Bruce Daigrepont was born in New Orleans to a Cajun family from Avoyelles Parish that had migrated to the city for postwar work. Raised on guitar from age five and fascinated by Cajun French language and heritage, he attended the 1978 Festival Acadiens in Lafayette and left inspired to learn the accordion and start his own Cajun band.
By 1980, the 22-year-old Daigrepont had launched a weekly Thursday-night fais do-do at the Maple Leaf Bar — at the time nearly the only Cajun music in New Orleans. In 1986 he moved the party to Sunday afternoons at Tipitina's, where it ran for thirty years before he stepped back in 2016, later returning for monthly shows starting in 2019. Backed by longtime bandmates Gina Forsyth (fiddle), Jim Markway (bass), and Mike Barras (drums), Daigrepont maintains a floating repertoire of more than two hundred songs and famously never uses a set list, drawing on Cajun waltzes, two-steps, blues, swamp pop, and zydeco in performances that have carried him to Wolf Trap, Lincoln Center, and stages across Europe.
