Amédé Ardoin / Dennis McGee

Dennis McGee was born January 26, 1893, in Eunice, and died October 3, 1989, in Mamou, at 96. He was a barber and a fiddler who received his first violin at 14, and his repertoire ran from waltzes and two-steps to reels and mazurkas. He and Amédé Ardoin, a fellow sharecropper, played dancehalls up to five nights a week. McGee's recordings with Sady Courville and Ernest Frugé survive from before the accordion came to dominate. He performed at festivals in the 1970s and 1980s, and Yazoo issued The Complete Early Recordings of Dennis McGee in 1994.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 1.4 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.2 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• McNaspy Stadium Memorial — steps away
• Pillars of Progress (Desegregation of SLI) — steps away
• Dedicated in Honor of Christiana Gordon Smith — 0.2 mi
• 1898-1899 (ULL Walk of Honor) — 0.3 mi