Country Roads Magazine "The Music Issue" February 2024 by Country Roads magazine

Friday live art demonstrations Grace Bowers

Conner Smith Flatland Cavalry

saturday 100+ Art vendors, local food vendors Kenny Brown Billy allen and the pollies jaime wyatt bass drum of death

charlie mars neal francis

christone “kingfish” ingram

brittany howard April 26 & 27 Oxford, ms doubledeckerfestival.com @doubledeckerart 2

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NOLA FUNK FEST

OCTOBER 18-20, 2024 DDISCOUNTED I S C O U N T E D EEARLY A R L Y BBIRD I R D TTICKETS ICKETS OON N SSALE A L E NNOW! OW!

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LINEUP REVEAL SHOW

MARCH 23

FREE ADMISSION FOR EARLY BIRD TICKET HOLDERS ALSO, for sale at the Lineup Reveal Show: Louisiana residents may purchase up to six Funk Fest GA tickets. This will be the only opportunity to purchase Locals tickets. The purchase will get you into the Lineup Reveal Show.

GA 1-Day GA 3-Day

LA RESIDENTS

EARLY BIRD

$25 $60

$35 $90

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Contents

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Introduction

6 8

Features

REFLECTIONS Tender Flower by James Fox-Smith

NEWS & NOTEWORTHIES

A Grammy-nominated Cajun music symphony, Jo-El Sonnier, and the Victor Profits Memorial Travel Media Award

Events

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COME ON, COUYON It’s carnival season, y’all.

FRENCH CONNECTIONS How Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop emerged by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Publisher

James Fox-Smith

Associate Publisher

Ashley Fox-Smith

THE SWAMP BLUES Baton Rouge’s legends, and their corner of blues history by John Wirt

Managing Editor

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Arts & Entertainment Editor

Alexandra Kennon

Creative Director

HOW NEW ORLEANS BECAME THE CRADLE

Kourtney Zimmerman

Jazz—how it began and where it’s taken us by Alexandra Kennon

On the Cover

Contributors:

Kara Bachman, Bryant Benoit, Jess Cole, Randy Leo “Frenchy” Frechette, Philip Gould, Mimi Greenwood Knight, Randell Henry, Sophie Nau, Natalie Roblin, Cyril Vetter, John Wirt

“TUBA SKINNY’S SHAYE COHN” Cover Artist

Dirk Guidry

For Lafayette artist Dirk Guidry’s Festival Musician series, he joins the flowing brushstrokes and color palette of his abstract work with the animated, figurative quality of his live paintings to create a collection that celebrates the region’s most recognizable musicians in action. Here, he captures cornetist Shaye Cohn in her element, performing for the music-worshiping crowds of Festival International de Louisiane last year. Besides the undeniable draw of Guidry’s visually stunning portrait, Cohn feels like an apt figurehead for this year’s Music Issue, which digs deep into the intricate and enduring legacies of Louisiana’s indigenous music traditions of jazz, swamp blues, Cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop. Cohn herself is part of the legacy of American jazz—the granddaughter of saxophonist and composer Al Cohn, and daughter of jazz guitarist Joe Cohn. Al and Joe found jazz in the New York scene, brought there by touring musicians from New Orleans in the mid-20th century. A part of a new generation revitalizing the traditional jazz sound, Cohn has brought the music back to its cradle, to the Crescent City, to found one of the hottest trad jazz bands on the scene, Tuba Skinny. Read more about the history of New Orleans jazz, and other musics born of Louisiana, in our Features section.

Cuisine

YOU SAY POTATO SALAD, I SAY SWEET POTATO The great gumbo debate—side dish edition by Natalie Roblin

Outdoors

Culture

50 52

“PIANO” SMITH The legend’s Baton Rouge era by John Wirt

LOUISIANA MUSIC & HERITAGE EXPERIENCE A new music museum in New Orleans

OUR SUSTAINABLE GARDEN Getting to to the root of things

by Alexandra Kennon

by Jess Cole

by Kara Bachman

THE FYRE FEST OF LOUISIANA And what went wrong

THE FUNERAL SINGER John “Deacon” Moore’s legacy of graceful departures

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Advertising

SALES@COUNTRYROADSMAG.COM

Sales Team

Heather Gammill & Heather Gibbons

Operations Coordinator

Camila Castillo

President

Dorcas Woods Brown

Country Roads Magazine 758 Saint Charles Street Baton Rouge, LA 70802 Phone (225) 343-3714 Fax (815) 550-2272 EDITORIAL@COUNTRYROADSMAG.COM WWW.COUNTRYROADSMAG.COM

by Cyril Vetter

Escapes

MISSISSIPPI’S MUSIC CITY Cleveland is a Delta hub of musical experiences by Mimi Greenwood Knight

Perspectives

ART OF IMPROVISATION The live, musical art of Emilie Rhys by Sophie Nau

Dirk Guidry

Subscriptions

21.99 for 12 months 39.58 for 24 months

$ $

ISSN #8756-906X

Copyrighted. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced without permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in Country Roads magazine are those of the authors or columnists and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, nor do they constitute an endorsement of products or services herein. Country Roads magazine retains the right to refuse any advertisement. Country Roads cannot be responsible for delays in subscription deliveries due to U.S. Post Oﬃce handling of third-class mail.

