The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World by Sally McKee (review)

"Il n'est pas lui à sa place" ("He feels out of place here"), noted the music critic for the New Orleans Bee on December 11, 1893, reporting on his interview with the composer and violin virtuoso Edmond Dédé (p. 197). No wonder. Born a free Creole of color in New Orleans in 1827, the musical prodigy, who died an expatriate in Paris in 1901, struggled throughout his life against the mind-forged manacles of race at home and abroad. He left Louisiana for France two years before the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision declared that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States. Dédé returned for the first and last time three years before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) codified Jim Crow as the law of the land. Homer Plessy's light skin allowed him to pass, an option unavailable to Dédé. All the key contemporary sources cited by Sally McKee in her carefully researched and evocative biography make mention of Dédé's dark skin. Even Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, the visionary civil rights pioneer who founded the Comité des Citoyens that sponsored Plessy's challenge, began his tribute to the composer's overtures, ballets, and art songs by emphasizing his complexion, presenting it as proof positive to confound the skeptics who doubted that anyone with a face that black could compose music that symphonic. But Dédé did compose such music, publishing his first art song, "Mon pauvre coeur," while he was still in New Orleans, and going on to a career as répétiteur of the ballet, composer, and conductor at the Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux and music director at the Théâtre de l'Alcazar also in that city.

No musicologist, McKee touches lightly on the style of Dédé's violin virtuosity and the formal qualities of his compositions, which included incidental music, operettas, ballets, a full-length opera, and hundreds of songs and dances. Her purpose is to place his life as a successful musician but a stranger in his own land in the larger context of what her title presents as "the unfinished revolutions of the Atlantic world." In that, she succeeds. The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World begins in 1893 with the shipwreck of the passenger freighter Marseille, which briefly stranded Dédé, who was on his way back to New Orleans as the celebrated guest of the African American fraternal societies whose membership included the supporters of Homer Plessy. The story then flashes back to the New Orleans that Dédé knew as a youth, his early musical education at home and in the studio of violinist Ludovico Gabici, his journey to Mexico to find work as a musician in 1848, his return to New Orleans in 1851, his immigration to Europe in 1855, his study at the famed Conservatoire de Paris, his extended musical career in Bordeaux, and finally his decline and death in Paris. Chapter 3, "City of Sound," which imagines the densely textured sonic culture of antebellum New Orleans, and chapter 7, "The Lost Violin," which reconstructs Dédé's ambivalent return to his natal city, at that very moment about to bring forth jazz, contribute most directly to a heretofore underrepresented history of the American South. Wistfully evoking unfinished revolutions, this thoughtful and moving account of an internationally prodigious musical life that began but did not end in the most racially tormented of societies brings to mind the last words of Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong as remembered by New Orleanian poet Tom Dent: "Don't bury me in New Orleans."