He is perhaps best known for his 1964 performance at the Newport Folk Festival with Gladius Thibodeaux and Vinus LeJeune, where the group received an enthusiastic response from over seventeen thousand audience members.

He sang the song "Parlez Nous à Boire" in the 1981 cult film Southern Comfort, in which he had a small role.

Dewey Balfa was born in Grand Louis, Louisiana, a small community west of Mamou.

Went into Nova Scotia, at the time Acadia, and settled there and was there for about a hundred years, and afterwards the British took over the territory and then the French-speaking people, the French descendants, known as the Acadians, came down to the South-Western part of Louisiana, and that was back in 1755.

So over all of these years, your language, and your music has been preserved from daddy to son or daddy to daughter or momma to daughter.Balfa was a recipient of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.