At Home With Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers LOUIS MICHOT could have built his house without ever tramping into the Louisiana bayou to wrangle 600 pounds of Spanish moss out of the live oak trees. But the plan - and Mr. Michot enjoys an open relationship with plans - was to fabricate the south wall out of moss and mud. Old-timers called this Acadian building method "bousillage," a country cousin to wattle and daub. And his wife, Ashlee Michot, said, "Everyone used to know how to do it." At least they did in the 1800s. Born a few years later (1979, to be precise), Mr. Michot is the fiddler and frontman for a riotous Cajun rock band, the Lost Bayou Ramblers. And he did not know how to construct a bousillage wall, or much of anything else, when he decided to raise his homestead on a sweet-potato field here. "The only thing I had ever built before was a rabbit cage," Mr. Michot said. For one rabbit. He got some practice remodeling the grottiest parts of the 1970s camper that was his home for two years on the building site. "It had little air plants - bromeliads - growing from the shutters," Mr. Michot said. "We had some good times in that camper," Mrs. Michot, 31, added. It's easier for the Michots to say that now, sitting over a pan of crawfish étouffée with their two little boys, Julien and Louis (Baby Lou), on a recent Friday afternoon. Their home today is like a piece of folk art that also happens to have air-conditioning and Wi-Fi. Mr. Michot only slept in the camper intermittently anyway, because he was dragging his fiddle to 150 gigs a year, two-stepping across the United States, Canada and Europe. The Lost Bayou Ramblers, with his brother, Andre, on accordion, are touring again this summer. There are shows this Friday night at the Pleasure Lounge on Shelter Island; Saturday night at Sullivan Hall in Manhattan; and July 13 at Yale University in New Haven. Mr. Michot's primal yawp also resounds from the opening scenes of the swampland fantasy "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which won the Sundance grand jury prize in January, and rolls into theaters this month. He possesses one of the great keening voices of Cajun music - "an old man's voice," said the band's former guitarist, Korey Richey - and a loose-limbed fervor. "It's kind of rare for a fiddle player to pop a string," Mr. Richey, 25, said. And he'll pop two a show. Mr. Richey, who recently left the band to help engineer a project with the rhapsodic Montreal band Arcade Fire, also produced Mr. Michot's new album, "Mammoth Waltz." On these raucous tracks, the Lost Bayou Ramblers sound Cajun in the same way the Pogues once sounded Celtic. Which is to say, they do and they don't. "Everyone calls us Cajun punk," Mr. Michot said. I don't know what that means. WHEN he started work on the house in 2004, Mr. Michot already knew, "We can't hit the road forever." He added: "As a single musician, I wanted a place to rest my bones between touring." "Then it became a mansion, because he met a woman," Mrs. Michot said. On their very first date, she recalled, he asked her to pick him up at a gas station in Milton, La., a rumor of a town largely defined by having a gas station. "He said his truck was in the shop," she said. When she pulled up, "he was on his bike with a six-pack of beer, eating a boudin breakfast" (a pork sausage). They drove off to collect a song from an old Cajun sorcière, or medicine woman, named Ethel Mae Bourque, who had recently sung it to her dying father as a kind of musical palliative. Mr. Michot ultimately gained a few important things from the visit: a wife, for one; a collection of field recordings with Mrs. Bourque; and a pile of cypress beams that now run through his house. With $100,000 to spend, and some sketches on graph paper, Mr. Michot was already imagining a different kind of house: a piece of bayou bricolage made from sunken cypress logs and salvaged shacks, architectural heirlooms and family junk. And all that Spanish moss. For the first 400-pound load, Mr. Michot went to see a man in Catahoula. Under a brush tree, a mountain of moss was retting - a process that to the untrained eye looks a lot like rotting.