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David Egan: Unabashedly Experienced

Denny Culbert via John Sellards Design

Songwriters talk about a song being “honest.” And according to David Egan, that’s all about telling the truth about our battles and our triumphs — our loves and losses.

“We write music for grownup people,” he says. “Grownup music for grown-ass people.”

They’re the people you might see at the gas station, or in the grocery store. Or in the mirror.

David Egan lives in Lafayette where he makes his living writing songs for those grown-ass people, but he was raised in Shreveport, in what he calls “a symphony family” — with an opera-singing mother and an orchestra-lawyering father.

There he’d rub shoulders with visiting conductors and ballet dancers at his parents’ cast parties that went on ’til the wee hours. On school nights!!

Life took him to LSU, and Nashville, and Denton, Texas for awhile before landing him back in Cajun country and the music circuit that has nourished him.

His big break came when Joe Cocker recorded the Egan song “Please No More” on the album Night Calls.

And in the years since many of the great voices of American music have recorded David Egan songs: Percy Sledge, Etta James, Solomon Burke, Johnny Adams, Marcia Ball, and Irma Thomas among them.

Today, he can be found playing piano and singing with the swamp pop supergroup Lil’ Band O’ Gold, with the likes of C. C. Adcock, Steve Riley, Jockey Etienne, ‘Dickie’ Landry, Tommy McLain, Lil’ Buck Senegal, Pat Breaux, and John Troutman. 

Our thanks this week to John Sellards, Jasmine Egan and Beverly Egan Houston, photographer Denny Culbert, and the staff of KRVS-Radio Acadie in Lafayette, Louisiana. 

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Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans native, NPR veteran and host of WWNO's Music Inside Out, where she brings to bear the knowledge and experience she amassed as senior editor of Weekend Edition, an East Africa correspondent, the holder of Nieman and Watson Fellowships, and as a longtime student of music from around the world.