Ardoin

Goyette called Ardoin "a heck of a weapon, the total package," and the junior quarterback was very much looking forward to his first post-season start after handing Notre Dame its first loss.

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"Mama, I'll Be Long Gone," Tompkins Square's new collection of the complete recordings that Ardoin was known to have made in his brief lifetime, could go a long way toward rectifying this oversight.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

The event was doubly cruel given Ardoin's inspired collaborations with McGee, a partnership that testified not only to a musical harmony but to a deeper racial accord that transcended the shame of segregation.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

Nearly two-thirds of the double-CD set's 34 tracks were made with Dennis McGee, the white Cajun fiddle player with whom Ardoin traveled throughout Louisiana and East Texas, playing to black, white and - in certain rural enclaves - racially integrated audiences at house parties and dances.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

It would have been fascinating to have heard how Ardoin's music might have evolved with the advent of the jump blues and rock-and-roll eras had he lived to see them.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

Not so with their Louisiana counterpart Amede Ardoin, the black Creole singer and accordionist whose astonishing recordings were as crucial to the evolution of Cajun and zydeco music as those of Patton and Johnson were to the development of Delta and Chicago blues.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

Kelly Ardoin from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, takes the F train, the fifth worst line, and the C train to get to her office in Soho where she works as an architect.

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But maybe even more remarkable than this instrumental interplay were the high, ravaged vocals of Ardoin, his coarse, dirty timbres possessed of an otherworldly quality akin to leather-throated bluesmen such as Patton and Blind Willie Johnson.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

Ardoin and McGee played with singular intimacy, the white man's fierce bow strokes and keening melody lines meshing instinctively with his Creole counterpart's hot, percussive chording.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011

On the mostly medium-paced solo recordings here, Ardoin's small diatonic accordion carries the rhythms and the melodies, his vocals on the lilting "Aimez Moi Ce Soir" and the heart-rending "Les Blues de la Prison," for example, evincing great subtlety and range.

Review: 'Mama, I'll Be Long Gone' finally delivers a Cajun innovator his honor 2011