{"id":41247,"date":"2015-05-28T16:09:29","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T16:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41247"},"modified":"2015-05-28T17:26:17","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T17:26:17","slug":"mystery-and-discovery-on-the-trail-of-a-creole-music-pioneer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41247","title":{"rendered":"Mystery, and Discovery, on the Trail of a Creole Music Pioneer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mystery, and Discovery, on the Trail of a Creole Music Pioneer<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-05-28<\/p>\n

Campbell Robertson<\/strong><\/a>, Southern correspondent<\/p>\n

PINEVILLE, La.<\/a> \u2014 Somewhere among the thousands beneath a grassy hill here lies the body of Am\u00e9d\u00e9 Ardoin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He was singular in life: one of the greatest accordion players ever to come out of south Louisiana<\/a>. A Creole<\/a> prodigy who traveled the countryside playing his bluesy two-steps and waltzes, he changed Cajun music<\/a> and laid down the roots for zydeco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At his death at the age of 44 in 1942, he was Case No.13387 in the state psychiatric hospital, destined for an anonymous burial.<\/p>\n

Years of attempts to recover the body of Am\u00e9d\u00e9, as he is widely known, have come to nothing. As with Mozart\u2019s grave<\/a>, Am\u00e9d\u00e9\u2019s is known only by its general vicinity: the area where the blacks were buried. But a desire for some sort of physical commemoration of his life, beyond a few documents and a blurry photograph, has not gone away.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started thinking of possible symbolic ways of bringing Am\u00e9d\u00e9 home, placing a kind of image of him in the culture, something physical,\u201d said Darrell Bourque<\/a>, a former state poet laureate<\/a>, who has been trying to raise funds to have a statue erected, most likely in Eunice, La., where Am\u00e9d\u00e9 spent much of his life.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bourque described Am\u00e9d\u00e9 as bringing the white Cajun<\/a> and black Creole traditions together in a society that policed racial boundaries so rigidly that it ultimately brought about his death. His music, Mr. Bourque said, represented \u201ca little pocket of possibility that didn\u2019t get replicated in the larger culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was only after he began looking for Am\u00e9d\u00e9 that Mr. Bourque came to learn how complicated those boundaries could be for whites and blacks at that time \u2014 and how deeply connected he was to the people who crossed them…<\/p>\n