Vendors, entertainers and Volunteers eager to kick off Mudbug’s 32nd year

Mudbug Madness is clawing its way back into Shreveport’s Festival Plaza.

And after 32 years, the food-focused festival seems to have perfected its recipe for success: Great music, dedicated volunteers and, of course, some of the tastiest mudbugs in all of Louisiana.

This year’s four-day festival kicks off the May 21-24 leading into Memorial Day weekend. Mudbug Madness will be open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Admission is $5 per person with children younger than 7 getting in free. Military members get in free with valid identification.

The festival is expected to feature some of the top crawfish in Mudbug Madness history, Robert Shaver, the man tasked with supplying the festival’s signature food source, said.

“This year is the best crawfish season for Mudbug Madness,” Shaver said, who credits the ideal water and weather conditions for the top-notch crawfish crop.

And Shaver, who owns Shaver’s Crawfish and Catering in Shreveport, knows a thing or two about the fire-engine red mudbug. He’s worked the festival for 14 years. For the last eight, Shaver’s has been the one-and-only source of crawfish for Mudbug Madness. This involves locating, purchasing and transporting anywhere from 65,000-pounds (in a weak year) to 100,000-pounds (in a strong year) of the small, clawed shellfish.

“It is a Herculean task,” Melanie Bacon, executive director of Downtown Shreveport Unlimited, said. DSU is responsible for Mudbug Madness as well as other events like Brew, Cork and the Red River Revel.

And there is a lot riding on Shaver’s ability to deliver the festival’s namesake delicacy, too.

The summer kickoff event that is Mudbug Madness regularly draws approximately 60,000 festivalgoers and carries an estimated economic impact of between $5-9 million dollars, Bacon said. Those figures are based on an economic study performed by Louisiana Tech University in 1997.

In the past, Bacon said, many festival vendors have fallen through on their crawfish commitments.

But not Shaver. “[Shaver] is the biggest user of crawfish in North Louisiana, and he comes through,” Bacon said.

She recalled eight years ago when two booths ran dry on a Saturday night. Bacon had just sat down to dinner when a volunteer appeared and yelled, “We just ran out of crawfish at two booths.”

Bacon went straight to Shaver, who was at his own booth cooking and selling crawfish to benefit C.E. Byrd High School

Football. Shaver agreed to sell the crawfishpoor booths a portion of his supply.

“He basically saved the night,” Bacon said.

Since that night, Shaver has literally put the “mudbug” into Mudbug Madness.

He admits the position is not one to be envied. True, it has a “huge financial impact” on his business.

“[But] the logistics are more than most people can comprehend,” Shaver said.

So how does he do it? First, Shaver has brokers all over Louisiana buying up crawfish for the event.

Second: “I do a lot of favors for people throughout the year.”

It’s a good chance those favors are needed just to supply the festival’s crawfish eating contest. One year, Bacon said the winning men’s contestant ate 42-pounds of crawfish in 30-minutes.

Asked about watching the mass consumption of his hard work, Shaver said, “It’s a big blow because it takes 500-pounds of crawfish just for the men’s event, which takes away from cooking station.”

“But 10 minutes later, we’re good,” he said.

As complimentary as Bacon is to Shaver’s ability to supply, Shaver said Bacon and her DSU team do a good job of organizing Mudbug Madness.

“The Mudbug Madness Festival is so well run,” Shaver said. “There is such a science to what [the organizers] do. They’re a quality group.”

It’s a quality group that’s made up primarily of volunteers, too.

Bacon said approximately 400 people who push this event from concept to success are volunteers.

“A lot of people give up so much of their time and energy to make this happen,” Bacon said.

One of those volunteers is Mollie Corbett, who serves as the volunteer chairman for Mudbug Madness.

“They’re just good people, man,” Corbett said about her stable of volunteers.

She begins her festival planning months in advance, which includes mining an online social network of 1,500 people.

“I start online sign-up right after January. Frankly, my volunteers are really concerned about getting their same spots as last year,” Corbett said.

There are five volunteer locations:

tickets, souvenirs, soft drinks, kids-play area and beer.

“Nobody wants to work the kid’s area,” Corbett admitted.

But, the beer booths are a different story.

For volunteers, the festival days are broken up into either four-hour or fivehour shifts. For Corbett, that means scheduling and filling 36 different shifts for each of the festival’s four days.

“It’s a massive undertaking. But volunteers are the life force of this event,” Corbett said.

Dedicated musicians make up another big draw for the Mudbug Madness Festival.

And as in previous years, the festival will groove along to music that’s uniquely Louisiana, featuring groups like Corey Ledet & His Zydeco Band, The Babineaux Sisters and Orphan Annie.

This marks the first appearance for Baton Rouge-based Orphan Annie at Mudbug Madness. Ian Webster, who plays guitar and sings with the band, described Orphan Annie as an “energetic” band “with a lot of variety.”

“We can pretty much adapt to whoever is in front of us,” Webster said, adding that front woman Pat-e Salzete will really ignite the Mudbug crowd when they play saturday.

Another band appearing at mudbug madness has been playing together for as long as the crawfish-dedicated event has been boiling up the tasty crustacean.

Mojo and the Bayou gypsies have 16 albums under their belt and deliver a sound unlike any other band, said mister mojo, the band’s leader.

Mister Mojo described the band’s sound as music in the Bayou tradition with mixes of Zydeco, cajun, and swamp pop. it’s a sound that entertains “from the first note to the last.”

“No one sounds like us,” Mister Mojo added.

Mojo and the Bayou gypsies are the headline performance saturday night during mudbug madness on the tony chachere’s stage.

Tony chachere’s is actually a new corporate sponsor for mudbug madness. Bacon said the Louisiana-based seasoning company brings a new interactive display to the festival.

“i’m really excited to have them up here because we feel it will add something fresh to our community,” Bacon said.

And no mudbug madness would be complete without festival favorite, wayne toups, the Grammy award-winning artist and commercially successful american cajun singer.

“Every year, people cannot get enough of wayne toups,” Bacon said.

Toups’ appearance highlights a motto Bacon adheres to during the festival’s planning, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

And for Bacon, the continued success and growth of mudbug madness proves it is not broken.