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thedrifter
09-03-05, 08:10 AM
Posted on Sat, Sep. 03, 2005
A blues for New Orleans
The hurricane that swamped the Big Easy - at least for now - silenced the music in one of the most musical American cities.
By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic

The soundtrack to the destruction in New Orleans was recorded long before Hurricane Katrina arrived.

"They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad," East Texas bluesman T-Bone Walker sang in 1947. "Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's oh so sad."

Is it ever.

Images of devastation around the city and the Gulf Coast make the heart sink, for so many reasons. Loss of life, first and foremost. But also cultural loss. And that means everything that makes the Big Easy - a nickname that this week became cruelly ironic - so distinctive:

Tennessee Williams. Mansions in the Garden District. Pecan waffles at the Camillia Grille.

And mainly, the music.

Along with Memphis, New Orleans is the richest of American musical cities, the birthplace of jazz and Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. Allen Toussaint and the Dixie Cups, Irma Thomas and Ernie K-Doe.

It's home to the Mardi Gras Indian troupe the Wild Tchoupitoulas, and Clarence "Frogman" Henry. The Neville Brothers and the Marsalis family. Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise" and Aaron Neville's "Tell It Like It Is." Dirty South rapper Master P and the Cash Money Millionaires, who gave the world the term bling-bling.

Not to mention my favorite, the great R&B singer Lee Dorsey, whose travelogue "Ride Your Pony" winds up back in "New Orleans, the home of the blues."

Louisiana music is the sound of resiliency, of peppery zydeco and funky swamp-pop. And that's not just the sound of letting les bon temps roulez. It's a celebration of the sheer lunacy of living in a city that sits below sea level, surrounded by water.

American blues, jazz and country music were forged under harsh conditions in the Deep South. Biblical images of the Flood - all too real along the mighty Mississippi - are everywhere.

For example: Johnny Cash asking, "How high is the water, mama?" in "3 Feet High and Rising." Delta blues progenitor Charley Patton, bellowing about "High Water Everywhere."

And maybe most eerily, Memphis Minnie singing "When the Levee Breaks," later reworked by Led Zeppelin, conjuring a too-real time when "crying won't help you, praying won't do no good."

New Orleans' self-image as the City That Care Forgot has also served as a bulkhead against the forces of homogeneity, an "Iko Iko" in response to the strip mall-ization of America.

In New Orleans, the humid streets have always been thick with history that lives. And it often seems as if everybody and his uncle feels the music.

I once went to a little club in the Treme district to hear nouveau Satchmo trumpeter Kermit Ruffins. Halfway through the set, a guy walked off the street, borrowed a horn, and cut Ruffins to pieces. When I complimented him, he assured me he wasn't even the best trumpeter in his family. "You should see my grandma," he said.

With Armstrong by her side in a 1947 movie named after the city, Billie Holiday sang "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." If you've been there, you do. Because the music stays with you when you go.

And it calls you back. One of the two songs I haven't been able to get out of my head is "Crescent City," by Lucinda Williams. In her cracked soul voice, she longs to drive over the now-ruined "longest bridge over Pontchartrain" and reach an unchanged place, "the Crescent City, where everything's still the same."

The other is Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," a lovely piano ballad about another natural disaster. "Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right," he sings. But while there's sorrow in Newman's voice, there's also stubbornness. "They're trying to wash us away," he repeats over and over, expressing a determination that it'll never come to pass.

In these dark days, one can only hope that such defiant spirit will prevail, that the waters will recede, that the city will rebuild.

Surely, the music will always be heard. But after Katrina, the unchanged place is certain to be changed forever. And we'll all know what it means to miss the New Orleans we once knew.

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at go.philly.com/dandeluca.

Ellie