What Makes These Musicians Great?–The Balfa Brothers

 Dewey Balfa – Jai Ete Au Bal – Awesome Fiddlesticks

In a significant departure for this series, the 9^th installment of What Makes This Musician Great will focus on a band instead of one musician, and more appropriately, a band of brothers.  The Balfa Brothers were a Cajun band of real-life brothers Rodney, Dewey, Will, Harry, and Burkeman.  They learned music from their father, who was a Louisiana sharecropper, and they started playing together in the 1940’s.

Their names are not as big and showy as any of the other musicians featured in this series because their professional timing was terrible.  They first began to perform and record Cajun music at a time when authentic Cajun had become “not cool,” and was being replaced by a more homogenized and progressive sound. Therefore, since the Balfa Brothers persisted with their old, traditional sound and stayed true to their roots, they represent the last, best surviving example of authentic Cajun music before the mass corruption of Cajun culture after World War II.  Eventually, a Cajun cultural renaissance would take place in the late 1960’s, causing The Balfa Brothers to suddenly became a hot commodity with international appeal.  I had a chance to see The Balfa Brothers in the Spring of 1978, and I missed it.  They were performing at a Cajun Festival near New Orleans, and my high school Jazz band was there at the same time performing in a separate Jazz festival.  I had never heard of The Balfa Brothers, but the photo in the newspaper caught my attention – it’s the photo seen with this article.  I was intrigued and conflicted, because something was pulling at my love of music to go and see this group at all costs, but eventually my Jazz snobbery prevailed.  They were Cajun, after all, and NOT Jazz, but I would never get another chance.  Rodney and Will were killed in a car crash in 1979 near Bunkie, Louisiana, just as their careers were really starting to take off internationally.

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