Heading west from Mamou towards Basile, there's a stretch of land and water known as Grand Louis where unsecured boats rest safely on the shores of crawfish ponds that outnumber the population. Many of the signs identifying the gravel lanes and paved roads jutting out from the highway have either been snapped off or never existed -- save for one just a few miles past the Holiday Lounge. There, the lane cuts through two sets of ponds, forming a barrier between tranquil waters only interrupted by the sway of the intermittently placed crawfish traps. Its sign still stands high, with its colors yet to fade and tall white letters proudly marking BALFA.

This dusty road, more dirt than gravel and barely wide enough to accommodate two passing cars, runs for about a mile before it reaches farmland and two houses. One house's front yard is cluttered by a stack of bricks and a few trees with roots dug deep into ground once shaded by a humble sharecropper's house. Now simply a memory, the home belonged to the family of Charles Balfa.

During the day, Charles Balfa worked himself to the bone in the fields of landowners. His wife Amay, an Ardoin, bore him a small fleet of workers, six boys and three girls, to work the land. As they were needed at home, the boys didn't go far in school -- Dewey, saying he graduated in third grade, others maybe never seeing the inside of a classroom. If their work ethic didn't meet Charles' standard, they'd receive an education in discipline.

At night, Balfa would pull out his fiddle or one of the other instruments he played and the sounds of Acadian music -- passed down from his grandfather to his father to him -- would drift through the home. It wouldn't be long before his sons became the fourth generation of musicians in their family, and eventually three of his sons -- Dewey, Rodney and Will -- began their travels across the globe as The Balfa Brothers and changed the connotation of the word Cajun in the process.

Old articles and historic accounts tell of how the Balfas moved frequently as Charles would have it out with his landlords and uproot his family in a huff, moving them from farm to farm in Evangeline Parish. The arrangement he kept with the landlords did little to benefit him. One-third to half of their harvested crop was taken for rent. It would be a stretch to call their houses modest. According to Fay Stanford's liner notes for J'Etais Au Bal, Dewey Balfa once said, when it rained, the furniture in a typical cabin had to be moved to one spot where the roof didn't leak.

"He'd talk about it, but he wouldn't really talk about it," says Dewey Balfa's youngest daughter Christine Balfa Powell, her face rosy as she wipes a stray tear away from her eye. "I think it was too painful to talk about how poor they were. One time something happened and one of my nieces was complaining and he said something in French like you were never hungry."

On July 18, 1981 -- 11 years before he succumbed to cancer -- Dewey Balfa sat down -- at his side, his trusty fiddle on call to play an impromptu rendition of Jole Blon -- with a reporter named Tim Knight in Port Neches, Texas. For years after writing a piece about Balfa's performance that night, Knight stored the tape away. While doing research for a project on Cajun fiddler Harry Choates, and after burning it on a CD, Knight decided to send it to Hadley Castille, a longtime friend of Dewey Balfa's. In the interview, Balfa discussed his music and his life, mentioning things -- like his sea-faring days -- of which Christine Balfa and Castille were completely unaware. In the 27-minute interview, Dewey details his career, taking Knight from his early musicianship to the cultural mission he embarked upon later in life. As with his daughter, in the hiss of the analog tape he doesn't talk much about his life as a poor farm boy -- only saying he was proud to be the son of a sharecropper.

Born without a middle name on March 20, 1927, Dewey Balfa first started learning the fiddle when he was about 8. Though coming from a long line of musicians and now considered a master of the instrument -- to some the greatest Cajun fiddler of all time -- those early years were no treat to the ears.

"There was no lessons given for you to learn to play an instrument. You picked it up and you did the best you can if you could. ... A lot of times my old mama would say, 'Turn loose of that cat, get out the house, I can't stand it anymore,'" Balfa laughed, relating to Knight that his early bow work resembled the screeching of a feline. When his mother ran him out the house, he'd retreat to a nearby haystack where the sun kept him warm enough to play even in the winter.

