Midnight On Bayou Bodcau: A Song History

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"Midnight On Bayou Bodcau" is the sixth of sixteen tunes in DulciFlute, John Keane and Karen Keane's book of duets for mountain dulcimer and Native American flute, published by Fingers Of Steel.[1] Its listing stresses that everything in the book is newly composed rather than drawn from old-time repertoire; the flute line is notated in full, the dulcimer is given chords, and the download includes the authors' own recordings of all sixteen pieces.[1] The listing does not say which of the Keanes wrote this tune.[1] The Keanes come from Shreveport, Louisiana; both took music-education degrees at Northeast Louisiana University, now the University of Louisiana-Monroe, and between them they have produced several books and CDs of their own compositions for mountain dulcimer and Native American flute.[2][3]

A sketchy black-and-white print of a swamp with tall reeds, still water and ducks flying low

Charles François Daubigny, Swamp with Ducks, cliché-verre, original impression 1862, printed in 1921. A swamp scene shown for its subject, not Bayou Bodcau itself; it has no connection to the tune.

Bayou Bodcau is a real waterway in northwest Louisiana, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed it chiefly to control flooding; work on the dam at Bellevue ran from May 1947 to December 1949.[4] The U.S. Geological Survey lists a monitoring site on the bayou at the dam, in Bossier Parish.[5] The Corps project reaches north from that dam to the Lake Erling Dam in Arkansas, protects some 43,000 acres of bottomland in the flood plain between the dam and the backwater of the Red River, and mixes cypress swamp, upland forest of pine and hardwood, and open grassland; a wildlife management area of about 32,471 acres within it is run by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.[4] The sources consulted here do not say what drew the Keanes to the bayou for this tune.[1][2][3]

Our book that contains the song "Midnight On Bayou Bodcau"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "John Keane And Karen Keane, DulciFlute".
  2. DulcimerDownloads: "John Keane".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Karen Keane".
  4. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg District: "Bayou Bodcau Dam & Reservoir".
  5. U.S. Geological Survey: "(COE)Bayou Bodcau at Bayou Bodcau Dam (Riverside) - 07349651".
  6. Image: Charles François Daubigny, Swamp with Ducks, cliché-verre, original impression 1862, printed in 1921. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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