Balfa Toujours

Family Fais Do Do
by Philip Von Vleck

Dewey Balfa was also the man who took a group of Cajun musicians to the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and taught 17,000 people the meaning of the Cajun term fais do do.

The Balfa Toujours lineup includes Christine Balfa (vocals, guitar, and triangle), Dirk Powell (accordion, vocals, fiddle), Kevin Wimmer (fiddle, vocals), and Craig Guillory (bass). Their latest album, Live at Whiskey River Landing, finds the band in its favorite bar, Angelle's Whiskey River Landing, performing a rowdy set of Cajun tunes with a finesse and fire that few bands can muster, Cajun or otherwise.

Christine and her sister Nelda started Balfa Toujours in 1993 and released the album Pop, Tu Me Parles Toujours on the Swallow label. Nelda left the band the following year and appears only occasionally with Balfa Toujours nowadays. Christine carried on, however. "I'd been playing music with my daddy since I was a little girl," she explained. "I knew I had music in me, and I knew that music would always be a part of my life, but I never dreamed that I'd be doing it as much as I am now, or that we'd have our own band.

"After my father died, Dirk [her husband since 1995] and I were writing a lot of songs," she continued, "and we were playing some festivals during the summer. We were trying to work through our grief, and when we returned to Louisiana at the end of summer, we caught up with Nelda and learned that, for the first time in her life, she'd been writing songs, too. She was also trying to deal with daddy's passing, of course. We realized that between the three of us we'd written about nine songs that summer."

Dewey's passing threw Christine, Powell, and Nelda into a tailspin not only because he was their father (father-in-law in Dirk's case), but also because he was the last member of the famed Balfa brothers band, the Musical Brothers. His passing was truly the end of an era. Expressing their grief in song was not just a way of dealing with their sorrow. It also seemed to be a way to hold on to Cajun music.

"We were so excited that the music was still alive," Christine recalled. "There was still music coming through to the Balfa family. So we made a little home cassette of the songs and sent it to Floyd Soileau [founder of Swallow Records]. He was really excited about the tape and wanted us to make a CD. So we thought, 'great.' Then we had to name the band, and we got Kevin [Wimmer], who was still living in California then, to play some fiddle with us. We named the band Balfa Toujours as a way of saying, 'Look, the music of the Balfa family is still around; we're still here.'

"To our surprise, we started getting a lot of calls to perform all over the place. Within a year we were doing it full time. I never dreamed this would happen. I mean, we get to play our music all the time and travel all over the world."

For Powell, forming Balfa Toujours and playing Cajun music was the only way to deal with the loss of Dewey. "I used to listen to Dewey play, on tapes and live, and wonder how he got so much feeling into his music," he said. "After getting to know him, I learned that the reason he played with such emotion was that he was thinking about the people he'd played with and lost. He learned the fiddle from his dad, so he always thought about his dad when he played step songs. He'd lost his only son, his wife, his brothers — he'd experienced so much tragedy, and the fiddle was a way to deal with that.

"When we lost him, it was exactly the same thing for us," he continued. "It felt so bad to play the music, but we realized we had to play it, because it was the only way to deal with the loss. Though playing was painful at first, it's the only way to communicate with him. Playing is hard, but not playing is even harder. We finally, completely understood that, for Dewey, the music was not only about the present and the future, but also about the past."