After working hard for 40 years to preserve, promote and advance Cajun music and culture, Michael Doucet is resting much more comfortably today than he did when he was younger.

Back during his high school days, if one of the Cajun elders in Louisiana died, some of the culture died with them, recalls Doucet, the leader of BeauSoleil — the most popular and probably the greatest Cajun band in the U.S. “It was a transitional time, between the old world French and the new world,” says Doucet (pronounced Doo-SAY).

But today, due in large part to the efforts of BeauSoleil and Doucet, Cajun music and culture “are much more popular,” says Doucet, who comes to The Ark with BeauSoleil on Friday. So, these days he’s confident that the Cajun tradition is in good hands and will continue to thrive when and if he and his band decide to retire some day.

“Back then, I could count the number of Cajun fiddlers on one hand, but now there are Cajun-music bands in every state.”

Michael Doucet is also a folklorist who won a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts for rediscovering the originators of Cajun music, and in the ‘80s, he spent 6 years teaching a course, “French Music In Louisiana,” at the University of Southwest Louisiana.

“But it wasn’t just us,” stresses Doucet. “Remember, in the ‘80s, Cajun cuisine became commercialized, and started drawing people down to New Orleans, and they would discover the music when they were down there.

“And so many people we have played for over the years have moved down to Louisiana,” says Doucet by phone from a tour stop in Austin. “Now, you can’t go to a Cajun dance in Louisiana without half the people being from somewhere else,” he adds with a laugh.

Doucet and his bandmates still live in Lafayette, where Doucet grew up, and where Cajun people were subjected to terrible oppression, discrimination and racism of a sort when he was a schoolboy. “It was almost like a civil rights issue,” recalls Doucet, now 58. “Cajuns were treated like 2nd-class citizens — not because of the color of our skin, obviously, but because of the language we spoke, and the food we ate, and because of our origins.”

When he was a youngster, Doucet — the group’s fiddler, singer and main songwriter — learned the tradition at the feet of the Cajun-music masters, like Dennis McGee, Dewey Balfa and Amedee Ardoin. “I would go to Dennis’s house all the time and record him, playing those great old Cajun songs. I must have tapes of him doing about 150 different songs.”

In the beginning, says Doucet, he was a stickler about hewing to the traditions and learning them properly. “There were so many different bowing styles on the fiddle, and these little stylistic nuances, and we thought it was important to learn those first.”

But once they’d mastered the traditional style, the band knew they had to evolve in order to keep Cajun music moving forward — they couldn’t treat it as a museum piece. So, for years, they’ve also been incorporating other styles — stirring rock, zydeco, blues, R&B, Tex-Mex, Caribbean, country and other styles into their musical roux.

“I think you have to be where you are now,” philosophizes Doucet. “Cajun music has always reflected what’s going on in the world. Even in the ‘20s, there were French versions of American songs, and there were, and still are, so many styles of music to draw on in Louisiana.” And BeauSoleil has always been enthusiastic about collaborating with other artists, or recording Cajun-ized versions of rock and pop songs.

On their latest album of new material, “Alligator Purse,” from ’09 (live CD/DVD “Make the Veiller” followed in spring of ’09), they showed off that inclusive spirit by featuring guest artists like Natalie Merchant and John Sebastian, as well as Garth Hudson and Jim Weider (both formerly of The Band). Other guests were Artie and Happy Traum (mainstays of the Woodstock, N.Y., roots rock scene.).

One song was a Cajun rendition of JJ Cale's “The Problem,” and another was an exuberant French-language re-working of Bob Dylan's 2006 arrangement of Muddy Waters' “Rollin' & Tumblin.” And “Les Oignon” was a trad tune that fused Cajun and vintage Bourbon Street jazz, complete with sultry sax and trombone blasts.

Hudson lent his Hammond-organ genius to a cover of “I Spent All My Money Loving You,” written by the late Bobby Charles, an acclaimed Louisiana songwriter. Meanwhile, Merchant did a playful vocal duet with Doucet on a Cajun-fried work-up of “Little Darlin,” a tune written by Julie Miller (wife of Buddy Miller).

Listen to the BeauSoleil album “Alligator Purse”:

That CD was released over a year ago, but the group isn’t currently working on a new disc, or even writing songs for 1, says Doucet. “We recorded too many songs for ‘Alligator Purse,’ so we have about 6 songs in the can for whatever we do next — maybe a mini-album,” says Doucet. “Plus, there’s this group, Festival Productions, that tapes live performances, and they taped us at last year’s Merle Fest, so we’re thinking about putting that out as a live album.

“We’ve put out around 30 records now, so there’s definitely a lot of BeauSoleil music already out there,” says Doucet. Then he adds, with a laugh, “So at this point, we’re not in a big rush to get another album out.”

Kevin Ransom, a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com, 1st wrote about BeauSoleil in 1993. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.

BeauSoleil performing ”Tropical Heatwave” in Florida last spring: