Photograph by Sarah Conard
When Dennis Stroughmatt did graduate work at the University of Quebec, he stayed with a French family. “Mais ça fait fraitte dehors,” he remarked casually one night, coming in from the chilly evening.
His host looked up. “What did you say?”
He’d said it was cold—literally, “it makes cold outside.” But the modern French word was froid, not fraitte.
“How do you know that word?” his host persisted.
“From Missouri,” Stroughmatt said, not realizing that fraitte hadn’t been used in contemporary French for centuries.
“That’s impossible,” the host declared. So Stroughmatt pulled out maps of Missouri and Illinois, and the two bent over them and read all the tiny town and river names. The man shook his head in amazement.
In the years that followed, Stroughmatt braided his interests in roots music, history, folklore and language. Best known as a Creole French fiddler, he apprenticed with three Missouri Creole French fiddlers: Charlie Pashia and cousins Roy and Pete Boyer. He now has two bands—Creole Stomp, which plays Cajun, and L’Esprit Créole, which plays the traditional French music of this region. He’s played his Creole French fiddle at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, at the Rhythm & Roots Festival in Charlestown, R.I., and on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion.
But he’s also one of the last to speak Old French, a language frozen in time in Missouri’s Old Mines region, which runs from Potosi to Festus. His commitment to preserving the language has him giving talks at schools and historic sites all over the region—and makes him a magnet for all manner of curious clashes with modern French culture.
Once in the early ’90s, when he tried to rent a car at the Paris airport, intending to drive to the Normandy battlefield, he asked for un char, and a sitcom of frustrated “Monsieur, you cannot do that” and “Whaddya mean I can’t rent a car?” ensued. Char, short for chariot, is Old French for “cart.” What Stroughmatt didn’t know is that its modern meaning is not “car” but “tank.” The car-rental guy thought the crazy American wanted to rent a tank and drive it to Normandy.
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In the ’80s, when Stroughmatt studied historic preservation at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, he gravitated toward stories of people and their culture, not the dusty litany of important dates and leaders. So when he heard that people still spoke Old French and kept up the old music and customs in the Old Mines region, he wanted to learn more. “Don’t just read about it in a book,” his history professor urged him. “Go find out who they are.”
So Stroughmatt, Scottish and Choctaw by descent, with only one semester of French to his credit, started spending weekends in Old Mines. He learned the old French stories and jokes, and he went to house parties (bouillons) with people three times his age. “I didn’t even realize nobody else there was under 50,” he says with a grin, explaining that he’d grown up hanging out with his Choctaw grandfather on the Wabash River. The mood of the bouillons carried him back to those days, too: “I grew up on Bonpas Creek in southeastern Illinois, and my father’s family had a very nomadic history; they lived and worked on the rivers, and there were house dances on houseboats, with moonshine, and life was catch as catch can. When I met this intense French Creole population in Old Mines, it gave me this outlet for everything I had known as a kid.”
He picked up The Gambler, the fiddle his great-grandfather won in a card game, and joined in the merriment. The sense of humor was freewheeling, not necessarily sarcastic but always self-deprecating, and as resilient as the blues. “They could take a really painful situation and still sit down and have a beer over it,” he says. “They complained about absolutely everything, but at the end of the day, they were still willing to get out there and do some barbecuing. ‘Troubles? We’ll deal with them on Monday.’”
Often it took a few swigs of moonshine to loosen their native tongue, though: They’d been punished in school for speaking French, and they’d been told they didn’t speak right, their language wasn’t real. “They would rather not say a word than be accused of not speaking properly,” he says.
When Stroughmatt went on for a master’s degree at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he fell in love with fellow student Jennifer Hellmuth and started taking her with him to Old Mines. She understood people’s defensiveness perfectly. “My grandparents were Acadian French, from Maine, and they had to kneel on hard corn kernels with their arms outstretched, holding heavy Bibles, if they spoke French,” she told him.
Jennifer—last name now Stroughmatt—had the French credentials Dennis lacked: DNA, plus eight years’ study of formal academic French. “My grandmother was very strict, and when I got her mad, she’d rattle off comments in French—so I was bound and determined to learn the language,” she explains. “I studied it in school for eight years, and then Dennis came along and destroyed my French.” She started grating on her Parisian French professor’s nerves by pronouncing oui as “way,” in a nasal drawl, and rolling her R’s instead of letting the sound rasp at the back of her throat in proper French fashion. “Ang, doo, twaahh,” she teases, demonstrating the Old French pronunciation of “un, deux, trois.” “My grandmother couldn’t understand my A+ school French, but when Dennis showed up, she loved him.”
Missouri’s Old French was enough like Cajun and Acadian French that Jennifer’s grandmother understood everything Dennis said. “It’s like American English,” Dennis says: “Less formal, very country, very familiar.” The simple modern French maintenant, for “now,” is droit à cette heure (right at this time) in Old French. Il pleur (it rains) is ça fait mouier (it’s making wet), and the last word is pronounced “mooey.” Words are shortened and dropped; what’s left rolls together indiscriminately; English sneaks in mischievously—“y’all vous autres”; pronunciation flattens and twangs like a loose guitar string.
Old French started fading in France in the 1600s, after Cardinal Richelieu started l’Académie Française and King Louis XIV intensified its purist efforts to teach French children a more urban, refined way of speaking. But French families without much formal education brought Old French to the New World, and here it froze.
“I’d ask people what their word was for a computer, and they’d say ‘la machine,’” Dennis says, “and I’d ask what their word was for a buzz saw, and they’d say ‘la machine.’”
Founded in 1723, the village of Old Mines vies with Ste. Genevieve for the claim of first permanent settlement in Missouri. The Old Mines district is part of the French “Illinois Country,” a.k.a. “Upper Louisiana,” which includes parts of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Arkansas. “When Cajun music and culture got big, people drove through
St. Louis to get to Louisiana, not even realizing they were going right through this corridor of French culture,” Dennis says. “The French Creoles in Missouri and southern Illinois have never had a very big PR network. There’s no big cultural center. They’re just living their lives.”
Jennifer adds that because St. Louis is called the Gateway to the West, “that automatically associates it with the Anglo path. It’s not ‘City of All Rivers,’ which would have drawn more attention to the French settlers here.”
“When Lewis and Clark showed up, the local French gave them tourist maps,” Dennis says dryly. “Now, you find out there’s this piece that hasn’t disappeared—it’s just sort of hidden itself. The Missouri Humanities Council and Illinois Arts Council have helped people realize. When I started playing at the Fête”—La Fête de l’Automne, the first Sunday of October in Old Mines—“11 years ago, there were a couple hundred people there. Now it draws 800 to 1,000.”
In the 1980s, between 400 and 500 native French speakers still lived in the Old Mines region. “People could go in and out of English and French” fluidly, Dennis says. Their families had fished and mined lead and chalky white barite, the stuff of lead paint. They lived tight, close lives with scant outside influence.
Asked how many of those native French speakers remain, Dennis starts listing them off—by name. Pressed for a total, he says maybe 40 or 50. “How many are fully fluent, I don’t know. But they come to the fête—the Thibeaus and the Robarts and the Boyers and the Villmers—and every once in a while, another French speaker pops up.”
Whenever that happens, Dennis feels a rush of exhilaration. He can’t bear to see this language go the way of Pictish, Cumbric, Tasmanian and Old Tibetan. “It’s another thread in the American fabric,” he says. “It adds that bit of color.”
“And the language is the embodiment of its speakers’ ideas, of how they experienced the world around them,” Jennifer adds.
Invariably, the schoolkids they talk to and play for (Jennifer plays string and percussion instruments, and often the Stroughmatts perform together) ask enthralled questions. So do the grown-ups, who never knew this pocket of French-American history existed.
“As we become a more homogenized American culture, when you find that little extra something, it’s fascinating,” Jennifer says. “It’s like a secret that’s been kept from you for years.”
“The music is another piece of the puzzle,” Dennis says. “You wouldn’t have bluegrass if it weren’t for some of the French Celtic fiddle styles in Missouri and southern Illinois. This music has influenced other forms. My whole point is to let it keep influencing—and keep it as close to its cultural tradition as possible.”
French Creole fiddling has “this driving pulsation you don’t even get in Cajun,” he adds. “You don’t get it in country; you don’t get it in bluegrass. They have a backbeat. French Creole has a front beat. It’s a very driving dance rhythm; that’s what it was made for.”
He performed recently at a Wisconsin showcase, and musicians in the audience kept trying to pigeonhole the music as Canadian or Louisianan. “Don’t do that,” he told them gently. “Missouri music has its own style.”
In 2000, he and Jennifer released a second CD on the Swallow label, The Gambler’s Fiddle: French Creole Fiddle Tunes and Ballads From Old Upper Louisiana, Vol. 1. “Dennis said, ‘We will probably be sitting on these forever,’” Jennifer recalls. “A few months later we were ordering more.”
The music’s sure to survive, Dennis says. The other half of his life’s work, the Old French language, may not. “Music can be picked up by pretty much anybody. Language is tougher; you have to live inside it. You have to communicate in it for some period of time in your life to learn its intricacies and idiosyncrasies.”
Does he ever think in Old French? “Oh, I used to. And when you are having night-mares in Old French, you know you have
crossed over.”
