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.

To build the wall, a gang of friends and family came over for the equivalent of a barn-raising. This is a quintessentially Cajun way of getting things done, said Mr. Michot’s friend Erik Charpentier, a scholar with a doctorate in francophone Louisiana studies.

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“Little clans stick together and help each other out,” Mr. Charpentier, 44, said. “It’s very old school. Nobody does this anymore, it seems.”

Having toured with the band and flopped in the “funky” camper, he has concluded, “With Louis, there’s always some heavy lifting involved.”

What the Michots provided in exchange was home-cooked Cajun food and hospitality. For the friends who visit from New Orleans or farther afield, the house can seem like an outpost from a distant country, said his fill-in bassist, Taylor Guarisco, 25, now with the band Givers.

“I’ve been a vegetarian for eight or nine years, but there, it feels like I’m in a different cultural setting,” Mr. Guarisco said. When the Michots are at the grill, “I’ll have a piece of boudin.”

The frame for the bousillage wall was recycled lumber, or what Mr. Michot called “barraux.”

The only issue with the mud, which he and his crew quarried out of the yard, was that it kept dripping into the beer. But the moss proved a bigger problem. They ran out when the wall was about two and a half feet tall.

So Mr. Michot headed to a friend’s fishing camp, where he fashioned a 30-foot bamboo stalk into a kind of grappling hook. With this, he twirled the moss out of the tree canopy, like pasta onto a fork. Later, the bamboo doubled as a shoulder pole for hauling 50-pound canvas sackfuls of moss out of the bottomlands.

Mrs. Michot nodded. “He uses bamboo for everything,” she said.

AT the top of the stairway at home, Mrs. Michot has hung an assemblage of crinkled paper — a family tree, compiled by an aunt years ago.

“That one goes back 17 generations, to 1400-something,” she said. There are Acadian forebears here: a few of the original 7,000 French Catholics whom the British exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755. This was the grand dérangement, or upheaval.

In lore, these transplanted trappers and fishermen were the wellspring of Cajun culture. But plenty of other nationalities and ethnic groups — white and black Creoles, French-Indian Métis, French-speaking Italians and Germans — have gone into the pot.

For instance, Mr. Michot said, “The first Michot to arrive in Louisiana came from Haiti in 1802 or 1803.” And he actually came by way of Cuba, having fled the Haitian revolution.

“The whole thing with Cajun,” Mr. Charpentier said, “is that although it’s a recognized ethnic group, they’re also white, for the most part. They can pass for the so-called mainstream.”

For all her rich ancestry, Mrs. Michot mastered her French “in a five-week immersion program,” she said. Among the younger francophones in Southwest Louisiana, “most of us have gone to a place in Nova Scotia, the University of St.-Anne.” (She went on to teach “Louisiana French” for five years at a local high school.)

Mr. Michot did his residency in Cajun culture every Monday night for more than a dozen years at a restaurant called Prejean’s in Carencro, filling out the rhythm section of Les Frères Michot. Led by his father and his uncles, the band boasted a repertory of some 500 traditional songs.

One evening when he was 16, he recalled, “my Uncle David wasn’t there, and they needed a bass player. They threw me onstage with a standup bass. I learned it right there.”

In his late teens and 20s, Mr. Michot took a fiddle on the road, busking across the United States and French Canada. College didn’t stick, a family tradition of its own. “My grandpa dropped out of college after a semester and he became superintendent of education for the whole state,” he said. “I took my inspiration from him.”

He learned more from a two-week course in permaculture. From this ecological movement, he adopted a vision of a bountiful, self-sufficient homestead. (One of the first things he did after buying this eight-acre property, for $15,000, was to plant 1,000 trees in a horseshoe around the prairie. He later founded the Cultural Research Institute of Acadiana, a nonprofit he runs out of his studio, to gather heirloom seeds and oral histories from traditional South Louisiana growers.)

After the permaculture course, he followed a few of his instructors, Australian eco-designers, to Brooklyn. For a time, he crashed with the Australians there, practicing his music every day in the streets. “Union Square and Park Slope, Brooklyn, those were my best busking areas,” he said.

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But inevitably, he found himself playing again at Prejean’s and bunking down at his family’s rustic camp, known as La Roue Qui Pend (the Hanging Wheel). Here, he fell in with his aged neighbor Sydney Bourque, a subsistence farmer, forager and hunter (and Ethel Mae’s father) who lived a kind of premodern life on Bayou Vermilion.

“He didn’t speak a lick of English, and he didn’t have a dollar to his name,” Mr. Michot said. “He probably didn’t have a Social Security number.”

Mr. Bourque became a totem of an older Cajun identity, and Mr. Michot stamped his photo on the first album by the Lost Bayou Ramblers.

Mrs. Michot pointed to a weathered grotto standing in the dooryard. Mr. Bourque, she said, had fastened this to a tree as a trough for his horses and goats. Today, it shelters a 30-inch statue of the Virgin Mary. This is the Stella Maris, the star of the sea, who shepherded the French across the Atlantic to Acadia. Mrs. Michot painted the concrete sculpture with a pale blue wash, an auspicious color, she said.

After Mr. Bourque died and his cabin fell into ruin, Mr. Michot reclaimed the planks and posts. He bought another tumbledown home in the neighboring parish for $2,000. And over the course of a month, he and a few friends demolished it with nothing but crowbars and hand tools. “We looked like coal workers from the ’30s,” Mr. Michot said.

The lumber ended up in a pile back on the building site. “It was like a haunted lumberyard,” Mrs. Michot said. “I saw snakes crawling, black widow spiders, brown recluses.”

Mr. Michot started on a 1,000-square-foot wraparound porch. “My favorite room in the house,” he said. Next, the old cypress turned into window sills and raw plank walls, board-and-batten doors and pecky, or distressed, cypress cabinets.

“There was still old clothing stuck in the cracks” of the living room siding, Mrs. Michot said. “We found marbles, little toys in the walls.”

“Old bottles,” Mr. Michot said

“Rat skeletons — lots of those,” she said.

The cypress pile shrank as the house grew. Eventually, it was time to leave the camper, whether the new place was finished or not. “We moved in the night we got married,” Mr. Michot said.

“There was no electricity, no air-conditioning,” Mrs. Michot said. “There were holes for the doorknobs.”

“It was that much easier to kick open the doors and carry her across the threshold,” he said.

“It was like that for two years, Louis!” she said.

Mr. Michot allowed that this charge was true. “The quality of living has improved every day since we moved in,” he said.

“Today is better than yesterday,” Mrs. Michot said.

Put another way, you can settle in a graveyard of Cajun relics, or you can raise them bones.