Dewey Balfa was one of our best friends. We spent a lot of time with him both on the road and playing music and partying at our house. Dewey was very handsome and had a magical way of touching peoples’ hearts everywhere he went. He could read people like a book and knew how to reach them. He became an international folk legend, but Marc and I knew him just as the simple man he was on a daily basis. Marc had played music with Dewey’s brother Rodney and also with Will Balfa in the dancehall scene in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. Dewey was working as an insurance salesman and school bus driver in those days. When I met him in the 1970’s he and his brothers played a weekly radio show at Mouche’s Lounge in Basile. Marc and I loved to go hear them in that element, Dewey announcing ads on the radio in French, and the brothers playing as a full band, steel guitar, fiddle, guitar, and drum. Nonc Allie Young was playing accordion with them.

-Ann Savoy