Largey examines how the Haitian bandmaster Occide Jeanty became, in the telling of his admirers, a figure of national defiance during the American occupation of 1915 to 1934, and what that transformation reveals about the making of historical meaning.

Jeanty's compositions commemorating the war of independence carried criticism of the occupying forces that Haitian audiences could hear even when foreigners could not. Largey calls the process recombinant mythology: speakers borrow the language of myth to praise a hero's qualities, and so link him to earlier heroes. Jean-Jacques Dessalines had already undergone such a fusion, absorbed into Vodou as a form of Ogou, at once the general who defended the republic and the body torn apart by the elite in 1806. President Florvil Hyppolite, whose death echoed that of Dessalines, was drawn into the same chain of stories.

Myth and history, on this account, are not separate domains but linked ways of holding on to the past.