As school wasn't a priority, he'd become quite advanced on the fiddle and started playing house dances around the community with his brothers -- Will, who spelled his name Bolfa as it was pronounced in French, also on fiddle; Rodney, his younger brother, on guitar; Harry or Burkeman on triangle; and friend Hadley Fontentot on accordion -- as the Musical Brothers. There were few instruments on which he could not carry a tune, including the accordion, banjo, harmonica and guitar. But Balfa said the fiddle was always his instrument of prominence and the first one he played. Adding to his tutelage from his father, Dewey Balfa rounded out his musical education with an ear pointed towards J.B. Fuselier, Leo Soileau, Bob Wills and Harry Choates. Along with his brothers, he played with J.Y. Sebastian from Grand Prairie and the Louisiana Rhythmaires.

"To me he was the best Cajun fiddle there was," says Vorance Barzas, who played with Balfa starting in 1986 and with Rodney and Will as a member of the original Mamou Playboys with his father Maurice Berzas. (Son Vorance spelled his name Barzas at the urging of his first grade teacher). "He played from his heart. "

Balfa stayed in Grand Louis dividing his time between his chores and making music until 1944, when he was 17. World War II was a year from its finish and Balfa served his country in the Consolidated Ship Yard in Port Arthur, Texas. As he saw the ships launch, he got a taste for the ocean and did three and a half years as a sea-going merchant marine. During this time, he admits, he'd leave his lunch on the dock to bring his fiddle on the boat and he strayed from Cajun music as his shipmates didn't know the songs in his repertoire. Balfa stayed on the water until 1948, when he returned home on a vacation.

There he visited a nightclub that featured a Cajun band. Before he could head back to Texas, he became involved with the band and cashed in the salty breeze of the boats for the thick smoke of South Louisiana nightclubs. "I loved my music so much that I just had to stay," he would tell Knight.

Balfa rejoined his band of brothers, which included the occasional performance by Harry Balfa before he put music aside for married life. They'd take on other performers, keeping a grinding schedule that included eight dances a week on top of their full-time jobs. For about a year, The Balfa Brothers worked a circuit across Evangeline, St. Landry and Acadia parishes, playing the Crowley, Jennings and Eunice dancehalls known as Maxine's Playhouse, the Canal Club, the Fais Do Do, the Dixie Club and the Chicken Shack.

But in November 1948, Dewey Balfa, now 21, married Hilda Fruge. Balfa's best friend had married Hilda's older sister, and when she visited one weekend, she and Dewey were set up on a blind date. Once wed, Balfa slowed down his performance schedule, playing on weekends while he took up the yoke of his father. After a couple years of farming he started selling insurance for Automotive Life. Balfa remained in the insurance business for years, later retiring to run his Balfa Discount Furniture and drive an Evangeline Parish school bus.

In the early 1950s, The Balfa Brothers began their recording catalog, first hitting wax with 1951's two-sided 78 rpm La Valse de Bon Baurche and Le Two Step de Ville Platte for the Khoury label. Dewey Balfa would also record with Nathan Abshire (including La Valse de Holly Beech and Shamrock Waltz) for a trio of legendary South Louisiana labels -- Khoury, Swallow Records and J.D. Miller's Kajun.

Although the records and the band were well received, it was not these years that separated their accomplishments from the pack of now-legends also recording and performing at the time. If not for the folk movement of the 1960s, the fame of Dewey Balfa and The Balfa Brothers would have likely never taken hold.

In 1964, Ralph Rinzler came down to Louisiana looking for a pure strain of American music to bring back to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. According to Marc Savoy's Web site, the Cajun music he heard was too commercialized or had been fused with country music. But a radio show broadcast from Eunice's KEUN was 100 percent Cajun. Host Revon Reed didn't allow his performers to use steel guitars and chose bands that stayed close to the music's roots. While Reed received complaints it was too unpolished and old timey, Rinzler knew he had found a sound he wanted represented festival. Savoy writes on his page that Reed and Paul Tate Sr. met with Rinzler and was taken on a tour of authentic Cajun culture and music. Together, they choose musicians to represent South Louisiana and travel to the festival.

The band included Gladius Thibodeaux, Louis "Vinesse" LeJeune (a cousin of Iry LeJeune) and Ally Young. When the guitarist couldn't make it, Dewey Balfa volunteered as a last-minute replacement. It would be the largest crowd any of them had ever played for as their careers were spent playing to audiences numbering in the hundreds at house dances, family gatherings and nightclubs. When the band stepped out on stage it was before 17,000 music fans all searching for something new and fresh in an untouched form of American music. Many in the crowd had never heard Cajun music or knew little about it. Others who had heard it called it chanky-chank (a derogatory term at the time) and were certain it would be laughed off the stage.

The band opened with Grand Mamou and quickly received a standing ovation from the crowd of newly converted Cajun music fans that would not let them off the stage. Not long after, Balfa would pen the Newport Waltz, a song recounting the experience first recorded on their debut full length for Swallow Records in 1965. In 1999, the Brothers' grand-nephew Courtney Granger recorded it for his Un Bal Chez Balfa album. Today, Granger translates one verse as "We went to Newport and we had a barrel of fun. Over in Newport, we went and we made a lot of good friends."

Three years later, Balfa returned with brothers Rodney and Will, Hadley Fontenot and his daughter Nelda. For him, the trips were eye-opening experiences that would shape the rest of his life.

"It turned me on to ... as you know, Cajun music and Cajun heritage was more or less wanting to be swept under the rug and when I seen all these people so moved with what we were doing, I said, 'Hey this can't be this bad. Something has to be done.' As I told you before, a highly educated man like me didn't know (what to do). I had to do something and the good lord just blessed me. I've traveled all over the United States, all over Canada, all over Europe, just telling the story about (our) ancestors. I'm just proud. I'm not proud to say that my culture, my music, is better than anybody else. Then yet, it's my own. It's mine. Whatever you have is the best."

Balfa realized the culture faced Americanization and could easily be lost. Speaking of the treasures of regional accents and their importance, Balfa said he felt sorry for people who lost their unique culture. "Once you have lost that, then you become a number ... unidentifiable."

" You take an accent out of say a Bostonian who is he then? Anybody in the U.S.," commented Balfa. "And he doesn't want to be identified as other than a Bostonian. You take a Texan, he's got his Texan accent. You take that away from him, who is he? I think if people would learn to accept that and respect that this would be a beautiful world."

With the performances at Newport, the world seemed to awaken to the beautiful and unique music created in South Louisiana. Media from across the country and even international markets were coming to Acadiana trying to figure out Cajun culture. On the road, the Brothers, in their 40s and dressed in white button-up shirts and black string ties, mesmerized young, scruffy hippies at concerts such as the July 4, 1969 Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C.

Marc Savoy remembers the time well. He had played with some of the brothers in the 1960s and would have gone to Newport but was told that he, 24 at the time, was too young. In 1965, the Mamou Cajun Band (featuring Adam Landreneau on fiddle with his cousin Cyprien Landreneau on accordion and Revon Reed on triangle) played Newport and received much of the same welcome Balfa saw on his first trip, as did Creole musicians Bois Sec Ardoin and Canray Fontenot who performed there in 1966. Savoy saw the dramatic change the acclaim had on Cajun people and their culture.

"All the media people had no idea there was this rich cultural pocket behind the cultural iron curtain here in Louisiana," says Savoy. "So when the media people found out about this, what happened was there were droves of people from CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, all these media people saying, 'Where's Cajun? Where's Cajun music where can I see Cajun people?' And they weren't here to inquire about all-American mediocrity, but they were here to find out about something unique, something fresh, a whole new story."

When he saw the attention local music was getting, he realized building his Savoy Music Center would be a wise venture and would keep him active in local music.

"So what it did to the people, especially to the ex-Cajuns, it made them realize that the thing they were running away from all these years, that was so stigmatized in those days, was exactly the thing that the rest of the world wanted to find out about. It legitimized the culture for the most of the people around here. It turned what was considered a stigma at the time into an asset."

