The passing of a master

Milton Vanicor, who died earlier this month at the age of 96, was a master fiddler who waited until the he was 95 to make his first recording, but one who developed early in his life a passion for Cajun music and the culture it embodied.
When he was growing up in the tiny community of Prairie Hayes in Acadia Parish, his parents, Jules and Hermina Vanicor, eked out a living farming cotton and feeding a few animals, but didn’t have the money to buy the fiddle that their young son craved.
He solved that problem by making his own instrument, using a piece of scrap lumber and a Prince Albert tobacco can, strung with wire used for broom making. His bow was made with a green tree branch and horse hair and resined with pine tar. It wasn’t a Stradivarius, but it was all he needed to begin playing the instrument that he would master.
He met Odile Bellard at a house dance in 1936 and married her the next year. They lived for a bit in Lake Charles, then moved to the Lacassine area to farm rice and cotton. That’s what he was doing when the United States was drawn into World War II and Uncle Sam said he needed Milton in the fight.
He was drafted into the Navy and served in the Pacific aboard the USS Newberry, an attack assault craft designed to ferry troops to land. It was pretty hairy business. For 10 days during the invasion of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles of the war, Milton’s ship raced time and again into dangerous waters to land Marines and to take off more than 400 injured men, who would have died if they had not been quickly evacuated. Even then, some did not make it.
“They’d start bringing those wounded boys on board and they’d die when they were on our ship,” Milton said in an interview several years ago. ”It was terrible.”
His ship also took part in hard fighting for Okinawa and in ferrying occupation troops to Japan at the end of the war.
When he got home from the war he wanted to take up the fiddle again, but once again there was no money to buy one. Once again he made his own.
In 1948, Iry Lejeune, Odile’s first cousin who became a legendary accordion player, came to live with the Vanicors, and creation of a Cajun band was perhaps inevitable after that. Iry, Milton, his brothers Ellis and Ivy, nephew Orsy, and brother-in-law Asa Lejeune formed the Lacassine Playboys. They became one of the most popular bands in south Louisiana, and in the early 1950s that caused a problem for Milton. He loved to play his music but it wouldn’t support his family.
He put away his fiddle and took up carpentry, creating a construction business that built homes across southwest Louisiana. He kept his hand in, playing the fiddle at parties and at home but didn’t play publicly again for more than 50 years, when after retiring from his business he began playing at nursing homes and in jam sessions.
This was just at the time when young musicians were taking an interest in the traditional Cajun music that he played, and he was invited to play at the Balfa Cajun Music Camp. That led to other teaching opportunities. For three years he was a featured guest artist and on the staff of the American Fiddle Tunes Festival in Port Townsend, Wash., where he played music and demonstrated the right way to make a roux.
Peter McCracken, director of the Townsend festival, captured who Milton Vanicor was as well as any of his eulogists. “Mr. Milton was so kind,” he said. “He was just tickled to see those young people try to learn his music. I am so grateful to have known him.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.