They're not your classic two-steppin' bayou band from Louisiana, however. Yes, their sound blends a Balfa Brothers-style Cajun with a Clifton Chenier-style zydeco, but they add rock and blues influences from Los Lobos, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones as well.

"We adhere to the spirit of the original music more than the strict traditional style," said the band's founder Mark Meaux. "We just sort of update that with modern instruments ... and mix it in with our traditional style."

Bluerunners has a regional sound that is slightly different from its Southwestern neighbors.

"There's so many layers and that's what's great about Louisiana music," Meaux said. "The style from where we're from, Lafayette, the Southwest part, is completely different from what happens in New Orleans. That's a whole other thing, it's jazz-based, horn music, that kind of thing. We're more fiddles and accordions and guitars," he said.

Cajun music has its roots in the folk music of the French Acadians who were driven from their homes in northeastern Canada in the mid-1700s. Many migrated to the secluded swampy region of Louisiana known as "the bayou." They brought with them fiddles and waltzes and kept to themselves for nearly two centuries, which gave them time to develop the culture we now know as Cajun (a name shortened from Acadian).

Zydeco is a spinoff of that music, developed when the French-speaking African American Creoles got hold of it. They added bone castanets and washboards and played the music with syncopated rhythms, giving it a pulsing, highly charged danceable quality.

On "Ghost of a Girl," from Bluerunners' "Honey Slides" album, the mandolin and lap steel guitar play in tandem over the spicy rhythms created by tambourine, accordion and bongos. Meaux and guest singer Susan Cowsill (of the '60s teen band) sing the haunting lyric, "She got the walking pain, the kind that won't go away and that can't be explained. She got the homemade blues, whatever happened in there takes a lifetime to lose. She's a ghost of a girl. She's seen way too much world. Just a ghost of girl, but I love her."

The spunky key-tapping zydeco accordion and Santana-like lead guitar, backed by a syncopated bass and punk drumbeat in "Kingsnake Crawl," shows the band's ability to get down and dirty.

Meaux said Juneau audiences can expect a high-energy show on Dec. 1.

"It'll be pretty rockin' as far as Cajun bands go," he said. "We run the gamut and I think I can say there's not too many bands like us, for better or for worse. ... We're more for intensity and kind of a deep-feeling performance. It kinda gets all over the place, but it's what we love to do."