It’s festival season again in southwest Louisiana. This year, however, a somber note—the passing of the Cajun-music legend Octa Clark at the age of 94—was sounded amid the joyful noise.

Clark will be remembered as one of Cajun-music’s truly seminal figures. An accordionist since the age of nine, the Judice native came to local prominence at the age of 24 as the partner of the fiddler Hector Duhon. The two played together off and on for the next 60 years, recording two albums—1982’s Old Time Cajun Music (Arhoolie) and 1983’s Ensemble Encore (Rounder)—and influencing such Cajun-legends-to-be as Joe Falcon and Amedee Breaux, who attended dances in the ‘30’s to learn from Clark, and Michael Doucet, who in the ‘80’s regularly performed with Clark and Duhon at Mulate’s in Breaux Bridge.

Clark’s last album, You Can’t Go Wrong … If You Play It Right (Field Span) appeared in 1993 and featured contributions from Steve Riley, David Greeley and Christine Balfa.

In some ways, Walter Mouton, the 59-year-old Cajun accordionist to whom this year’s Festival Acadiens (September 18-20) was dedicated, has followed in the Clark tradition. Like Clark, Mouton has exerted considerable influence over several generations of Louisiana musicians less by recording and touring than by holding down a longtime local gig.

For the past 14 years, Mouton and his band, the Scott Playboys, have performed every Saturday night at the La Poussiere Club in Breaux Bridge. For the 19 years before that, they played there on alternating Saturdays.

"We’ve been in Breaux Bridge for 33 years," Mouton observes. "Apparently, we must be doing something good."

Mouton typically understates his accomplishments. Although he’s recorded no albums and only one single in his entire career (two live tracks are included on the Arhoolie soundtrack to the Les Blank film J’ai Ete au Bal: The Cajun and Zydeco Music of Louisiana), musicians such as Steve Riley, Jackie Caillier, and Wayne Toups have frequented La Poussiere in hopes of learning from Mouton. Toups, in fact, was himself an occasional Scott Playboy at one point in his career. And Mouton’s very first guitarist was none other than a teenage Johnnie Allan.

The current Scott Playboy lineup consists of Chris Lougon, U.J. Meaux, Daniel Meyers, and Mouton’s nephew, Ronald Prejean. As part of his 90-minute, Festival Acadiens-capping performance, Mouton hopes to have several of his former bandmembers join him on-stage.

"Mr. Dick Richard played fiddle for me for 26 years. Then I have a steel-guitar player by the name of Randall Forman who played with me for 22 years and Keith Richard, who drummed for me for nine years. Those three I think will be there."

With the bassist Emery Leger (whose out-of-state work as a surveyor has made his participation in this year’s Festival impossible), those three former Playboys constitute the lineup that Mouton considers his best.

"Back then we were a pretty tight group. Everybody knew everybody else’s licks. We did Cajun, country, rock—whatever was people asked for. If we couldn’t respond with what they’d asked for, we could respond with something similar."

Mouton recalls his early days as particularly busy. He would frequently play four or five nights a week while working a steady nine-to-five job. The main reason he committed himself to such an exhausting pace was that he had a wife and three children to support ("I’ve always been one that if there was an opportunity to make a dollar, I wanted to make it," he says).

In light of his willingness to profit legitimately from his marketability, Mouton’s refusal to record is particularly puzzling. Even more puzzling is his reluctance to talk about his aversion to the studio. All he’ll say on the record about his one recording experience is that it was long ago, that it wasn’t pleasant, and that he vowed at the end of it never to record again unless he could be guaranteed a different set of circumstances.

Since that first and only session, much has changed both in terms of recording technology in general and in terms of the Lafayette-area music-studio scene in particular. Nevertheless, Mouton still refuses to record.

"With recordings you almost have to go on the road," he says. "You create demands. And I really do not care to create a demand that I can’t fulfill.

"It’s not that I don’t care to go," Mouton continues. "I just don’t have the time. Plus, to be honest with you, I don’t have any new material. Everything I play is something I’ve heard before. I can’t read a note of music, so I’m thankful that everybody else is recording so I have something to play."

It’s definitely not the prospect of traveling that troubles Mouton. He currently works as a trucker and logs lots of miles as a matter of course. For that matter, the band does a fair amount of traveling anyway. He and his band, for instance, travel to several folk-music festivals a year and seem not only to tolerate but to relish the role of Cajun-music ambassadors.

"For the seventh year in a row, we went to the Grassroots Festival in Ithaca, New York," says Mouton. "We also went to a festival in Long Beach, California, this year. Then three weeks ago we went to Austin, Texas. I went to Accordion Kings Camp and actually discussed Cajun music with a lot of students."

The truck-driving Cajun musician who claims not to enjoy creating or meeting demands, in other words—or traveling—traveled to Austin to create and meet demands, even going so far as to lead a workshop.

"My group came with me, and we performed an hour-and-a-half Saturday morning. We played two encores, and the people ate it up. Most of them came around the bandstand, shook hands with us, and thanked us for going out there."

As the Festival Acadiens’s decision to honor Mouton this year suggests, his ability to inspire gratitude is not limited to Texans.

"Whenever I go out of state, I make sure to invite the people to stop by La Poussiere when they come to Louisiana. It’s amazing the people that do stop by! In fact, just three weeks ago, when we got to La Poussiere, the owner said there were some people from Austin that had called and made reservations for the same weekend as the Festival.

"I’ve always enjoyed being the entertainment part of these people’s evenings," Mouton, the reluctant meeter-of-demands, finally admits. "It just makes you feel good when you see people enjoying themselves."

Another participant in this year’s Festival Acadiens is Bruce Daigrepont, the New Orleans native who, like Mouton, has long been reaping the rewards of maintaining a regular local gig—he’s played every Sunday at Tipitina’s for the last 12 years—while recording relatively little. Since the release of his debut album 11 years ago (Stir Up the Roux), he’s released only two others (1989’s Coeur des Cajuns and 1993’s Petit Cadeau, all Rounder). And although he has a fourth one in the can, he hasn’t put the finishing touches on it yet and doesn’t seem in any particular hurry to.

In a performer of lesser stature, such equanimity might seem like laziness. In the case of Daigrepont, however, each of whose first three albums are particularly well sung, well written, and well played, it simply seems like the result of the confidence that comes from doing one’s job well over a long period of time.

Daigrepont’s return to the Festival Acadiens was particularly welcome given the crucial role that the Festival itself has played in his career.

"The Festival changed my life," he says. "I went to one of the first ones, in 1979, and, you know, I’d always liked Cajun music, but up until that time most of my generation thought of Cajun music as the music of our grandparents.

"Anyway," Daigrepont continues, "I went to the festival—the theme that year was ‘the young people,’ lejeune—and for the first time I saw people from my generation playing accordions and fiddles, playing Cajun-French music, speaking French, and making announcements in French. That’s when it hit me: I’m a musician. I’m a Cajun. I want to play the music of my heritage."

Daigrepont began doing just that, eventually going so far as to make the composition of good, original French-Cajun songs one of his top priorities. "I don’t want to be a guy that just played Cajun music," he explains, "but also a guy that left his mark on Cajun music by writing songs that become part of the repertoire of other people. That’s what I like to do more than anything, write songs."

Songs, that is, in Cajun French. "If I write them in English, am I really doing Cajun music?" Daigrepont asks. "To me, no. There are thousands of people writing songs in English. There are very few of us that can really write good French songs. So that’s what I’ve been doing now for about the last 20 years."