The Cajun Triangle
Back in the early 90s Cajun music was big. Every other acoustic band seemed to have Cajun tunes in their set and most had a Cajun triangle. It’s a percussion instrument you hang from your index finger, a triangle formed from a long single piece of round bar, the ends at the open angle tapered and scrolled back. You strike it rhythmically with another piece of bar, damping the ringing by wrapping your hand round the instrument to get a variety of duller sounds and tones. It proved really popular and I had quite a production line going when I wasn’t at festivals running workshops.
There were always a few festivals early in the season that I wasn’t able to get to because of my children’s school commitments, so that year a blacksmith friend offered to take my triangles and see if he could sell them for me.
Later that month my then fourteen-year-old daughter was at WOMAD and found herself late at night sitting round a fire, listening to the drums, the guitars, the music and song. She picked out a familiar sound; someone was playing a Cajun triangle. She looked at it.
“Where did you get that? Did you buy it from a woman blacksmith?”
“No, I bought it at a festival last week from a fella selling woodburning stoves, trivets and brackets.”
“My mum made that!”
Kate The Wordsmith 