re: Is Baton Rouge redneck or Cajun?

quote:

---

BR is not Cajun or redneck. It's a college town with no real culture/identity besides LSU. (Coming from a lifelong BR resident )

Livingston/WBR = Redneck
NBR= Ghetto
SBR=Wannabe NOLA Elite
NOLA= NOLA
LAF = Cajun

---

I agree that LSU, and the capital being there both bring people in from all over. They both always have, and always will.

In the late 70's most of the guys I knew from Baton Rouge were no different than the guys in Monroe, or Shreveport. I had one frat brother who attended Robert E. Lee High School in Baton Rouge. Hung out with him a good bit when we were freshmen. Lots of kids there drove trucks, just like Monroe. Going to a football game there was no different. From my personal interactions with people from Baton Rouge, my impression was that living there was no different than living in North Louisiana. Back then, it felt like a "larger" small town to me. I was never treated any differently than I had been growing up in towns like Vidalia, Monroe, or Ruston. People were all friendly. Most of the people I knew grew up going to church back then too.

I couldn't say Lafayette or NOLA were the same. People around Lafayette were still speaking a little French back then. Sometimes you couldn't understand what a ref said in a football or baseball game. The people were nice, but their lives were different from mine. NOLA people were never as trusting as people I knew in the rest of the state. Lots of them seemed no different than Northerners that I had met.

I also wonder how many of the Baton Rouge people that I encountered in the 70's live in Livingston, or Ascension Parish now? Maybe BR was more redneck back then than it is now.