Amédé Ardoin was born on March 11, 1898, near Basile, in what is now Evangeline Parish. He spoke Cajun French, not English, and chose music over field work, which did not entirely please his family. He played the accordion and sang in a high, drawn-out voice. Dennis McGee, the white fiddler who played with him, said in a 1983 PBS interview that Ardoin could make people cry. The Louisiana encyclopedia 64 Parishes says he often hitchhiked the unpaved prairie roads with his accordion in a burlap sack, headed for house parties. The archivist Christopher King describes those parties as gatherings that ran from about seven in the evening until morning, often on plantations, with sharecropper musicians hired to keep spirits up.
The records
Ardoin met McGee near Chataignier, and the two played dances together. In 1929 they cut six songs for Columbia in New Orleans, among the first records of the music of Acadiana. By 1934 Ardoin had made 34 recordings in four sessions, in New Orleans, San Antonio and New York. King, who gathered the complete recordings, says only two or three copies survive of about 80 percent of them, and that a Black and a white musician playing together was among the first such pairings in Cajun music. McGee, he says, still teared up talking about Ardoin forty years after his death. Some of Ardoin's songs came from fragments of medieval French songs. One, "La Valse des Chantiers Pétroliers," was about oilfield workers.
Eunice
In the late 1930s something happened to him near Eunice. Descendants and people who knew him tell it this way: after a dance, a white woman lent him her handkerchief to wipe his face, and men beat him on the way home. The fiddler Canray Fontenot said instead that a car struck him as he left town. Most versions agree he was found in a ditch the next day, and that he was never the same.
The record of the end is thin. A death certificate from Pineville dated May 30, 1941 names an "Amelie Ardoin," and Mother Jones, which reported it, treats the match as uncertain. Other accounts say he was admitted to the state hospital in Pineville in September 1942 and died there on November 3, at 44. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Beyond the records themselves, the paper trail is slight: a draft card, a census entry and one photograph.
What carried on
Scholars credit him with laying groundwork for both Cajun and Creole music. 64 Parishes says he influenced the Cajun accordionist Iry LeJeune and the Creole accordionist Clifton Chenier, and the accordion maker Marc Savoy is counted among those he influenced. His relative Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin, who lived from 1915 to 2007, kept playing into the new millennium. A bronze statue by Russell Whiting was unveiled at the St. Landry Parish Visitor Center in Opelousas on March 11, 2018, his birthday.
In Opelousas, Le Vieux Village has a seven-panel zydeco exhibit that names Clifton Chenier among the legends tied to the town. In St. Martinville, the African American Museum tells the Black history of the Teche country.