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Reflections FROM THE PUBLISHER

s any warm-blooded creature living in Louisiana has certainly observed, the weather’s hardly been tropical lately. Those who, like me, live in old houses will have noticed this keenly, because old houses built in the semitropical South prior to the arrival of air-conditioning were cleverly designed to lose heat as eﬃciently as possible. Our house is excellent at losing heat. In fact, during summers past, when one hurricane or another knocked out the power for an extended period, the house, with its high ceilings, screened porches, and tall, double-hung windows, remained pretty comfortable through all but the hottest weather. In mid-January, though, when the temperature fell to fifteen degrees and the wind came straight out of Winnipeg, comfortable it was not. While the power was on, no number of fossil fuel-driven heating appliances could raise the indoor temperature above fifty degrees. And when the electric-

ity went out—which it did with great finality on the coldest night of all, leaving just two wood-burning fireplaces standing between us and the arctic blast—we were dealt a stark reminder of just how tough my wife’s great-grandparents must have been. They were certainly tougher than my wife, a tender flower who loathes cold weather, and who has been leaning hard into her “eccentric plant lady” identity since our youngest child left for college last August. As the polar vortex descended, my tender flower set out to rescue scores of the even tenderer, tropical plants that she spends all year nurturing in our garden— stepping into the cold snap wearing enough clothes to resemble a Russian nesting doll. In the days leading up to the hard freeze, into the house came ferns, hip gardenias, gingers, trays of tender perennials—Lamb’s Ears and Dusty Miller; and potted Night-Blooming Cereus by the dozen. Now that it’s gotten really cold, so much tropical flora has been relocated into the house that it’s begun to resemble Max’s bedroom in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the ceiling hung with vines and the walls become the world

Unlock a Healthier Future

Publisher, daughter, and plant life: a moment frozen in time.

all around. To tell the truth, I rather like the effect. Although perhaps not as much as our dogs, whose usual “outside dog” status has been temporarily suspended for humanitarian reasons, as well as because, as mammals, they give off heat and therefore might as well be doing so indoors. Jockeying for position on the floor in front of the fire, they can’t quite believe their luck. Never has the origin of the phrase “three-dog-night” required less explanation. Of course, this being Louisiana, it won’t stay cold for long. Pretty soon the season will tilt back towards the heat and humidity for which this old house was built, and which have shaped so much about the way the architecture, the cuisine, and the mu-

sic of this place have evolved. Until it does, we present Country Roads’ annual “Music Issue” for your winter reading pleasure. In it we trace the complicated evolution of jazz, swamp blues, and Louisiana French music; profile musical pioneers present and passed; and share tales of music festivals gone wrong, a Mississippi Delta town doing it right, and the vast project to build a museum capable of encompassing it all. Our goal with this annual special issue is to deliver the inspiration to better appreciate Louisiana’s wealth of home-grown musical genres, a guide to where to hear them at their best, and a primer for the musical bonanza that spring festival season has in store. Read on, and once the weather is warm enough for all these tender flowers, dogs, and people to go outside again, keep a copy close, because February’s Calendar of Events also brings enough Mardi Gras season shenanigans to warm the cockles of the coldest heart. (And hey, if it does stay cold, you could always use the pages to start a fire.) Happy Mardi Gras. —James Fox-Smith, publisher james@countryroadsmag.com

www.pbrc.edu

@penningtonbiomed

@pbrcnews

@PenningtonBiomedical

Join a clinical trial at Pennington Biomedical! Clinical trials are part of scientific research and at the heart of all medical advances. Pennington Biomedical offers clinical trials that cover topics such as weight-loss, diabetes, cancer, nutrition, and healthy aging. Compensation is provided for trial participants. 225-763-3000 6400 Perkins Road, Baton Rouge, LA 70808

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Learn more: www.pbrc.edu/clinicaltrials

A special advertising feature from Pennington Biomedical Research Center

Equitable Interventions How Pennington Biomedical is addressing racial disparities in research participation

“

Not all medications work the same in everybody. So, if we want to have medications that work well for everybody, we need to have everyone included in our research studies.”

