The sunset resort

I'm not alone in having memories of the funky resort known, at the time of its demise, as the Sunrise Resort.

I first knew it as Ted Hilton's when in junior high, and high school, we had end of year outings at the Moodus resort, hard by the Salmon River.

Decades later when I returned to host the first Cajun and Zydeco Music and Arts Festival, it was like stepping into a time warp. Nothing had changed.

That Cajun and Zydeco Music Festival lasted for more than a decade, but now that the state owns the resort, one wonders if that festival, or others, like the annual dixieland jazz band festival will continue.

This week the Moodus noise was creole

The funky, unintentionally retro Sunrise resort in Moodus held it's regular Cajun and Zydeco Music and Arts Festival over the weekend. Formerly held, for years, on the same weekend as the Blast from the Bayou at Strawberry Park, the festival now takes advantage of a dance crowd willing to hang around for consecutive weekends. I saw a bit of the festival on Sunday, and in talking to festival-goers, reports are that despite the steamy, Lousiana-like weather, the dance tent was packed to overflowing on Saturday.

It's interesting to note that the Cajun/Zydeco dance crowd in New England is aging. Most of these folks have danced here for decades to a music which found a second home in the old North. Down home in Louisiana, the music has caught on again, in a big way, with a new generation of teens and twenty-somethings who love the old sounds, and the idea that dancing is the best form of social interaction on a Saturday night.

Soggy zydeco part deux

We spent the afternoon at Sunrise Resort in Moodus yesterday for the Great Connecticut Cajun and Zydeco Music and Arts Festival. The afternoon could not have been more splendid - sunny, bright, low humidity. Lots of dancers under the big tent for Step Rideau, whom I hadn't seen perform since a sunny day in October a few years ago at a street festival in Eunice LA. He was playing an early set, so he said, because he had a gig later that evening in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I re-connected with Al Berard, who, with the current lineup of the Basin Brothers played a set of old-time twin-fiddle fueled songs.

Now that this festival is and the one last week in Preston, are on consecutive weekends, there is an itinerant dance crowd which hangs out in Connecticut for the week, and dances until they drop on the weekends. It's amazing how this New England-Louisiana connection has sustained and grown since these bands first came north to play at the Newport Folk Festival, and later at the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival in Escoheag RI.




We were leaving as the black clouds of a thunderstorm cell pushed in from the West. Fortunately, the rain didn't last long, and with the sun breaking out again later, I'm sure the crowds were elbow to elbow for Keith Frank's set later in the evening.