Kevin Naquin

Kevin Naquin easily ran away with the Cajun French Music Association's Le Cajun Awards ceremony in 2000. The musician, who was in his early twenties at the time, swept five of the night's top awards along with his band, the Ossun Playboys. Naquin earned top honors as Accordionist of the Year and Vocalist of the Year, while he and the group took home Band of the Year and Album of the Year for their Pour la Première Fois release in 1999 from Swallow Records. The award for Song of the Year went to "Je Suis en Amour Avec la Femme Que J'ai Marie," which Naquin co-wrote with Barry Jean Ancelet, aka Jean Arceneaux. Unlike numerous Cajun songs that concentrate on love lost, "Je Suis en Amour Avec la Femme Que J'ai Marie" is a positive celebration of the enduring love of a man for the woman he took as his bride. Another Naquin and Ancelet collaboration, "Pour la Première Fois," from which the album takes its name, is similarly themed. Naquin has made a name for himself as an accomplished accordionist who puts his own slant on traditional Cajun numbers while still penning new music. The latter category would include his "Ossun Playboy Special," an instrumental. In 2001, Naquin's own company, Bayou Groove Productions, put out Au Coup d'Èclair, the Ossun Playboys' second CD.

Despite his youth, Naquin has been taking home awards for more than six years. In 1994, when he was a junior accordionist, he took home his first top prize at an annual competition staged in Breaux Bridge, LA. Great grandfathers from both sides of his family were musicians. Hadley Fontenot played a Horner accordion that eventually became his great grandson's, while Edius Naquin played the fiddle. In addition to his family's musical influence, Naquin received a first-hand introduction to the accordion-playing ability of a Louisiana musician who has been honored as a Cajun living legend, Don Montoucet. Around the age of three, Naquin was frequently invited to climb aboard Montoucet's lap and listen while he played, thanks to the fact that the elder accordionist and his wife, Adolice, were the future accordionist's babysitters.