Alcide "Blind Uncle" Gaspard was a blind vocalist and guitarist from Louisiana who alternated between string-band music (in a band with his brothers) and traditional Cajun balladry on his recordings for Vocalion. Born in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana in 1880, he became blind when he was seven. Gaspard formed his first band with his brothers Victor and Amade. When he began recording in the late 1920s it was as a backing guitarist for fiddler Delma Lachney. He also recorded some solo selections during these sessions. Little else is known about Gaspard, though four of his sides (and a few of his appearances with Lachney) appear on the Yazoo compilation Early American Cajun Music released in 1999. Gaspard died in 1937.
Famous quotes containing the words blind and/or uncle:
“The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest looking persons I ever see; except one, and that was uncle Silas, when he come in, and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn’t know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer meeting sermon that night that give him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn’t a understood it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)