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(photo courtesy of the Balfa Family.)
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Dewey Balfa
Dewey Balfa was the musical ambassador of Louisiana's Cajun people. One of the first artists
to take Cajun music to audiences outside of Louisiana, his performances introduced greater
America to the beauties of Cajun music, and sparked a revival of traditional culture in Louisiana
when the old, French ways were in grave danger of being lost. As a teacher, mentor, performer
and advocate, No artist did more to bring about the ongoing revival of Cajun musical culture than
Dewey Balfa.
Dewey Balfa was born near Mamou, Louisiana in 1927. His father, Charles, was an
accomplished fiddler and ballad singer. By the time Dewey was 10, he and his brother
Will were accompanying their father professionally. In the mid-1940s Dewey formed The
Musical Brothers and began gigging locally. For many years, Dewey kept up a punishing
schedule. The band often played eight times a week, while Dewey was holding down a
full-time job. However, the advent of rock & roll meant a decline in the fortunes of
Cajun music and the band found itself playing less and less. In 1964, Dewey was asked
at the last minute to fill in on guitar for a member of a Cajun band booked to play the
Newport Folk Festival. This was the first time a Cajun band had played Newport and many
felt that it would be it an embarrassment for Louisiana to be represented by such an
"outdated" form of music. Dewey described what happened: "I had played in house dances,
family gatherings, maybe a dance hall where you might have seen as many as two hundred
people at once... And in Newport, there were seventeen thousand. Seventeen thousand
people who wouldn't let us get off the stage." Buoyed by this extraordinary response,
Dewey returned home with a new sense of pride in his culture. He persuaded his brothers
to put the band back together and spent the next fifteen years with his brothers, taking
Cajun music around the world, playing festivals and concert halls and making records.
Tragically, Dewey lost his brothers Will and Rodney in a car accident in 1979. This,
combined with the death of his wife in 1980, devastated Dewey for a while, but eventually
he realized that Cajun music needed him and that his only choice was to carry on. He
gradually began playing and touring again. Throughout the 1980s he shared his music with
countless audiences and taught many workshops as musicians from around the globe became
attracted to Cajun music. For his role as artist, mentor and cultural spokesman, Dewey
Balfa was awarded one of the first National Heritage Fellowships by the National
Endowment for the Arts in 1982. Dewey performed and taught Cajun music until his death
from cancer in June, 1992. Today his youngest daughter, Christine, continues the proud
Balfa family tradition with her popular band, Balfa Toujours. Thanks in large part to
the work of Dewey Balfa, today Cajun music is as healthy as it has ever been.
Edith Fowke
"I'm an ordinary person, and what ordinary people do is important." With these words,
takenfrom a 1994 interview, Edith Fowke summed up her reasons for pursuing the study of
folklore and folksong. Fowke, along with Marius Barbeau, a specialist in Native Indian
and Quebec folklore studies and Helen Creighton, who pioneered folklore studies in the
Maritimes, is one of the individuals that dominated the field of folklore studies in
Canada during the twentieth century. A specialist in Anglo-Canadian cultures and by far
the best-known of the three. Edith's renown came because her work had both a wider
geographical sweep than that of Barbeau and Creighton and a much greater variety. Her
collections include items from and for children and adults from across Canada,
encompassing material as diverse as women's songs, bawdy songs, games, legends and tales.
Edith Fowke was born as Edith Fulton in 1913. Her parents had emigrated to Canada from
Northern Ireland, settling in the small Saskatchewan town of Lumden on the Qu'Appelle
River. She spent her childhood as a voracious reader and writer, publishing poetry in
a local newspaper in her youth. She attended the University of Saskatchewan, graduating
with a degree in English in 1933. Edith spent the next two decades getting a graduate
degree, writing and editing and working for a brief time as a schoolteacher. She was
extremely active in the politically progressive Cooperative Commonwealth Federation,
both in Saskatchewan and in Toronto, where she moved after marrying in 1938.
In 1953, Edith Fowke became disillusioned with politics, dropping out of the political
arena after a change in the leadership of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. She
began spending more time researching folk music. Edith had started collecting folk music
records in the late 1940s and by 1949 was writing and supplying music for the CBC radio
program "Folk Song Time", a program she would remain involved with as producer, writer and
host until 1958. While doing research for the show, Fowke became aware of the lack of
scholarship on Canadian folksong and she put together her first book, a collection of 76
songs called Folk Songs of Canada. A songbook for general audiences, the book sold very
well after its 1954 publication and was followed by a recording of the songs in the book,
and a version of the book arranged for choruses.
