The Accordion and the Diatonic Heart of Cajun Music

The accordion arrived in south Louisiana in the mid to late eighteen hundreds, probably brought in through German-speaking communities and merchants, though no one knows who carried the first one. It was not an instrument with Acadian roots. The Acadians had brought fiddles from Nova Scotia, and the fiddle remained central. But the diatonic button accordion, loud, durable, made for dance halls, fit the country perfectly.

Volume was the reason. A fiddle could carry a tune, but an accordion could fill a room. At the fais do-do, the Saturday night community dance parties that anchored social life across Acadiana, you needed an instrument that projected over a hundred dancing pairs of feet. The accordion earned its place.

The diatonic accordion plays only certain notes depending on which direction the bellows move. That limitation is also a sound, a particular squeezing, alternating quality that defines Cajun music in a way no other instrument does. Coupled with the fiddle, a triangle, and sometimes a guitar, it produced a dance music rooted in loss and celebration simultaneously, waltzes and two-steps, songs about exile and about love, sung in a Louisiana French that drifted steadily from its Canadian ancestor over two centuries of isolation.

Dewey Balfa, born near Mamou in nineteen twenty-seven, brought this music to a national audience. When he and two fellow musicians played the Newport Folk Festival in nineteen sixty-four, the audience of more than seventeen thousand people responded with such enthusiasm that Balfa was stunned. The experience deepened his commitment, and he spent the rest of his life, until his death in nineteen ninety-two, working to keep the music alive.