Through the attention Cajun performers received, the tide turned from Cajuns becoming Americanized and ashamed of their different culture, accent and language to being proud of their unique heritage. At the urging of schools intolerable of the Cajun language, many had gotten away from their identity while bands merged Cajun music with rock 'n' roll or country. At the time, many thought Cajun was a dying genre. Elton "Bee" Cormier recalls seeing an album from a Louisiana record company declaring the music would not last 10 more years.

The music Cajuns played at Newport helped spark a Cajun renaissance still felt today. Balfa realized the importance of his music and continued his travels, the band touring folk and culture circuits in America and making overseas jaunts to Europe. As well as their deeply traditional music, Balfa spoke out for Cajuns and brought a message to audiences and anyone who would listen. Later awarded a National Heritage Fellowship Award by the National Endowment for the Arts, Balfa would be a crucial advocate for the music and culture as it was suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

"Dewey was on a mission. It really wasn't about promoting themselves," says Ray Abshire, who from 1969 to 1975 played accordion with the Brothers, receiving a scholarship to what he calls the greatest institution in the world. The young Abshire, just out of high school, replaced his aging cousin Nathan Abshire who played with the Brothers. "It wasn't about being a star it was just about playing your music and representing your state."

The Balfa Brothers -- joined by musicians such as Savoy and Abshire as needed -- opened the door for the travels of today's Cajun, and even zydeco, bands as they were the first to tour extensively outside the state, breaking in virgin audiences from Leone, France to Mexico City, where they played the Olympics festival in 1968.

Asked what made them win over crowds both Savoy and Abshire reply it was Dewey Balfa's charisma and play-it-from-the-heart character.

"Dewey could charm you out of anything you wanted," says Savoy. "Dewey had this knack, this personality ... it's kinda like a Superman personality. A lot of people today or maybe in the past have always needed a Superman image or someone they could think of a Superman. Well, I think that's how Dewey came across. Here was a person that represented this rich cultural scene in Louisiana, family man, played music and it was non-professional, it was not polished, it was nothing slick. He had an outgoing personality. People would gravitate to him. He could enter a crowd and in a matter of minutes he could have them eating out of the palm of his hand."

On jaunts booked by the NEA, the band would fly into Seattle or Salt Lake City and work their way down the coast at concert set-ups and college auditoriums. In early tours they were joined by other ethnic and regional music. At first, people didn't even know how to pronounce Cajun, Savoy recalling that they'd ask, "what is this thing Ca-hoon?" On the first runs the band was so unknown, the marquees would display the bigger-name bands in huge type. In tiny letters at the bottom, it would also read: Featuring Balfa Brothers, Cajun music from Louisiana.

Abshire recalls shows where the promoters bolted chairs to the floor despite the band asking to make room for the crowd to dance. By the end of the night, the infectious music had college students dancing in the aisles or even on the stage itself. The next time the tour came through, the chairs would stop a few rows before the stage and the signs ditched the names of other bands, giving the Balfa Brothers' name room to stretch.

On the road, Savoy says crowds would intimidate them as both the band and audience seemed so foreign to each other. In the face of popular music, here they were playing music in a French dialect using fiddles, a triangle and an accordion. In his native tongue, Dewey Balfa would whisper a farm expression that meant, "we'll draw them into the post." On the farm, if a farmer wanted to rope a skittish horse or cow, they'd tie a rope a around a post to them give more leverage.

"In other words, he was saying just give me a few minutes and I'll draw them in," says Savoy. "Sure enough, in a matter of minutes, Dewey had them eating out of the palm of his hand."

