STORYTELLING is in our blood.  Michelle Benoit’s mother was a print journalist.  Glen Pitre grew up steeped in the Cajun oral traditions of Bayou Lafourche. When schedule permits, Glen and Michelle occasionally perform as on stage storytellers (sometimes in English, sometimes in French) at folk festivals in the U.S. and overseas.

COLLECTING ORAL HISTORIES since the mid-1970s, Côte Blanche Productions has preserved hundreds of hours of first person accounts of daily life in Louisiana going all the way back to the 1890s.  In addition to our self-initiated projects, along the way we’ve worked for institutions such as the Library of Congress and for researchers such as the late Allan Lomax.  You’ll find the fruits of all our recording — and so will future generations — in numerous university archives.  One of our projects, the Memories of Terrebonne Oral History Archive, won a national award as “a model for public access to folklife resources.”

RADIO provided us an ideal medium to disseminate tales in Louisiana French, a language still widely spoken, through not much read. The most listened-to of our radio projects, our 31-part series Les Raconteurs de la Louisiane, with theme music by Michael Doucet and guest producers such as Barry Ancelet and Richard Guidry, was syndicated across Louisiana and Texas.