The winding history of the first documented Haitian Creole song is traced in this new album
ITHACA, N.Y. – “Lisette: A Song’s Journey From Haiti & Back” explores the evolution of a nearly 300-year-old song first sung in Haitian Creole.
The album is the most recent contribution of the Lisette Project, which was founded by Jean Bernard Cerin in 2021 to bring “performers, scholars, and audiences together to explore the rich world of Haitian classical music.”
Cerin, a baritone, scholar and curator, collaborated with soprano Michele Kennedy and keyboardist Nicholas Matthew along with many other artists to create an album that traces the oldest surviving published song in Haitian Creole, “Lisette quitté la plaine” (1757).
The song has its origin in French-colonized Saint-Domingue, part of modern-day Haiti. “Lisette” was performed in salons before it moved to abolitionist circles in France, Creole homes in Louisiana, and performance halls. The music changed and adapted along the way.
Throughout the album, we encounter six variations of “Lisette” including Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version “Chanson nègre” (1781) and “Lizèt fò’n kite Laplenn” (2025).
Despite the many versions Cerin has discovered in his research, at their core, all versions prior to the 2025 one tell the story of an enslaved man who works on a sugar cane plantation. His lover has left. Filled with despair, he can no longer focus on his work in the sugar cane fields or the rituals that once brought him pleasure. The name of the lost lover varies. In Saint-Domingue, she is Lisette. In France, Lisetto. In Louisiana, Zélim.
The 2025 version of the song was commissioned by Cerin to add a contemporary story of Lisette that sets the music of Amos Coulanges — a highly esteemed guitarist and composer who combines Haitian heritage with Caribbean and international influences — to a poem of a speaker entreating their lover to escape present-day Haiti with their child by Lunise Jules.
While the lyrical narrative may seem easy enough to understand, the complexity of the song’s history allows for many meanings, interpretations and uses.
The lyrics were first recorded by an anti-abolitionist French colonist in his written history of Saint-Domingue, Cerin said, as an “interesting example of how ingenious the language of those slaves were, and that it was more complex, more expressive, more interesting than his peers gave it credit.”
In colonial Saint-Domingue, slave labor was used on sugar cane plantations to amass opulence and wealth. Adapted from a traditional European pastorale, “Lisette” was a contrafactum — a song created by applying new lyrics to the melody of another — that was often performed in the colony’s salons.
Cerin brims with knowledge of the storied past of “Lisette.” He said that Camille Nickerson, a pianist and composer who toured the U.S. as “The Louisiana Lady,” helped propel the song by advocating for Louisiana culture and music.
Nickerson took the original Louisiana Creole folk song, “Zélim” (1902) — which is sung softly in the background by Kennedy in “Zélim: Truth & Reconciliation”— and created “Lizette, ma chère amie” (1942).
Cerin said Nickerson collected stories from Creole people “who were ashamed of this music,” whether that was because of its complicated history or because they may have believed that “Creole was literally lesser.”
“I suspect that some of it also was just that a lot of this music is kind of offensive or holds truths that are difficult to reconcile,” Cerin said.
“Lisette” has survived many contexts and continues to be performed and studied today both as a poem and a song. This complexity is what makes the song so intriguing and it is the reason that Cerin chose to begin the Lisette Project, to “live in the problem” of its complexity as both an “object of Black cultural heritage” and an “object of colonial fantasy, of colonial sentimentalism.”
Cerin said this history is what makes “Lisette” iconic. It’s the song people will turn to when they want something to represent Haiti.
“What do they want from Haiti?” Cerin said. “Do they want to remember it quaintly, as the place where people were enslaved, or do they want to remember it more earnestly for the beauty of its language?”
The album’s remaining tracks include short audio recordings in which the performers share their perspective on the significance of the song and music. Cerin has also carefully curated the inclusion of additional songs that provide both political and musical context.
Despite the incredible time period it spans, the album is only 50 minutes long. The collective result is captivating in its stylistic range. It features baroque instruments, operatic performance and sonic landscapes inspired by ragtime, Haitian folk dance, classical music and patriotic anthems to name a few.
The album page, which provides song notes as well as original and translated lyrics, offers rich insight for the listener curious about the history and significance of each track.
Listening to “Lisette: A Song’s Journey From Haiti & Back” is an opportunity to be immersed in a collision of people and cultures. By carefully tracing the origin and evolution of a single song and placing it in its many contexts, Cerin and his collaborators have given us a specific entry point to engage directly with the richness of Haitian Creole and Louisiana Creole heritage while acknowledging the impact of European colonialism.