I moved to Louisiana the same year the Blue Moon Guest House and Saloon opened in Lafayette. First, my family stayed there. Then I started going to performances and fun events there. I even organized a couple of them, but I never even considered the possibility of singing on its legendary stage.
Until last week.
A few weeks ago, I went to a songwriting workshop with legitimate musicians. Josh Brashear, Mary Alice Vanderwaters and I wrote a little ditty. A couple of weeks later, Brashear invited me to “sing the bridge” at the Blue Moon.
So, I went — contributing 19 words in song to his performance during Storyteller Night, which happens every other Tuesday night at the Blue Moon in Lafayette.
The crowd was generous, and the evening was a blast.
Nancy Nicholson, who runs Acadiana Talent, organizes the Storyteller Night, which she calls a listening room. That means no talking — and she’s serious.
Musicians play original music, and the audience actually pays attention. Jason Harrington is the on-stage host and backs up musicians with his guitar and/or harmonica. He’s an incredible talent and moves the evening right along.
Steve Judice, whom I met briefly at the songwriting retreat, also performed at the event. After the workshop, a mutual friend — who turns out to be Judice’s cousin — sent me a link to a YouTube video of Judice performing a piece he wrote called “The Camel Song.”
The song recounts an actual event that anyone in Louisiana who was paying attention in 2019 surely remembers. A woman visiting the Tiger Truck Stop in Grosse Tete — the one that once housed a live tiger, replaced it with a camel, and kept the name — entered the camel yard to retrieve her dog and found herself pinned.
What she did next, and what she bit, became legendary on the internet. Judice wrote the song within a day or two of the incident. He needed material for a show opening for a humorous songwriter named Kipp Adaway, and the incident arrived, he said, like an answered prayer.
The song is clever in ways that cannot be fully described in a family newspaper. What can be said is that Judice has a gift for wordplay, a commitment to the bit and the good sense to end with a disclaimer: “This is my interpretation of the facts as they might have been.”
The YouTube video has been up for three years, and, for reasons unknown, has only 275 views. He has never released the song beyond YouTube.
At the Blue Moon, Judice played nothing like “The Camel Song.” He played something called “Private Miller’s Mama’s House,” a song in honor of soldiers who didn’t come home.
Despite the hilarity of “The Camel Song,” his music is layered and many are about serious topics. They are the work of someone paying attention to the world.
Judice practiced law, primarily in Baton Rouge, for 38 years, primarily litigation, the high-stress variety. In 2012, he had a quadruple bypass. By October of that year, symptoms were returning. He made a change, trading trial work for mediation, helping opposing parties find their way to settlement.
“Basically peacemaking,” he said, “which kind of agrees more with my spirit.”
Now 70, he has been playing guitar since he was 16. He wrote his first song around 1994, when two of his four daughters started piano lessons, and he started noodling on the rented piano.
When he and his wife moved to Lafayette after retirement, they built a small outbuilding beside the house: half garden shed, half music room. He works on his music in the building every day and is currently teaching himself fiddle and accordion.
He says the outbuilding is separate from the house, so his wife doesn’t have to hear him play.
Judice has released six albums of original music — five solo, one co-written with a Texas songwriter named Slim Bob Pierce. His music is on Spotify, except for “The Camel Song.”
He describes his musical style as “Amerikinda” — a word borrowed from his friends in a Texas band called The Chubby Knuckle Choir. He says it’s not quite Americana.
People who throw themselves into what makes them happy earn my respect. Judice’s music is smart and fun. “The Camel Song,” for all of its bawdiness, is an outlier.
But there’s value in laughter too — and, trust me on this one, “The Camel Song” is definitely worth a listen.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theadvocate.com ’
