Bringing Amédé Back Home

When poet Darrell Bourque was growing up in Bellevue in rural St. Landry Parish in the 1940s and ‘50s, he had a love-hate relationship with the music of the area. “My uncle owned a bar with a white side and a black side,” said Bourque. “They were all country musicians, self taught. They knew Amédé Ardoin’s music. That was the first time I heard Amédé-influenced music.

“But I wouldn’t listen to French music as a teenager; that was ‘chank-a-chank’ music. My love for Cajun music really began with going to Mulate’s [dancehall] in Breaux Bridge in the 1960s and hearing Dewey Balfa. It was well into the twenty-first century that I heard the music of Amédé and was astonished at his genius.”

Around 2005, Bourque began consciously listening to CDs of Ardoin and seeking stories—some conflicting—of the musician’s life. Ardoin’s story has several variations, but all are tragic, from his devastating loss of the woman he loved to his final weeks in an insane asylum and his death at forty-four.

Born in 1898, Ardoin lost his father in an accident when he was nine months old. His mother and seven brothers eked out a living as sharecroppers in Eunice in St. Landry Parish. As a teenager, Ardoin acquired an accordion and taught himself to play it. Illiterate, he also “wrote” songs that seemed to vary with every rendition. “He never sang a song the same way twice,” said Bourque. “He’d change the lyrics. He made up the songs. It’s all in the oral tradition.” Soon Ardoin was in great demand to play and sing—in a voice that has been described as haunting and unearthly—at house parties and little country honky-tonks. 

Although Ardoin left no known descendants, he had relatives—including younger musicians Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin and Canray Fontenot—who knew him and played with him. They kept alive the stories about Amédé. One tale was his ill-fated love for a woman named Maise Broussard. For reasons unknown, the romance ended badly and Broussard married another man. Many think that Amédé’s songs were composed directly to or about Maise, whom he called Joline or Jouline—pretty one. Bourque said Amédé often antagonized people by singing about them. “I saw her dancing with someone else last week,” he’d sing to one hapless man. “Don’t think you’re so special.” Such off-the-cuff lyrics sometimes got the crowd so worked up that Amédé had to make a hasty exit.

Amédé, who always carried a lemon in his pocket to refresh his throat between performances, formed a close friendship with fiddler Dennis McGee when they worked on the Marcantel farm near Eunice. Although Amédé was black and McGee white, they became good friends. The two often played together—in fact, Amédé preferred to play only with McGee, who always seemed in sync with him. Years after Ardoin’s death, McGee, then ninety, had tears in his eyes as he recalled his friend, whom he described as “une chanson vivante”—a living song.

Ardoin also befriended Cleoma and Joe Falcon, white musicians whom he accompanied to New York in 1934 to record 78s on Decca Records. “The story goes that in New York he was lonely, alienated,” said Bourque. “He understood English but spoke only French. The main theme of every song he recorded there was ‘I want to go home.’”

It was at a house party in Louisiana that Ardoin reportedly committed the innocent act that sealed his fate. The daughter of the homeowner lent him her handkerchief to wipe his brow. “Outsiders” attending the party, unaware of the informal relations that prevailed among whites and blacks in the area, later followed Ardoin as he trekked homeward, carrying his accordion in a flour sack.

Two men reportedly beat him badly and then, for good measure, ran over him with a Model A Ford and left him for dead. Another version says he was poisoned by a rival musician. At any rate, he was found in a ditch the next day, his head and neck severely injured, his voice destroyed. Described by Canray Fontenot as “stone crazy,” he never regained his senses.

When Amédé’s behavior became unmanageable—he reputedly refused food and drink and wandered the house at night, mumbling to himself—he was committed to an insane asylum in Pineville in Rapides Parish. This was in September 1942; within six weeks he was dead. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the “Negro” section of the asylum’s cemetery.

While working on his chapbook if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook, published last year, Bourque learned that Amédé’s relatives wanted to bring his remains home to Acadiana and rebury them with a marker commemorating his life and his music—which is widely believed to be the beginning of Cajun and Creole music. “His remains can’t be found,” said Bourque. “So I conceived the idea of commissioning a statue of him—probably in Eunice, which Amédé considered his home, or possibly in Evangeline Parish.” Bourque contacted sculptor Al LaVergne, whose work can be viewed at several sites in Baton Rouge. Lavergne, who was born in Basile in Acadiana, taught at Southern University and now lives in Michigan. He estimated a cost of fifty to one hundred thousand dollars to create a life-size statue of fabricated steel.

Bourque has partnered with Patricia Cravins, a teacher and activist in St. Landry Parish, to spearhead the movement. They have already held several veillées, or gatherings, telling Ardoin’s story and asking for donations toward the statue. The first was held at Vermilionville in August 2014; relatives of Amédé played his music and Bourque read from his poems to a gathering of seventy-five people. Another veillée was held at NUNU in Arnaudville last December. The nonprofit Baton Rouge Area Foundation is acting as a repository for the donations. Last month Bourque and Cravins met to decide how to push the project to the next level—with a Facebook page, a website, and possible corporate support. 

Bourque and his wife Karen now live in the house he grew up in. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Florida State University. A professor of English at ULL for thirty-nine years, he was the state’s poet laureate from 2007 until 2011. Bourque has published eight volumes of poetry, including, in 2013, Megan’s Guitar, which drew on the history of the Acadians. “I began to feel that I hadn’t told the whole story,” he said. “I looked for someone else whose story I could tell—a French-speaking Creole who was a root figure. Writing about Amédé also gave me the opportunity to work with the idea of social justice.” One poem in the collection consists solely of lines from Amédé’s songs.

In 2011, Christopher King of Virginia published a CD on his Tompkins Square label, Mama I’ll Be Long Gone: The Complete Recordings of Amédé Ardoin, 1929–1934, comprising all of Ardoin’s 78 recordings. In his liner notes, King describes “the unvarnished beauty and passion of his singing … seemingly not of this world. Such is Amédé’s voice: a sound irresistibly compelling and sublime.” King, who has collected all of Ardoin’s 78s, marveled at the fact that he recorded in New York. “One has to wonder at the business acumen of record executives in New York, [but] we can celebrate [the fact that] they preserved some of the very best of our rural musical culture, the soundscape of the prairie and of the bayou.” Speaking of those early recordings, King said, “There is a carnal or visceral rawness or emotiveness to the singing that’s very, very, very intense.”

Bourque is working on an expansion of his chapbook and plans to add other figures of the era. “Amédé will be the central figure in my new book, which will consist of three persona poems in the voices of Amédé, Cleoma Falcon, and Iry Lejeune. “Iry was a little country white kid who was legally blind. He went to the blind school in Baton Rouge and then came back to [near Eunice]. He fell in love with Amédé’s music. He sat on the porch and learned to play accordion by listening to Amédé. After the war, the accordion almost went out of fashion. Iry not only brought Amédé back but he brought the accordion back.”

In working on his poems about Ardoin, Bourque discovered certain documents: his draft-registration card, medical records from the hospital. He hopes to find more. “Amédé Ardoin’s story is an important American story, an important world story,” said Bourque. “He lived his life deliberately and with intention. He is pure artist. He had nothing else to give but his playing and singing. He was as Dennis McGee describes him, a “chanson vivante,” a living song; and that’s the stuff histories and cultures are made of.

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.