The success of her book raised Fowke's profile in both Canada and the US and she soon
came under the influence of scholar Kenneth Goldstein. Goldstein got Fowke's book
published in the US and convinced Fowke to join the American Folklore Society. Becoming
more of a professional folklorist, Fowke helped to organize the Canadian Folk Music
Society in 1956 and began making field recordings of Canadian folk musicians in Ontario
that same year. Fowke had outstanding recording equipment and a very good ear and many
of her recordings were published by Folkways records.
Over the next several years, Fowke continued her work in the field of folklore. She
published a number of books and recordings for both professional and general interest
readers, her most popular being the 1960 publication of Songs of Work and Freedom, the
product of five years of collaborative effort with Joe Glazer, and Sally Go Round the
Sun, her 1969 publication of children's games and songs. During the 1960's she served
from the start on the advisory board for the Mariposa Folk Festival, helping to define
that festival's eclectic character. She continued to write and produce programs for the
CBC and worked on projects celebrating Canada's centennial and her native province of
Saskatchewan.
In 1971 she took a position teaching folklore at York University, where she taught and
continued to write, publishing The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs in 1973 and Sea
Songs and Ballads from Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia: The William H. Smith and Fenwick
Hatt Manuscripts in 1981. In 1978 Fowke was appointed a member of the Order of Canada
for her service to Canadian Culture. Focusing during the 1980's on children's music, she
studied the works of Hungarian theorist Zoltan Kodaly and lectured on his work at the
University of Calgary's Kodaly summer diploma program.
Scholar, populist, teacher and chronicler of vanishing ways of life, Edith Fowke
produced a body of work which will stand. Her career filled a great void in the field of
folksong and folklore studies, not only in Canada but throughout the world. Her death in
1996 at the age of 83 brought an end to the career of Canada's best-known and most
widely-read folklorist.
Doc Watson
Recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a National Heritage Fellowship and five
Grammy awards, Arthel "Doc" Watson has traveled a long way over the course of his long
career from Deep Gap, North Carolina, where he was born in 1923.
The extended Watson family - and their neighbors - harbored a rich musical tradition and
Doc took up the guitar at age thirteen after first learning harmonica and banjo. Doc's
talent rapidly developed and he was soon playing not only the traditional songs sung and
played at family gatherings but also popular songs he had learned from records and the
radio. For a number of years in the 1950s Doc supported himself by playing electric
guitar in a local dance combo.
In 1960 folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle came south to record Doc's famous
neighbor, banjo player Clarence "Tom" Ashley. Recognizing Doc's enormous talent, Rinzler
not only made and issued Doc's first recordings but convinced him to try his hand at
playing the newly-emerging folk circuit. In 1962 Doc found himself performing solo at
Gerde's Folk City in New York. This in turn led to a long-term contract with Vanguard
Records and thus was launched one of the most illustrious careers in the history of
American folk music.
Flatpicker supreme, inspiration to thousands of aspiring musicians, Doc found not only a musical equal but also a playing partner and travelling companion in his son Merle. Together they spent 20 years touring the world and making dozens of recordings. Merle's tragic death at 36 in a 1985 tractor accident nearly caused a heartbroken Doc to go into premature retirement. After a period of mourning, Doc renewed his commitment to music, and with a new partner, Jack Lawrence, has continued to tour and record.
Perhaps most gratifying for Doc is the success of the Merle Watson Memorial Festival, now known as Merlefest. The annual festival, established in 1988 in Merle's memory and held near Doc's home in Wilkesboro, NC, has grown from a gathering of 4,000 people to one of the largest traditional music events on the east coast. The festival presents performers from a wide variety of musical backgrounds on 13 stages drawing 45,000 people over four days. Doc always hosts the event and one of its highlights for any avid guitarist is the opportunity to see Doc perform with his grandson Richard, Merle's son. Already a superb guitarist, Richard recorded an album with Doc in 1999, carrying on a family tradition. Of course, keeping tradition alive and carrying it forward is what Doc Watson has always done best.
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