Singer and accordionist Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin served as a vital bridge to the Creole musical customs of an earlier time, sustaining the Cajun "la la" style that arose within the African-American enclaves of southwestern Louisiana and functioned as a direct predecessor to modern zydeco. Born on a farm in rural Duralde in 1914 or 1916, he received the nickname that means "Dry Wood" after consistently being the first child to head indoors when storms approached. Although he grew up and worked as a sharecropper, with agriculture always taking precedence over other interests even in adulthood, he nevertheless picked up the accordion on his own at age twelve, motivated by the performances of his older cousin, the celebrated Creole master Amedée Ardoin, whom he later accompanied on a regular basis at house parties and club engagements. In contrast to that relative, however, Bois Sec never pursued music as a full-time occupation, largely because his mother firmly opposed such a path. He formed a partnership in 1948 with fiddler Canray Fontenot, who would serve as his chief musical associate for decades; performing together as the Duralde Ramblers, the pair became regulars at neighborhood gatherings and dances and achieved enough local prominence to appear at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966, the same year they recorded the landmark album Les Blues de Bayou for the Melodeon label. By the early 1970s Ardoin led the Ardoin Brothers Band, whose members included his sons Morris, Gustave, and Lawrence (who later headed the French Zydeco Band) along with Fontenot; the death of Gustave in a 1974 car crash left him largely uninterested in music, prompting retirement from regular dance performances the next year even though occasional shows continued for some time afterward.
