D.L. Menard

D.L. Menard, born Doris Leon Menard and long celebrated by the nickname “the Cajun Hank Williams,” crossed paths with Williams just once, at the Teche Club in New Iberia during 1951. Across the following years, the somber country songs Williams recorded stayed the dominant force shaping Menard’s own writing. His signature composition, “La Porte Dans Arriere (The Back Door),” appeared in 1962 and moved more than half a million copies, yet he never loosened his role as one of the sturdiest bridges between Cajun music and country throughout his career. Early encouragement came from his father’s harmonica playing and from an uncle who performed with a local Cajun group. When Menard sat in on a rehearsal, his uncle’s guitar work captivated him; after persuading the older man to show him a handful of basic chords, he progressed rapidly. Within six months of ordering his first instrument through the Sears and Roebuck catalog, he was already playing paid engagements. Not long after he entered Elias Badeaux’s Louisiana Aces in 1952, leadership of the band passed to him. He sustained his musical work alongside an assortment of day jobs, even writing “La Porte Dans Arriere” during shifts at a filling station. Additional earnings came from the rocking-chair factory he and his wife Louella operated. The National Endowment for the Arts presented him with a National Heritage Fellowship in 1994. Menard passed away in July 2017 at eighty-five.