Bunkhouse Boys

Roger Weiss has always been drawn to primitive expressions of creativity. Whether in art, music, or literature, he has embraced the outliers — the less polished voice — and followed that path throughout his life.

His first musical endeavor came in middle school, when he became part of a three-piece rock and roll band: guitar, vocals, and drums. Roger was the off-pitch vocalist. The band debuted at Bar Mitzvahs they had been invited to as guests, where the actual band had little choice but to let them up to play a few songs. Nothing memorable came from that excursion, but it unleashed a curiosity about the guitar. In 1972, at age 13, he spent the summer mucking out a pony’s stall at a camp where his father worked. With those earnings he bought his first guitar. Lessons meant learning chords and the songs of the day — and he quickly discovered that bringing a guitar to parties was a considerable asset.

He picked up the fiddle in 1992 when a friend handed him one that had been sitting in an attic — a handmade American instrument over a hundred years old that remains his pride and joy. Humbled by its difficulty, he set it aside before a transformative experience at Ashokan Music & Dance Camp changed everything. Hearing a fiddler play in a field, the hair on the back of his neck stood up — the music was by Cajun master Dewey Balfa. He was hooked. Roger returned to Ashokan year after year, eventually joining the staff as an instructor, teaching the very music that had stopped him in his tracks.

Roger has recorded with Dr. Romo and the Cajun Orchestra, Cleoma's Ghost with Buffy Lewis, and The Okey Dokey Brothers, whose album won a Grammy in 2018.

It was through joining Laren Droll and Mark Sagar in the Bunkhouse Boys that Roger's true voice emerged — rhythmic, heartfelt, and rooted in listening to those who came before. The fiddle and accordion found a rare symmetry, reclaiming a character lost in the more polished modern sound. Together, they looked to the Creole masters, honoring those traditions while forging something distinctly their own.

Roger’s unique fiddling and vocals figure prominently in the Bunkhouse Boys' debut album 'Tit Oiseau (2018). Recently he recorded on ZydeGroove’s debut album Hot-Steppin (2026). For Roger, the Bunkhouse Boys weren't just another band — they were where every detour — the pony stall, the attic fiddle, the field at Ashokan — turned out to have been the road all along.

Mark Sagar is the guitar player for the Bunkhouse Boys, setting the tempo and giving the band it’s characteristic drive. Mark has been singing and playing music his whole life, having grown up in a musical household where his mother sang all day while doing housework and his father sang harmony and played harmonica. In addition, Mark comes from an old Hudson Valley family who had a family band at the turn of the century. Exposed to a wide variety of music while very young, including classical, show tunes, and folk, Mark was an early devotee of Bob Dylan and his life was changed by hearing Mississippi John Hurt and Son House on the New Port Folk Festival albums at age 13. He got his first guitar at age 14 and the journey into roots music began... Mark plays and sings finger-style country blues, old country close harmony, old-time and Cajun music. He has played roots music locally with Great Big Yam Potatoes and the Minnewaska Ramblers.

Mark discovered Cajun music about 25 years ago and became an enthusiastic two-stepper, started playing Cajun guitar at jams and became obsessed with it.

15 years ago (2011), Mark met Laren Droll at Ashokan Southern Week, where they jammed together and shortly after were joined by fiddler Roger Weiss and the Bunkhouse Boys were born. The Bunkhouse Boys have been playing dances and other venues since.

Mark plays guitar almost every day and is still improving his technique. His wife is intrigued to hear him say occasionally that he is “working on his right hand” or “still learning his way around the neck”.

Like the Bunkhouse Boys themselves, Maggie McManus got hooked on Cajun music at Ashokan Southern Week — and deepened that passion by chasing festivals wherever Cajun and zydeco dancing was on the bill. She traveled with a devoted cadre of dance friends on regular pilgrimages to Louisiana, seeking out the finest dancers the culture had to offer. Along the way she was swept into the orbit of Mona Wilson and her circle of zydeco dance aficionados, soaking up everything she could.

It was Laren who eventually coaxed her into joining the band, persuading her to take up triangle and rubboard. She took to both instruments as if she'd always played them, and her rhythm became the pulse that holds the band together.

Maggie brings to her playing a lifetime of movement — from ballet and modern dance to many forms of partner dancing, and of course Cajun and zydeco. That deep physical intelligence is inseparable from her musicianship. Her primary instrument, the tit fer (pronounced "tee fer"), is the Cajun French term for "little iron" — essentially a triangle, and one of the oldest threads in the musical tradition of the Cajun and Creole people of southeast Louisiana. She also excels on the frottoir, the corrugated metal rubboard worn as a vest and scraped to drive the zydeco groove.

In addition to her work with the Bunkhouse Boys — including on their album Tit Oiseau — Maggie plays frottoir in ZydeGroove alongside her husband Laren on accordion. ZydeGroove recently released their debut album, Hot-Steppin'. True to form, Maggie can't play either instrument without moving her feet. Given the choice, she'd always rather be out on the dance floor.

Laren Droll grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, about as far from the bayous of Louisiana as a person can get — geographically and culturally. Cajun music simply wasn't part of the landscape. Then one day, entirely by chance, he caught Marc and Ann Savoy on WBUR public radio out of Boston, and something shifted. The sound reached him in a way he hadn't expected, and he couldn't let it go.

He began hunting down every opportunity to hear and dance to Cajun music in New England — catching Marc and Ann Savoy at the Stanfordville Festival and Old Songs in New York, seeking out Louisiana bands at dances in Providence. But the events were rare and never quite enough to satisfy what had become a genuine hunger, especially for the accordion. So he made a decision: if he couldn't find enough of the music, he'd learn to play it himself. He bought his first modest Cajun accordion at the Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs, New York, and stepped onto a path he's been walking ever since.

His earliest real guidance came from Tracy Schwarz of West Virginia — a musician who had toured with the legendary Dewey Balfa, taught himself accordion in Louisiana, and steeped himself deeply in Cajun fiddling tradition. Schwarz pointed Laren in the right direction and set the tone for what would become a lifelong devotion to playing the music faithfully.

From there, Laren's education deepened considerably at the Augusta Heritage Center in West Virginia, where Cajun & Creole Week brought the cream of Louisiana musicians as artists in residence each year. Laren studied with an extraordinary range of masters: Boisec Ardoin, Danny Poullard, Delton Broussard, Sheryl Cormier, Lionel Leleux, Steve Riley, Jason Frey, Jesse Leger, Walter Mouton, and many others. He recorded everything he could — workshops, classroom sessions, informal moments — and spent years studying those recordings, absorbing techniques and nuances. It is a practice he continues to this day.

In 1989, ready or not, Laren took the plunge into playing publicly, joining the Cajun trio Pauvre Bete alongside fiddler John Walker and guitarist Dave Brown, both of Providence. The years that followed brought more bands, more stages, and steady deepening of his craft. Today he plays with Bunkhouse Boys and leads his zydeco outfit ZydeGroove, bringing dancers to their feet across the Northeast.

Laren has recorded three albums along the way: Don't Want Nobody Else with Dirty Rice Zydeco (2006), Tit Oiseau with Bunkhouse Boys (2018), and Hot-Steppin' with ZydeGroove (2026). He may be the elder statesman among Cajun accordion players in the Northeast now — but he's not finished bringing joy to the dance floor.