This simple truth is at the heart of Dr. Robert L. Newton, Jr.’s work at Pennington Biomedical Research Center—where he specializes in addressing health disparities in African American populations. Through this work, Dr. Newton engages directly with a challenge faced by researchers across the country: How do we recruit more members of minority communities to participate in research studies? The Importance of Diversity in Medical Research Studies FDA records on clinical trials conducted in the U.S. show that minorities make up less than 10% of trial participants nationwide, despite representing 24% of the population. There are myriad, systemic reasons that contribute to the health disparities between African American and white populations. A major contributor is the fact that, for decades, scientists have developed medical interventions that work well for their majority white study participants but are less effective for individuals of races underrepresented in the research. “We now know that the optimal treatment for hypertension is different if you are an African American person than if you are white,” is an example given by Dr. Owen Carmichael, Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at Pennington Biomedical. “So, that’s a case where simply saying hypertension is hypertension is hypertension doesn’t work.” Pennington Biomedical’s commitment to ensuring diversity in clinical trials goes beyond race, emphasizing the many variables that can contribute to an intervention’s effectiveness in members of one population over another. Dr. Newton stresses the need to address as many variables as possible before a treatment can be expected to benefit all people equally. “We know that people are from different cultures, have different socio-economic backgrounds, different experiences,” he says. “People live in different environments. So, when we develop behavioral interventions and we don’t take diversity into account, we’re ignoring and missing the important role these factors play in behavior change.” Spreading Awareness, Increasing Access, and Facilitating Relationships “Studies have shown that African Americans and other people of color are willing to take part in research,” says Dr. Newton, emphasizing that the barriers keeping them from doing so are not insurmountable. “We don’t want to continue to foster the belief that people of color just don’t want to participate in studies.” Trust is a major issue, as many have experienced lack of access to adequate health care in the U.S., and the nation’s history of exploitation of minorities in research. Another issue is the need to build awareness. “We know that people of color have said that these studies are not advertised in their communities,” says Dr. Newton. “If you don’t have somebody coming to tell you about research studies and why you need to be a part of them, then it’s just not part of your system. You don’t know about it.” Pennington Biomedical is working to address the issues of trust and awareness through various community engagements and initiatives. Events such as Wellness Day for Women, Men’s Health Summit, and the Senior Black American Health Fair invite the community into Pennington Biomedical’s facilities—providing guided tours of the campus and inviting visitors to meet researchers to learn more about projects. “Allowing these diverse populations to see what we do and where we do it removes the mystery and is helping to address participation issues,” says Dr. Newton. Pennington Biomedical also works to recruit members of minority communities by meeting them where they are. By building relationships with “community champions”— leaders in the African American community such as pastors, community nurses, and political figures—researchers can spread the word about research work through trusted advocates. “By working with trusted community centers that are promoting health, similar to Pennington Biomedical’s mission, we can start to build trust in the community,” says Dr. Newton. “Then, when we advertise these studies, it’s my belief that they will be more willing and empowered to come out and participate in our studies, because they understand who Pennington Biomedical is, what we’re trying to do, and how we benefit the community.” Learn more about the work Pennington Biomedical is doing in this space using the QR code below, and explore opportunities to participate in ongoing research trials at pbrc.edu/research-trials.

For more information about Pennington Biomedical Research Center, visit www.pbrc.edu. // F E B 2 4

Noteworthy

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N E W S , T I M E LY T I D B I T S , A N D

ASSORTED CURIOSITIES

A New Stage For Roots Music A COLLABORATION WITH LOST BAYOU RAMBLERS EARNS THE LOUISIANA PHILHARMONIC ITS FIRST GRAMMY NOM, IN AN UNPRECEDENTED CATEGORY FOR AMERICAN ORCHESTRAS

The Lost Bayou Ramblers performing with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra for their Grammy-nominated live album. Courtesy of LPO.

t is only from a musical tapestry as rich and inventive as Louisiana’s that a symphonic orchestra produces an album nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Regional Roots Music” category. “It blew my mind,” said Anwar Nasir, the Executive Director at the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), whose live album with internationally-acclaimed Cajun/Creole band Lost Bayou Ramblers, recorded last

January and released in August, has been recognized by the Recording Academy along with a host of other Louisiana artists. “For us to be the orchestra of this region . . . for this to be our first nomination felt really really special, to be a trailblazer in a way that is magical, and can show that orchestras can be more than just playing the greats, the Beethoven the Tchaikovsky. We can also do the music from our hometowns.”

We Won a Louey!

