Coco Robicheaux: The Blues Rougarou of Frenchmen Street

The Rougarou of Frenchmen Street

Curtis John Arceneaux was not born to be ordinary. Born in Ascension Parish to an Acadian family, he became a blues musician, a visual artist, a mystic, and a character so thoroughly larger than life that his stage name — Coco Robicheaux — came from a Louisiana folk tale about a Cajun werewolf. The loup garou, or rougarou, is a creature from French Louisiana folklore that abducts naughty children. It is a strange and wonderful name for a strange and wonderful man, and it fit him like a second skin.

Coco was one of those New Orleans figures who defied easy categorization. His music was blues at its foundation, but it incorporated elements of swamp rock, roots music, and something darker and more spiritual that seemed to come from the same bayou waters that produced the folk tales he was named after. He played guitar with a rawness that suggested the instrument was an extension of his nervous system, and he sang with the weathered authority of a man who had seen things he would never fully explain.

Art, Music, and the Voodoo Blues

Beyond the music, Coco was a visual artist whose paintings and drawings explored the same mystical territory as his songs. His art was outsider art in the truest sense — vivid, spiritual, haunted — and it hung in galleries and bars and private collections throughout New Orleans. He was also known as a practitioner of folk spirituality, a man who took the voodoo and hoodoo traditions of Louisiana seriously at a time when most people treated them as tourist kitsch.

He portrayed himself in the HBO series Treme, David Simon's love letter to post-Katrina New Orleans, which was fitting because Coco was the kind of character that fiction writers dream about but rarely have the nerve to invent. He was too real to be made up — too eccentric, too talented, too deeply rooted in the soil of Louisiana to be anything other than exactly what he was.

Last Call at the Apple Barrel

Coco Robicheaux died the way he lived — on Frenchmen Street, in the middle of the music. He collapsed at the Apple Barrel, his favorite bar, a tiny venue on the stretch of Frenchmen that serves as the beating heart of New Orleans' live music scene. It was, in its sad way, the most appropriate exit imaginable. The rougarou went home to the swamp, and Frenchmen Street lost one of its most essential souls. But his music and his art remain, as wild and untamed as the man himself, proof that New Orleans will always produce people who cannot be contained by convention.