"I haven't been writing songs really, I wrote one song since Katrina. And a lot of it is just because I lost my places to write, I lost my places to be inspired. They're dying, they're washing away."
Cajun blues man Tab Benoit grew up in a small coastal town south of Houma. He's been flying above the marshes of Terrebonne Parish since he was a teenager. His first real job was flying pipeline inspections for oil companies.
"This was where I grew up. My house was right over there. That used to all be beautiful cypress trees. It's all gone you know, says Tab."
Now Tab uses his airplane, his guitar, his voice and strong words to try to save these rapidly vanishing wetlands.
"When you spend time in the air, you're flying around like the eagles, you're flying around like the birds and you're seeing what man's doing from a bird's eye view and you're looking at it saying this is stupid. Ya'll are idiots. What are you doing?"
The land has been eroding and sinking as it's supply of freshwater and land-building sediment was cutoff by man-made levees.
Much of the area around Houma and Terrebonne Parish could be the poster child for Louisiana's disappearing coastline. Over the last few decades, miles and miles of grassy marsh has turned into open water.
But Tab Benoit sees salvation as he flies just 30 miles west of Terrebonne's critically damaged wetlands.
"This is beautiful. This is the answer. This is the hope. This is the thing that keeps guys like myself continuously fighting for something, says Tab."
That answer is the rapidly growing delta of the Atchafalaya River. A shortcut to the Gulf that carries sediment and 30 percent of the water from the Mississippi River.
"We're in the Gulf right now. And that's the coastline south of Morgan City. Look at the difference. Look at how solid that is. It looks like pastures," Tab says as he flies over.
The delta shows that the Atchafalaya is a natural land-building machine.
The challenge is moving its freshwater and sediment into the dying marshes of Terrebonne Parish.
"My feeling now is it's late and we either have to fix it or we have to move everything. We can't just move people. You have to move everything. You will have to move those refineries, you gotta move the port system"
And that's the message that Benoit brings to audiences across the country. His bluesy music and his voice of the wetlands foundation speak to what's at stake, not only for his bayou home, but for the rest of America.
After losing two camps to hurricanes Lily and Rita, Benoit is working on a houseboat to get him back to the marsh, back to where he hopes he'll be inspired to write more music. One of his last songs is titled "When a Cajun Man Gets the Blues."
"I was in the swamp writing this and feeling you know real heart felt pain about what was going on and how this place was dying," Tab says.