COUNTRY ROADS PRESENTED WITH VICTOR PROFITS MEMORIAL TRAVEL MEDIA AWARD

n January, we were honored and humbled when Country Roads magazine was awarded the Victor Profits (Southern Living) Memorial Travel Media Award by the Louisiana Travel Association (LTA). The accolade, which was presented during LTA's Annual Meeting at Harrah's New Orleans on January 16, goes to a media organization that goes the extra mile in providing exceptional value to the state, region, and/or tourism entities through editorial content, online presence, or other forms of partnership. The award is named in memory of Victor Profits, who was a pioneer in the travel media industry. During the ceremony, Country Roads was acknowledged for its "unwavering commitment to showcasing the unique essence of the region through innovative editorial content, a strong online presence, and meaningful partnerships that extend far beyond traditional advertising." Country Roads’ hometown of St. Francisville was well-represented at this year's Louey Tourism Awards. The St. Francisville Inn took home the Accommodation of the Year award for providing guests with exceptional service and amenities, and Visit St. Francisville received the Louey for Outstanding Convention and Visitors Bureaus/ Tourist Commission (CVBs/TCs) of the Year in the budget up to $499,999 category. "We are thrilled to accept the Victor Profits Memorial Travel Media Award," said publisher James Fox-Smith. "This recognition is a testament to the hard work and dedication our team has shown in delivering content that not only informs and entertains, but also contributes to the promotion and growth of the region that we cover. For forty years, it’s been our privilege to cover the area we call home, and we are honored to be acknowledged for our commitment to excellence in travel media." Pictured at the 2024 LTA Louey Travel Awards are (l-r) LTA President/CEO Chris Landry, Country Roads’ Ashley and James FoxSmith, and Ralph Ney, LTA Chairman and GM of Baton Rouge Hilton/Embassy Suites. 8

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LO O K C LO S E R

The concept was part of the LPO’s ongoing series of collaborative performances with local musicians. Demonstrating the orchestra’s range, and its place within the Louisiana music community, the sonically exciting shows have brought the classic orchestral sound to bear on contemporary music by local artists the likes of Tank and the Bangas, Sweet Crude, and Black Masking Indian tribes. When Nasir first joined LPO in 2021, coming out of the pandemic, “We wanted to turn our attention to really being the orchestra of New Orleans in Louisiana, and that meant really featuring the music of our region,” he said. Prior to the 2022 concert, Lost Bayou Ramblers had already worked with orchestras across the country, performing live their original score of the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. In 2019, they brought that performance home to Lafayette, playing the soundtrack with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra. For the occasion, they created new orchestral arrangements of Lost Bayou Ramblers songs for the first time. The LPO performance and resulting album drew from these songs, as well as four new ones arranged with the help of local composer and orchestrator Jay Weigel just for the New Orleans performance. “Jay was really the glue between the two sounds,” said Nasir. “He really brought them together in a way that birthed this fantastic project that I don’t think any of us knew was going to get this big.” “Translating the rhythms of Cajun music to an orchestra was the trickiest thing,” said Lost Bayou Ramblers fiddler and lead singer Louis Michot. “This is a very interesting collaboration because you’re coming from a completely oral tradition in music, and matching it with the exact opposite extreme, which is learned, note-bynote arrangements. It’s really hard to put enough Italian musical annotations to properly convey what a syncopated Cajun music rhythm is supposed to sound like. The beautiful thing about it is when you bring it together, music is still a universal language. So once the melodies of Cajun music are put to paper for the orchestra, it just comes alive beautifully.” The Grammy winner for the Best Regional Roots Music Album will be announced at the 2024 Grammy Awards on February 4 at 7 pm. This year, the category’s nominees are all from Louisiana, and include Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. & The Legendary Ils Sont Partis Band’s album New Beginnings, Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers’ album Live at the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, New Breed Brass Band’s Made in New Orleans, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers’ Too Much to Hold, and The Rumble’s album featuring Chief Joseph Boudreaux, Jr., Live at the Maple Leaf. Nominees in other categories include Jon Batiste, Tank and the Bangas, Neutral Milk Hotel, PJ Morton, Rickie Lee Jones, Bobby Rush, Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton, Terence Blanchard and Lauren Daigle. —Jordan LaHaye Fontenot You can listen to Lost Bayou Ramblers & Philharmonic Orchestra Live at the Orpheum Theater NOLA on Spotify and other streaming services. Learn more about the Ramblers at lostbayouramblers.com, and about LPO at lpomusic.com.

Come on, Joe

Photo by David Simpson

IN MEMORIAM: LOUISIANA MUSIC HALL OF FAMER JOE-EL SONNIER

Published in partnership with Télé-Louisiane and Le Louisianais

o-El Sonnier, the Grammy Award-winning Cajun and country music star and member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, died on Jan. 13 in Llano, Texas while on tour. He was seventy-seven. According to Texas Country Music promoter Tracy Pitcox, Sonnier died of a heart attack following a performance at the Llano Country Opry. After his last song of the night, “Tear Stained Letter,” Sonnier came back on stage for an encore and played “Jambalaya.” “Jo-El mentioned that he needed to rest for just a few minutes before signing autographs,” Pitcox recalled on social media. “Unfortunately, he suffered cardiac arrest and was air-flighted to Austin, where he was pronounced deceased. It is never easy to lose a legend, but he truly spent his final day doing what he loved—entertaining his fans with his loving wife, Bobbye, by his side.” Sonnier was born to sharecropper parents in rural Rayne, Louisiana in 1946. He learned French as a first language from his parents and grandparents, speaking it exclusively until the age of around seven. In a 2018 interview with Télé-Louisiane, Sonnier recalled, “I listened to French music [Cajun and Zydeco music] on an old AM radio. That’s all we had was two stations. Before five or six in the morning, we listened to music and then we went in the fields and worked.” Sonnier began playing music from a young age; at three his mother Eunice gave him an accordion, which he played under a wagon while the family worked in the fields. As a teenager, he released independent singles and several albums. By thirteen in 1960, he was leading the Duson Playboys, recording an album at the legendary Swallow Records. Sonnier played both country and Cajun music throughout his life. In the 1970s, he signed on with Mercury Nashville Records to cut country records before switching back to Cajun music with Rounder Records, where he earned his first Grammy nomination. He signed on with RCA Records, releasing the songs “No More One Time” and “Tear Stained Letter,” that both made it to the Top Ten on the country charts in the 1980s. In the ‘90s, Sonnier went back to Cajun music and he received two Grammy

