Lina Mathon-Blanchet dies, the woman who put Vodou song on the concert stage

Lina Mathon-Blanchet died at ninety-one. Born in Port-au-Prince on 3 January 1903, she began piano at four with Justin Elie and studied in Paris from 1917 to 1921. She founded the Choeur Folklorique National in 1937, and in 1938 she put her students on a stage singing in Creole, which polite Port-au-Prince did not do. In the early 1940s her ensemble Haiti Chant et Danse performed Vodou dance and music, and she was accused of black magic for it, in the same years the Church ran its anti-superstition campaign. She was the first director of the Conservatoire National. Frisner Augustin, Lumane Casimir, Martha Jean-Claude, Jean-Leon Destine and Emerante Morse all came through her.