Parlez-Nous à Boire

Track: Parlez-Nous à Boire

Artist: The Balfa Brothers

Album: The Balfa Brothers Play Traditional Cajun Music: Vols. 1 & 2

Label: Swallow Records

This is a studio version of the wonderful track featured in the movie Southern Comfort. Unfortunately, as best I know, the complete movie soundtrack was never released, so if you want to hear it in all its glory you'll have to buy the DVD. It's a good movie and the soundtrack, produced by Ry Cooder, is excellent.

Here's Dewey Balfa describing his 1964 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, the first time Cajun music had featured there -

"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. In fact, I doubt I had ever seen two hundred people at once. And in Newport, there were seventeen thousand. Seventeen thousand people who wouldn't let us get off stage."

Parlez Nous a Boire

Words & music traditional

O, parlez - nous a boire,

Non pas de mariage,

Toujours en regretons,

Les jolis jours passes.

S'it a ti maris, avec une jolie fille,

Te tands de grand danger, mon cher,

lls vont a la voler.

O, parlez - nous a boire...

S'it a ti maris, avec une vilaine fille,

Te tands de grand danger, faudra,

Que tu fais ta vie avec.

S'it a ti maris, avec une fille bien fauvre,

Te tands de grand danger, faudra,

Travailler tout ta vie.

O, parlez - nous a boire...

S'it a ti maris, avec une fille qui a de quoi,

Te tands de grand danger, faudra,

Attraper des grandes rapproches.

Parlez - moi, mon grand bon - a - rien,

Tu ta gaspiller mon bien!

Parlez - moi, mon grand bon - a - rien,

Tu ta gaspiller mon bien!