Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, December 29, 1998

D. L. Menard got to Cajun music "through the back door"

by Jim Bradshaw

The first songs he learned and sang were from the American country music that he heard on the family radio. When he began singing with the Louisiana Aces, he sang mostly Hank Williams songs. But as Cajun music began to make a comeback, the band began to play and sing more of them, and he began also to sing traditional songs in French and to write new ones.

The one that established his name as a Cajun songwriter was La Porte d'en Arrièrer. He told about writing it in an interview with Barry Jean Ancelet, published in the Makers of Cajun Music.

"'The words just came to me," Menard said. "I based the tune on Hank William's Honky Tonk Blues. I changed the tune some and made up words in French. You know nothing makes a better song than something ordinary that you see or do every day but never notice. La Porte d'en Arrièrer (is) about having to come in through the back door. Lots of people could identify with that. The story came to me all at once but I was working in a service station at the time. I had to fix flats and pump gas and serve the people, so I was only able to get to the song between jobs. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but I didn't have the time to sit down and write it all at once. Every little chance I had I would get my note pad and write down what I could. I wrote the words in English, because I don't know how to write in French, but the song was in French. I wrote it in English as close as I could to what I wanted to say in French."

In the 1970s, Menard began appearing in the annual Smithsonian folk life festival in Washington and later made State Department-sponsored tours of Latin America, Asia, and Europe, playing and singing Cajun music around the world.

In 1994, Menard was one of 11 folk artists who received the National Heritage Fellowship Award. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton presented him with a plaque proclaiming him a master artist.

At the time of the award, the National Endowment for the Arts characterized him as a man whose "wit unfailing good humor, generosity, and overall make-up embodied a self confident quintessential Cajun character."

Despite that designation, Menard said then that he still had a soft spot in his heart for the country music made famous by Hank Williams.

"At every show I like to throw in a Hank Williams song," Menard said. "I still have an old autographed picture of him."