Are these Louisiana's craziest dancehall stories?

The Dew Drop Jazz and Social Hall in Mandeville is the oldest continually operating dancehall. It opened in 1895.

There's a line of dancehalls that run along Louisiana's borders with Texas and Mississippi that popped up when Louisiana's drinking age was 18 and those other states' weren't.

Hearing the names of these places in songs caught the ear and attention of John "Pudd" Sharp, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's assistant director for research at the Center for Louisiana Studies, who has inventoried more than 1,600 dancehalls.

"There are pretty common tunes that people play in Cajun vernacular and some of the words were in English," said Sharp of the songs he came across in the Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore

(at UL). "It turns out that quite a few of those were theme songs for these dancehalls.

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"And I thought, 'Man I'd love to see pictures of these places; know more about them, where they were, things like that and I was having a hard time finding information," he said. "So when I started to come across information, people helped me out and pointed me to resources and then pretty quick I had about 300 dancehalls and I was like, 'Wow - this is a lot, this is cool - I wonder where else did they have halls.'"

And so, for the past two and a half years, he's been working on a documentary of the 1,200 dancehalls (and growing) he has inventoried. Sharp hopes to have the documentary completed by year's end.

"I'm going to visit every one standing that I can find, whether it's open or closed," said Sharp. "I don't really know how many that is, so far."

And the more he looked, the more he found, and found. So Sharp decided to leave New Orleans jazz halls out of the equation.

"No offense to New Orleans, but New Orleans gets a lot of attention,"­ said Sharp. "Of course there was some stuff in New Orleans, but, man, was there anything in Shreveport? Natchitoches? What's going on there?

"So I tried to branch out looking at more directions than towards the big cities," he said. "I was surprised at what I found."

Sharp would find a little bit of information, say, in Shreveport, and then more information generally would follow.

"As soon as I can get contact in some area," he said. "They know someone I need to talk to."

And here's where you come in. If you have any information about a dancehall, you can get it to Sharp on his website.

In the research process, Sharp saw a distinct line of dancehalls along I-10 and up I-49; as well as along the Mississippi River "which you can imagine existed on both sides," he said. "There was a large amount in the Lake Charles area, including Vinton and the area called East Orange.

"Those and the Mississippi line ones really took advantage of the drinking age for so many years being 18 in Louisiana while it was 21 in the surrounding states," said Sharp. "So all sorts of these little things come into play over time."

Sharp is interviewing people and gathering photos and old footage, handbills, posters that will go into the UL archive of Cajun and Creole Folklore and also be fodder for the documentary in progress.

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"The truth of the matter, these places are disappearing and the fact that no one has really made an effort to gather any of the information together, it was just worrying to me," Sharp said, adding that for an archivist, "you lay awake at night wondering, worrying about information transmitted orally slipping through the cracks. So it seemed like a worthy project to get out there and explore.

"It's also a gateway to talk about other things," he said. "The reality is, just talking about the good times, this is entertainment to people and people love to talk about their formative years; when they were courting and their good times. A lot of the them are kind of in a high school, post-high school, the wonder years kind of area.

"It's a good project to get some people talking," said Sharp. "We talk about other things, too; people's traditional employment and trades; family history and family stories. It's a good way to get people to open up and it's any easy thing to get people to talk about."

Sharp said if anything stands out in his research, are the "craziest stories come from the most unexpected places," he said. "Oftentimes people will share a story with me that surprises their spouse or their friend or their children.

"I'm very into that — the surprise element," he said.

Take the circle of quilters in New Iberia.

"We got a lot more information than the dancehalls that day," said Sharp. "But one of the things that was really great was that people said, 'Oh, yeah. I used to go dancing there. Met my husband …'

"Most of the ladies didn't want to talk too much and then all of a sudden, one lady started saying, 'Oh, I went to that place all the time.' And everybody said, 'Oh, gosh, that place was rough. I wasn't allowed to go there,' Sharp said, and then the first woman continued with a story of how she and friends "stole a man's car to go to another dancehall.

"I heard a lot of really crazy stories," said Sharp. "But honestly, a majority of the stories were 'This was the normal thing that we did. We were so happy to have this."

For more information and to assist in the adventure, go to www.louisianadancehalls.com.