“They said from this point right here to this point right over here is where the black folks are buried,” Mr. Ardoin recalled being told. The area was large and presumably crowded; pinpointing a grave would be impossible.

Mr. Ardoin seemed hesitant about the statue plan. “It’s just something they want to do,” he said, adding that somebody would probably make money off it, and that it would not be family.

The music may be memorial enough, he said, though of course people have appropriated that, too.

Others are still not resigned to the notion that the only memorial for Amédé is an unmarked spot in a part of the state that meant nothing to him. “Those New York recordings that he did, every single cut he made up there it was some improvisation on ‘I’m so alone, I want to go home,’ ” Mr. Ancelet said.

“We need to bring his spirit home.”

Mr. Bourque did not know much about Amédé until a few years ago. But the music Amédé played, known as la la, was the first he had known as a child. At night he would listen to the sounds from his uncle’s little bar up the road, where white customers played cards in one room and Creoles played their music in the next. It was some of the only French he heard growing up, having been reared by parents who, like many Cajuns in the 1950s, were careful to speak only English in the home so their children could better assimilate.