's Dance Halls Past and Present, now back in stock!