The Exile's Song

French-speaking Edmond Dédé (1827–1901) was an African American violin prodigy, composer, and conductor who migrated to France in 1855. His great-grandfather, a free black man in Spanish Louisiana, had purchased his wife in 1785. Conspicuous with his dark skin, especially in southwest France, Dédé nevertheless was often invisible during his life and in this study. Sally McKee's brief introductory chapter, “Lost,” concerns the 1893 shipwreck of the Marseille in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Bahamas. Dédé survived but claimed to have lost a valuable Cremona violin. McKee's central chapters proceed chronologically, through Dédé's life, and geographically, through the cities where he worked. Raised in New Orleans, Dédé learned the clarinet from his bandmaster-father, then studied violin with the Italian Ludovivo Gabici. In 1848 Dédé went to Mexico, reentering the United States in 1851 with a falsified Mexican passport. Soon after, he journeyed to Paris, where he worked for a cigar maker while auditing conservatory classes. At the end of the decade, he moved to Bordeaux where, between 1860 and 1889, he served as an assistant conductor at the Grand Theater of Bordeaux, the Alcazar Theater music director, the Café Delta manager, and the Folies Bordelaises conductor. He wrote more than 250 compositions, including French Romantic fare and, in 1887, an unperformed grand opera. At the end of her book, McKee returns to the shipwreck and speculates that Dédé may have never owned a rare seventeenth-century violin, as the musician did invent or exaggerate aspects of his life. McKee concludes by recounting her search for Dédé's burial place, which she located in 2010 in a communal grave in a Bagneaux suburb

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Literature · Romance · Theology · Violin · Wife · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Classics · Cuban History and Society · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy