Louisiana’s four-time Grammy-nominated Pine Leaf Boys are celebrated around the world for their inimitable brand of Cajun music and youthful exuberance. The Pine Leaf Boys capture the feel of a south Louisiana roadhouse on a Saturday night. Two-steps, waltzes and shuffles — highlighted by accordion, fiddle and guitar — keep the dance floor full as these five young multi-instrumentalists trade hot solos and vocal leads alike.

The culture that the Pine Leaf Boys preserve — injecting old songs with immediacy and exuberance, and writing new ones in the traditional idiom — is the Cajun dance-hall sound of such great artists from years past as Iry LeJeune, Belton Richard, Sidney Brown, the Balfa Brothers and Vin Bruce. Esoteric names elsewhere, perhaps, they are beloved icons in south Louisiana where their succinct, eloquent and timeless songs, such as “J’ai Fait Un Gross Erreur” (“I Made a Big Mistake”) and “Parlez-nous a boire” (“Let’s talk about drinking, not marriage”), have remained popular for decades.

But the Pine Leaf Boys don’t just play Cajun music; their Louisiana music can range from gritty Creole blues to Zydeco stomps to sentimental waltzes — even a baisse-bas (an old Creole-style waltz).

The rapid rise of the Pine Leaf Boys began in 2005 when the group formed in Lafayette. Since the mid-1970s, Lafayette has served as the epicenter of the Cajun/Creole renaissance, spawning such pioneering crusaders as Zachary Richard and Michael Doucet avec BeauSoleil. Today that cultural movement is led by a third generation of torch-bearers — the Pine Leaf Boys and their colleagues in several other hot young bands — who embody the adventurous enthusiasm of the burgeoning Lafayette scene.

In an age of rampant homogenization, when vital regional cultures are eroding just like Louisiana’s endangered wetlands, the Pine Leaf Boys prove that the vitality of this homegrown music will never wane — and perhaps most importantly, never stop being riotous fun.

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