In 1979, Rodney Balfa and Will Bolfa died in an accident while driving to Avoyelles Parish near Bunkie to visit family members. The next year, Dewey Balfa's wife died as a result of trichinosis. Though faced with such tragedy, Balfa would continue performing, utilizing Dick Richard, Rodney's son Tony Balfa (who now lives in Atlanta), Marc Savoy and Ally Young. They released albums for Swallow, Folkways and the trio of Savoy, D.L. Menard and Balfa recorded Under the Oak Tree on Arhoolie. In the early 1980s, Balfa began playing instructional camps on Cajun music and dance in Augusta, West Virginia and other towns. He'd bring teenaged daughter Christine on the road with him. Balfa also brought his Evangeline Parish neighbor Steve Riley to folk camps, sharpening the skills that would later have his Mamou Playboys band in Grammy contention. In 1986, Balfa was nominated for a Grammy and named adjunct professor of Cajun music at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1988. In the early 1990s, Balfa faced off against cancer and would eventually be forced to stop performing. On June 17, 1992, he passed away.

"When he played music, it seemed like that's when he'd cry," says Christine Balfa Powell of his music after the tragic loss of his brothers and wife. "And I would always think, 'Why are you playing if it makes you cry?' I couldn't understand if it brings you so much pain why would you possibly do that to yourself? But then after he died, all I could do was play music. I was just driven to play more. I felt his presence there and it just brought me closer to him and it helped me deal with the pain of losing him. "

As Ray Abshire puts it, he still plays with the Brothers. In camps in places like Seattle, he'll be squeezing his accordion when he will hear a Dewey fiddle lick come in, some Rodney guitar techniques or Will's signing style. Strum by strum, lick by lick, the Brothers come back.

"It never fails: he's there. They've studied him so much, and listened to their records, I think their legacy will be the influence they had outside of Louisiana that is so strong, I hear them all over," says Abshire.

The influence of the Brothers could be tangibly pinpointed last year when Abshire played Australia and was backed in two cities by two different sets of Australians playing Cajun music. The legacy stands as a couple years ago Abshire boarded a plane chartered by a festival booker and realized it was filled aisle to aisle with nothing but Louisiana musicians. Their influence on the Cajun sound is so omnipresent that Jon Bertand of the Pine Leaf Boys and the Lost Bayou Ramblers says both bands stray away from Balfa tunes because everyone else has done them. The Balfas' dominance in the genre is so strong that in discussions at some camps people only want to discuss the Balfas with Wilson Savoy, a Pine Leaf Boy who also wants to talk about Lawrence Walker. It's in the nightclubs and tour circuits as the band inspired and molded numerous performers -- such as Rick Michot, of Les Freres Michot, who directly credits the Brothers as the reason he took his music from a mere hobby to performing publicly. Countless performers submerge themselves in their music, taking cues from their style -- Drew Simon of The Pine Leaf Boys crediting Will Bolfa as a key influence for his singing style.

The Balfa Brothers' future influence grows every spring in music camps spread across the country. And finally, their legacy survives in Dewey Balfa's dream being realized here in Acadiana, where he thought it would never take root.

"His whole thing was, he always said it's a shame we can't do this (instructional camps) at home," says Christine Balfa.

When the founder of her father's beloved Augusta camp asked her to plan a Cajun and Creole component, it planted the seed for her to bring the camps to their true home. In April 2000, Louisiana Folk Roots, her non-profit group, held the first fundraiser for the Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week, running this week at Chicot State Park. In 2001, the event debuted featuring dances and workshops.

"... It would have been great," says Christine, "if we could have started it and him be here when we had one because he would have loved to see that happen."

Toward the end of the Knight interview, Balfa explains how the Balfa Brothers kept performing even though his siblings had perished. The name had always been an inclusive title, referring less and less to blood brothers and more to those related by their love of Cajun music.

"We didn't think of ourselves just as Will, Dewey and Rodney. We thought of the Balfa Brothers musically as anybody that worked with us as a musical brother. As they say, you may not have been a blood brother but if you felt the music as we did, then you were one of our brothers."

The band, he said, made it a point to play with as many musicians as possible. In a way, the Brothers deputized fellow performers in the all-inclusive order of Cajun music. Adding these members to their roster meant more musicians would play Cajun music and the message would spread exponentially.

"The idea, we would use as many different musicians that we could to really go out there and see that people away from Louisiana could appreciate your music, come back home and talk about it. And we did it, and I thank God for the rest of my life!"<