New Orleans singer-songwriter Robin Barnes is currently putting the last touches to her first solo full-length album, “Louisiana Love,” which dives into her family’s history and the Louisiana traditions she grew up learning about. “Louisiana Love” will be released in May, and on Friday, Barnes gave her first look at the album with the energetic zydeco single “Eh, Ma Belle.”
Featuring zydeco staples Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and Dwayne Dopsie, “Eh, Ma Belle” is full of joy and made for grabbing your partner and pulling them out to the dance floor. Take a listen to it below and find links to streaming platforms here.
“I’m a ninth-generation Louisianian, so this music is woven into my ancestry,” Barnes says. “My grandparents spoke Creole; I grew up hearing my Papa call out ‘Eh, Ma Belle’ to my Mémère across the house, and that memory became the title of this song.”
The song imagines young love, set to a fiery zydeco rhythm, Barnes adds. “Having Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and Dwayne Dopsie on it brought exactly the kind of heat it needed.”
The album “Louisiana Love” will further pull from Barnes’ family history and the ways their traditions have shaped her, she says. A native of the Lower 9th Ward, Barnes has been a well-known figure in New Orleans music for more than a decade and earned the nickname “The Songbird of New Orleans.” But although she has released a couple of EPs and a few singles with her band The Fiyabirds and as Da Lovebirds with her husband Pat Casey, “Louisiana Love” will be Barnes’ first full-length album.
A few years ago, following a health scare, Barnes began to think about the ways the women in her family have passed down their culture over the generations and found their history, language and values were shared through oral traditions. “Louisiana Love,” she says, is her way of capturing that history and leaving a record of those traditions, from Skull and Bone gangs and Black Masking Indians to zydeco, jazz and brass bands.
The album will be released in May. Find Barnes’ music at robinbarnesmusic.com.
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