nominations—in 1997 for his album Cajun Pride and in 2001 for his album Cajun Blood—before being inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2015, he won a Grammy Award for the Best Regional Roots Music Album for his record The Legacy. Sonnier played on stages in over thirty countries around the world, including the Grand Ole Opry, and he shared those stages with legends like Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and George Jones. He collaborated on records with artists like Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, and songs he wrote were recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis and George Strait. With all of his success, Sonnier continuously paid homage to his Louisiana French roots, singing in the language and using it with local Francophones and while he toured in countries like Canada or France. “I play my music in French,” he said in 2018, “to give back to my home, the young generation and the older one. You have to have someone to protect and to preserve the music and the language.” “We’re trying to save [the language],” he continued. “And me, the way I know how to save it is to write my songs.” —Jonathan Olivier

Saturday, March 2, 2024 3:00 until 6:00 pm Come and enjoy tastings of over 200 domestic and international beers and ales at this 19th annual Baton Rouge tradition. Home brews for sample will also be available, which are always crowd pleasers.

Proceeds from this annual event will go to the LSU Rural Life Museum, which supports research, education, and preservation.

Please note that this event is for patrons who are 21 years of age and older. You will need to provide proper photo identification to purchase tickets and enter the event. We kindly ask parents to find a sitter for their children and furry friends, as no children or pets will be admitted to the museum grounds.

Non- alcoholic beverages and food will be available.

Ticket Information: Early Admission: $65.00 per ticket

(Includes 1 jambalaya, 1 non-alcoholic beverage and 2:00 pm entry.) entr

Point phone camera here for tickets

Admission: $45.00 per ticket Designated Driver: $20.00 per ticket

(Includes 1 jambalaya, 1 non-alcoholic beverage and entry with your party.)

Photo of Jo-El Sonnier by David Simpson

Located on Burden Museum and Gardens | 4560 Essen Lane, Baton Rouge, LA 70809 // F E B 2 4

upcoming events 2024

• 1/26-28 – Clarksdale Film & Music Festival • 4/11-14 – Juke Joint Festival & Related Events • 4/14 – Cat Head Mini Blues Fest • 5/11 – Clarksdale Caravan Music Festival • 5/24-25 – Ground Zero Blues Club Anniversary • 5/25 – Deak’s Harmonica Block Party • 5/26 – Bad Apple Blues Festival • 6/14-16 – Birthplace of American Music Festival • 8/9-11 – Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Fest • 8/9-11 – Cat Head Anniversary • 8/31 – Red’s Old Timers Blues Fest • 9/13-14 – Mighty Roots Music Festival • 10/9-12 – King Biscuit Blues Festival (Helena, Arkansas) • 10/13 – Clarksdale Super Blues Sunday • 10/13 – Pinetop Perkins Homecoming • 10/17-20 – Deep Blues Fest • 10/ 17-19 – Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival • 10/24-27 – Hambone Festival • 10/25-26 – Cruz’n The Crossroads Car & Truck Show • 12/31 – Clarksdale’s New Year’s Eve Weekend

In Mississippi, we’re just 75 miles South of Memphis.

Download the app!

MUSEUMS • LOCAL TOURS • HISTORY MARKERS • CANOE TRIPS ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

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FROM CATCH

Events

C I T Y P A R A D E S TO S M A L L-TOW N THESE

FESTIVITIES ACROSS

CELEBRATIONS

THE

SOUTH

THIS

GRAS GREATNESS

AND RURAL COURIRS, CARNIVAL SEASON

IT’S

CARNIVAL TIME

Peruse the following pages for Mardi Gras madness in all its forms as we gear up for Fat Tuesday. Laissez les bons temps roulez!

Founded in 2006 by local musicians with tradition as well as inclusion at its heart, the Faquetaigue Courir de Mardi Gras on the outskirts of Eunice offers a creative iteration of the classic Cajun chicken run on Fat Tuesday morning. See listing on page 13. Image by David Simpson, courtesy of St. Landry Parish.

NORTH LOUISIANA

February 4

February 3

Krewe of Barkus and Meoux: The crowd acts like animals for this Shreveport favorite. 11 am. barkusandmeoux.com.

