Musicians are not known for their willingness to rise early, but if you’ve got the right incentive, anything is possible.

And when it comes to keeping Louisiana zydeco and swamp-pop specialists the Revelers together, singer and accordionist Blake Miller clearly has the right recipe. Membership in the sextet comes with an irresistible perk: access to the finest Cajun andouille known to man.

“Bruno, Blake’s dad, makes sausage,” saxophonist Chris Miller explains. “Actually, he makes the best sausage in the world. I wouldn’t say it’s a typical day, but sometimes we’ll get up at 7 a.m. and start grinding pork sausage, and it’s a big group effort. That takes four or five hours, and we get it all smoked, and then we pack it all up and split it all up amongst those who took part in helping make it.”

Food also plays a big part in Revelers rehearsals, which might also be described as parties.

“Any given night of the week it’s sort of like ‘Alright, who’s cooking?’ And everybody goes over to somebody’s house and they’ve got a pot of stew on, gumbo or salpicon or something, and then we just hang out and play tunes,” Miller tells the Straight from his girlfriend’s place in Maryland, where he’s escaping “the crazy disaster that is American Black Friday”.

“People are dancing in the kitchen or the backyard; it’s like a community thing,” he continues. “And dinner’s ready when it’s ready—which might be midnight! Without the music and the food I don’t know what there’d be, but on the surface it’s incredible how inextricably linked they are.”

Miller—a transplant from Florida to the Revelers’ home base of Lafayette—isn’t related to his accordion-playing namesake but says he and his bandmates have been welcomed into that other Miller’s family, and into Cajun life in general.

“If you want to come in and respect their tradition and learn it, then people are happy to have you,” he notes. “It’s really a melting-pot culture, and I consider it to be like a second home to me now.”

Cajun music’s expansiveness is well-served by the Revelers’ approach. Although Miller, with his French-language songs and robust squeezebox—which he built himself—is more or less the heart of the band, Memphis-born guitarist Chas Justus adds a swinging jump-blues approach to the mix, and fiddler Daniel Coolik, an Atlanta native, is fluent in a variety of styles from beyond the bayou.

Clever tricks, like throwing a Count Basie–style jazz riff into a Cajun waltz, keep the music from ever being narrowly traditional, yet Miller says even the most rural audiences enjoy these experiments—as long as the Revelers remember to include one key traditional ingredient.

“Ultimately, it’s dance music, and people in Louisiana, they don’t really care what you play as long as they can dance to it,” Miller points out. “Yes, there are purists who would say that what we do isn’t Cajun enough, or it’s not zydeco enough, but there are always going to be people like that.

“We just play what we like, and if the dancers are happy then we’re happy too.”

The Revelers play St. James Hall tonight (December 1).