Louis Michot

Louis Michot is best known as the fiddle player and lead singer for the Lost Bayou Ramblers, but his passions for Louisiana French, local folklore, and sustainability in the fastest-disappearing landmass in the world are what fuel his career as a musician. With two Grammy Awards, six film scores and over 20 LPs under his belt, his music career continues to push the boundaries of Louisiana French music traditions.

In 2025, Louis embarks on his first major solo tours, supporting the release of SEAUXLEAUX, an audio and video album recorded at Dockside Studio by Tony Daigle. The recording represents Louis’ live solo shows, a dynamic performance featuring guitar, fiddle, voice and an effected-samples stomp box, with a collection of songs that tell his stories and those of the Louisiana French experience. The SEAUXLEAUX tour will visit both U.S. coasts, along with shows in the South beyond his artistic home of New Orleans, with 30 dates across the U.S. and Canada, scheduled between tours with the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Louis Michot & SWAMP MAGIC, as well as collaborations with Leyla McCalla and other Louisiana artists.

In 2024, the Lost Bayou Ramblers kicked off the year with their second Grammy win for Live: Orpheum Theater NOLA, a collaboration with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Louis also received six nominations in New Orleans’s Best of the Beat Awards, including Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year for “Boscoyo Fleaux.” He rang in the Mardi Gras season as king of the Krewe of Joan of Arc, then entered his second year performing with Louis Michot & SWAMP MAGIC, a four-piece band featuring Michot on fiddle, accordion, guitar, and vocals; Evan Ceaser on drums; the Ramblers’ Jonny Campos on pedal steel; and Bryan Webre on bass, synths, and samples.

Rêve du Troubadour, Michot’s solo debut, released in 2023, includes special guests: Nigerien Tuareg guitarist Bombino and critically acclaimed singer and multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla. He began work on the album by tracking original songs in his dry-docked houseboat, Sister Ray, during lockdown. Recording was completed at Mark Bingham’s Piety Studio, engineered and mixed by the Ramblers’ Kirkland Middleton.

In 2021, Michot faced the unique challenge of trying to perform live during a pandemic, while also leading hurricane-relief efforts (covered in a Rolling Stone article, “Can This Cajun-Punk Musician Protect His Culture From Climate Change?”) and raised funds to provide solar panels and generators to homes in rural Louisiana after Hurricane Ida (covered in The New Yorker’s “The Lost Bayou Ramblers Get Lit”).

Louis was named Louisianian of the Year in 2020, alongside his brother, Andre. The previous year, the Lost Bayou Ramblers celebrated their 20th anniversary with a live album and documentary DVD release, Asteur/On Va Continuer. The documentary aired around the world on the Francophone television network TV5Monde. This followed their first Grammy win, for 2017’s Kalenda. A few years earlier, Louis’s singing and playing were featured in the score for the Oscar-nominated film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

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