Krewe of Centaur: The largest parade in the Ark-La-Tex area, Shreveport’s “Fun Krewe” is known for its raucously centurion celebration of the regional gambling industry. 3 pm starting downtown and traveling down the Shreveport-Barksdale Highway, to E. Kings Highway, ending just before Preston. kreweofcentaur.org. Krewe of Janus Children’s Parade: A cute parade with even cuter riders at Pecanland Mall’s Center Court in Monroe. 10 am. kreweofjanus.com. Krewe of Janus: Celebrating forty years, Northeast Louisiana’s oldest parade joins the Twin Cities by parading through West Monroe and Monroe, mostly down Louisville Avenue. 6 pm. kreweofjanusonline.com. Krewe of Paws Parade: Furry friends of all shapes and sizes will be in West Monroe dressed in their Mardi Gras best, beginning on the 100 block of Commerce Street. 1 pm. monroewestmonroe.org.

February 10 Krewe of Gemini: Shreveport and Bossier City’s first parading Krewe of modern times, this event is one of distinctly royal revelry. In downtown Shreveport at 3 pm. kreweofgemini.com.

February 11 Krewe of Highland: Lunch will be supplied at this eclectic Shreveport parade in the form of grilled hot dogs and packaged ramen noodles hurled off of floats. After, enjoy live music, crawfish, and more at the Mardi Gras Bash at Marilynn’s. Rolls at 2 pm through the Highland neighborhood. kreweofhighland.org. ACADIANA

February 2 Krewe de Canailles: Celebrating inclusivity, creativity, and sustainability, this walking parade down Jefferson Street in Lafayette does allow for floats—if you

drag them yourself. Tossing out ecofriendly throws and joining together groups of sub-krewes, these carnival crusaders have found a way to party their way to a better Lafayette. This year’s theme is “Into the Shadowverse”. 7 pm. krewedecanailles.com.

February 3 Lakeview Park & Beach Children’s Mardi Gras: Immerse your tots in the traditional Mardi Gras experience at Lakeview in Eunice, where chickens will be set loose for chasing, and live music will usher in a two step. lvpark.com. Krewe Des Chiens: We all know that we don’t deserve them, so the least we can do for our dogs is to parade them, in all their grandeur, through the streets of Lafayette. Noon on West Vemilion Street. krewedeschiens.org. Krewe of Carnivale en Rio: Known for its vibrant floats, dazzling lights and the jubilant accompaniment of maracas, the Parada—which honors Brazil’s first emperor Dom Pedro I and his granddaughter Dona Isabel—has become Lafayette’s premier Mardi Gras event. // F E B 2 4

CARNIVAL CALENDAR Parades and more in Acadiana & New Orleans 6:30 pm down Johnston and Vermilion. riolafayette.com. Scott Mardi Gras Parade: This small town parade is one of Acadiana’s largest, and a favorite for families city-wide and beyond. Floats and costumed riders will vie en fete for the title “Most Original Float.” Rolls at 11 am. scottsba.org/mardi-gras. La Rivière Mardi Gras Chicken Run and Parade: This kid-friendly chicken run starts at Riverview RV Park & Resort and heads along the Achafalaya River, offering a boudin intermission, and a bowl of gumbo and live music at the end. $10 for the trailside, $15 for the chicken, cash only. 9 am. (337) 351-4260.

February 4

Courir de Mardi Gras at Vermilionville: Vermilionville and the Basile Mardi Gras Association are hosting a traditional country Mardi Gras run in the historic village. Afterwards, enjoy lunch at the onsite restaurant and head to the dancehall for a fais-do-do. 10 am–4 pm. $10, $8 students, $6 seniors. vermiliondistrict.org. Krewe of Ezana Jeanerette Parade: This parade features marching bands, dance

groups, Mardi Gras royalty and lots of throws. Starts on Main St. at 1 pm. For more information call (337) 255-9539

February 9

Greater Southwest Louisiana Mardi Gras Kick-Off Parade: Getting things started for the slate of events that makes up the Association’s celebration of Mardi Gras in Lafayette, this parade travels from the corner of Simcoe, Surry, and Jefferson through the Downtown area over to Johnston, turning on to College to land at Cajun Field. Rolls at 6:30 pm. gomardigras.com.

February 9–13

Le Festival de Mardi Gras à Lafayette: Head to Cajun Field in Lafayette for Carnival rides (see what we did there?) and games, and live music from Wayne Toups and others. gomardigras.com. Eunice Cajun Mardi Gras Festival: In the days leading up to Eunice’s historic courir on Mardi Gras Day, the city convenes downtown for five days of fais do-doing. Expect to watch the end of Eunice’s courir come through town at 3 pm Tuesday afternoon, then dance until the dang day is done. Festivities start at 6:30 pm Friday, 11 am Saturday, 9:30

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am Sunday, 12:30 pm Monday; 9:30 am Tuesday. eunicemardigras.com.

