The draft for opening night at the Festival International in Lafayette, La., last month was an easy choice. Hugging his piano accordion, Geno Delafose was escorted onto the stage by local college student Becca Begnaud. She prompted him to rotate, showcasing his trademark outfit of cowboy hat, tailored and starched shirt, tight jeans and cowboy boots. "He looks as good in back as he does in front," Begnaud commented, and the crowd seemed to agree.

Before the performance, Delafose was characteristically modest about his indelible impact on female fans coast-to-coast.

"I don't know whether it's the black cowboy thing, or the accordion," said the 34-year-year-old who comes to Alameda next weekend.

Delafose's accordion, an instrument vital to the African American- Louisianan musical form called zydeco, had dancers of both genders, black and white, young and old, gyrating in the warm night air of Lafayette, with propulsive assistance from the corrugated metal rubboard (another zydeco staple) and the electrified rhythm section of Delafose's French Rockin' Boogie band. The broad appeal of the band reflected the breadth of its repertoire, burning down boundaries in the interest of giving everybody a good time.

"We've been referred to as a salt-and-pepper band," said Delafose. "If I have to get down and play some funky zydeco, I can do it, and if I have to play some real Cajun music," developed from Louisiana's French-speaking whites with European musical roots, "I can do that, too. Once I figure out what (an audience) wants, we're gonna go on with it."

Delafose sees himself following the footsteps of his father, the late accordionist John Delafose, who was among the purveyors of zydeco not long after the form had arisen (in the 1950s and '60s) as a gumbo of melodies and rhythms from Cajun, Creole and blues sources. The younger Delafose also inherited the elder's day job, raising cattle and horses on a ranch near Opelousas, 130 miles northwest of New Orleans.

"We'd go out and milk the cow, and we'd have the radio on, and you'd always listen to Cajun radio stations," he remembers. "As a little kid I knew how to speak French just as well as I spoke English. In the Creole music," which preceded zydeco among the black residents of the bayous and prairies, "there was a lot of just tapping the foot and playing the rubboard and accordion."

At age 8, Delafose started scraping the rubboard in his dad's band, then moved to drums, and to accordion at 13. A decade later, as John's health worsened, Geno assumed leadership of the band. After John's death in 1994, Geno recorded for Massachusetts-based Rounder Records and gained bookings out of state.

In the Washington area, Delafose discovered mixed audiences enthusiastic about his music and his vocalizing in Creole. Some of his new white fans followed him on visits to Louisiana, helping to dissolve the racial barriers in the state's clubs and festivals.

Among Louisianans, zydeco was evolving.

"When I first started playing (as a child), zydeco was for older people," performed on the small diatonic button accordion, Delafose explained. "Then Clifton Chenier started playing the big piano accordion and bluesed it up some. The trend that got young people listening was when Beau Jocque started playing. He had a lot of funk, a lot of bass and kicking ... And a lot of the newer zydeco bands today are into hip hop and rapping."

This recent nouveau zydeco is sparsely represented on Delafose's latest album, "Everybody's Dancin','' which lives up to its title by showcasing classic Cajun (on button accordion) and zydeco styles (including a John Delafose number), alongside Delafose's rousing originals, evocative of those older styles.

Unique among zydeco artists, Delafose has been tapped for collaborations with such white Cajun traditionalists as Christine Balfa and Steve Riley. While touring the Bay Area, Delafose has managed to win over many of his father's aging black fans who had relocated here from Louisiana upon discharge from the military after World War II to work in oil refineries and shipyards. These fans are regulars in the multiracial zydeco dance scene at Alameda's Eagles Hall, by some accounts the hottest outside the source state.

But Delafose, still unmarried, is a bit reluctant these days to work for too long too far from his ranch, whose acreage and holdings have increased significantly since his father's passing.

"The cattle and horses and all that stuff, that all came off of the music, " he points out, but he's not about to forsake the former for the latter. "One Easter Sunday, I was getting ready to play a dance in Lake Charles (in western Louisiana), and I had a cow who was getting ready to have a calf, and I saw she was having trouble with it," Delafose recounts. "I called the band and told them, 'Go to Lake Charles and set up, and I'll meet y'all there'. I got down on my knees, delivered the calf, and then packed up and left, and met the band and played the dance. Sometimes you have to do those things."

-Jeff Kaliss