February 10 Sunset Mardi Gras Parade: Once one of the largest celebrations in the area, Sunset Mardi Gras has continued on as a carnival classic with beads, doubloons, and live music—along with children’s activities along the parade route. 11 am. sunsetmardigras.com. Lafayette Children’s Parade: The city’s tiniest krewes will head down Johnston, in all their majesty, at 12:30 pm. gomardigras.com. Lafayette’s Krewe of Bonaparte: A hallmark of Lafayette Mardi Gras since 1972, this Krewe infuses excitement and youth into the city’s annual traditions. See them roll down the Greater Southwest Louisiana Mardi Gras route, from Jefferson to Johnston, to the Cajun Dome, starting at 6:30 pm. gomardigras.com. Hot Grits & the Krewe of Couche Couche Secret Revolutionary Ball: Catch the Krewe of Bonaparte Parade from Cliff ’s Bar at Cite des Arts, then stick around for the Secret Revolutionary Ball and Beaumont powerhouse jam band Hot Grits in the theater at 8:30 pm. $12. citedesarts.org.

February 11 Eunice Parade of Paws: It’s a ruff world out there, but not on the Sunday before

Mardi Gras. Come see the pups parade through Downtown Eunice. 3 pm. eunicemardigras.com. Courir de Mardi Gras Church Point: Once named “The Best Traditional Mardi Gras,” this run features costumed horseback riders, wagons, buggies, floats, and live music along with all your characteristic chicken chasing and greased pig capturing. 8 am–1:30 pm. $40 to participate, must be in costume. Main Street parade begins at 1 pm. churchpointmardigras.com. Eunice Lil’ Mardi Gras: Some might argue that it’s easier to catch a chicken if you’re closer to the ground. Watch the ‘lil costumed runners race after the courir’s mascot—fueled by the promise of a chicken-shaped trophy. $10 per child to participate; $10 per vehicle to follow along the route. The day begins at 9 am with the traditional run at the Eunice Recreation Complex, followed by the official chicken chasing competition at 1:15 and the children’s parade through downtown Eunice at 3 pm. facebook. com/eunicelilmardigras. Grand Marais Mardi Gras Parade: Admire costumes from the artistic to the repulsive—all elaborate, plus floats and dance troops at this family-friendly Jeanerette parade, which begins at Grand Marais Park at 2 pm. iberiatravel.com.

St. Martinville’s Annual Newcomers Mardi Gras Celebration: Join the Newcomers Club for their annual Mardi Gras celebration with music, food, and children’s activities beside the Evangeline Oak. 2 pm–10 pm. stmartinville.org.

February 12 Lundi Gras at Lakeview: Lakeview Park & Beach in Eunice know how to throw a party, and their free Lundi Gras pig roast is no different. Get your fill, then stick around all day for live music then the traditional barn dance in the evening. 8 am–6 pm. lvpark.com. Lafayette’s Monday Night Parade: In Lafayette, Lundi Gras is for the queens— Evangeline LXXXII and LXXXIII will reign over the city’s most regal krewes, rolling down the Southwest Louisiana Mardi Gras route at 6 pm. gomardigras.com.

February 13 Courir de Mardi Gras de Grand Mamou: One of the most raucous and famous Cajun chicken runs on the prairies. Starts at 6:30 am, and travels throughout the country roads collecting goods for that end-of-the-day gumbo. Catch the parade at the end of the day in downtown Mamou around 3 pm (watch where you step, horses have been known to enter the bars). evangelineparishtourism.org. Faquetaigue Courir de Mardi Gras: This courir celebrated annually on the outskirts of Eunice holds values of tradition, as well as inclusivity, at its heart. Designed to be appropriate for all ages, to be family friendly, and to emphasize culture—the run takes place on horseback, on foot, and via trailer, journeying throughout the Faquetaigue community. Dancing, begging, and singing are aplenty, all leading up to a traditional gumbo and concert at the day’s end. Begins at 8 am; full costumes with hats and masks are required. $25. faquetaigue.com. Le Vieux Mardi Gras de Cajuns de Eunice: Dating back to the city’s earliest days in the late nineteenth century, Eunice’s Courir de Mardi Gras features riders on horseback in masks, conspiring in chicken-chasing, revelry, general silliness, and an effort to make a community-wide gumbo. Costumeclad trailers follow behind—and all join together in downtown Eunice for a final fais do do at 3 pm. The day starts long before that, though, at 8 am at the Northwest Community Center. facebook.com/eunicemardigras. Tee Mamou-Iota Mardi Gras Folklife Festival: Featuring all your favorite clung-to traditions, the handmade costumes and masks, the masterfully medieval capuchins, and the unbridled chaos of it all—the Folklife Festival also celebrates with live music, folk crafts, and

local food booths on the prairie. 9 am–4 pm. acadiatourism.org. Carnival D’Acadie: Run into the heart of the Cajun Prairie to celebrate Fat Tuesday, Rice City Style. Crowley’s Fat Tuesday festival includes carnival rides, live music, and a grand parade at 2 pm. Music starts at 10 am. acadiatourism.org. King Gabriel’s Parade: Lafayette’s grandest of parades, honoring the King of Carnival and the hundreds of volunteers who make the vibrant showcase down Johnston possible. Revelers will vie for beads, trinkets, and other memorabilia. Rolls at 10 am. gomardigras.com. Opelousas Imperial Mardi Gras Parade: Floats, beads, and reigning royalty make up this Opelousas parade. Rolls from East Landry Street to Liberty Street beginning at 11 am. cajuntravel.com. Lafayette Mardi Gras Festival Parade: Emitting the spirit fueled by the carnival atmosphere at Cajun Field, this parade will run down Johnston at 1 pm. gomardigras.com. Krewe Chic-a-la-Pie Parade: Even the name of the parade sounds fun; old fashioned and put on by passionate Mardi Gras apologists, this family-style parade ignites the seasonal spirit in Kaplan. 2 pm. vermilion.org. Zyde Gras on the Square: Zydeco music legend Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band will perform at the St. Landry Parish Courthouse Square following the Opelousas Parade. 2 pm– 5 pm. Free. (337) 948-3688. Independent Parade: Anyone can participate in this parade, which closes out Mardi Gras day in Lafayette. Take part, or enjoy the show of “independent” floats rolling down Johnston, starting at 2:30 pm. gomardigras.com. Papa Red Dog Mardi Gras Parade: Loreauville Legend, Papa Red keeps tradition alive at this parade. Enjoy throws, live music, and more. 2 pm. (337) 967-4554. NEW ORLEANS

February 2 Krewe of Cork: New Orleans’s wine krewe will be sippin’ and steppin’ through the French Quarter. 3 pm. kreweofcork.com.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS February 2024 Tee Wayne BCA BBQ ChampionshipThe Paragon Casino RV Park February 3, 2024 337-482-6466 (337-257-8727 after hours) Donkey Basketball Fifth Ward Community Center February 3, 2024 318.305.7793 or 318.447.8729 Avoyelles Rotary Mardi Gras Parade Downtown Marksville February 4, 2024 @ 2:00pm 318.359.3534 Mardi Gras Mask Workshop Big Bend Museum February 4, 2024 @ 2:00pm 318.500.4036 Belledeau KC Fish Fry St. Martin of Tours February 23, 2024 318.359.9454 Alligator Feeding Show Paragon Casino Resort February 24, 2024 @ 4:00pm www.paragoncasinoresort.com

Krewe of Oshun: This krewe includes marching Baby Dolls, a band contest, peacocks, and the goddess of love—all making their way down St. Charles. 6 pm. mardigrasneworleans.com. Krewe of Cleopatra: The first all-female organization on the Uptown route will roll again. 6 pm. kreweofcleopatra.org. Krewe of ALLA: One of the oldest New Orleans krewes, ALLA has been marching in Uptown since the Great Depression. Step out to catch one of their signature genie lamp throws. 7 pm. kreweofalla.net.

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CARNIVAL CALENDAR Parades and more in New Orleans February 3 Magical Krewe of Mad Hatters: This recently-founded Metairie krewe aimed at capturing the imagination brings Alice in Wonderland to life with colorful lights, costumes, and dance troops on Veteran’s Boulevard. 5 pm. madhattersparade.com. Knights of Nemesis: The krewe of St. Bernard Parish will make its annual, unforgettable appearance coming down Judge Perez Drive. 1 pm. knightsofnemesis.org. Krewe of Pontchartrain: Famous for its history of celebrity Grand Marshals, this St. Charles Avenue parade is one of New Orleans’s longest-standing. 11:30 am. kofp.com. Krewe of Choctaw: Starting their eightyyear history on mail wagons as floats, this krewe will march down St. Charles. 2 pm. kreweofchoctaw.com. Krewe of Freret: This krewe has a focus of preserving New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition, and will march down St. Charles following Choctaw. 3 pm. kreweoffreret.org. Knights of Sparta: This all-male krewe

has been around since the fifties. 5:30 pm down St. Charles. knightsofsparta.com. Krewe of Pygmalion: This parade founded by Carnival veterans in 1999 rolls down the St. Charles route around 6:15 pm. kreweofpygmalion.org.

February 4 Mystic Krewe of Barkus: This one has gone to the dogs—see them all, including the four-legged royalty, this year with the theme “Top Dogs: Barkus Comes to the Rescue”. In the French Quarter, starting at 2 pm. kreweofbarkus.org. The Mystic Krewe of Femme Fatale: The first krewe founded by African American women, their signature throw is a designer lady’s compact, symbolizing constant inward and outward reflection. 11 am down St. Charles. mkfemmefatale.org. Krewe of Carrollton: Carrollton is the fourth-oldest parading krewe of the New Orleans Carnival season. Watch out! They are known for throwing shrimp boots. Follows Femme Fatale at noon down St. Charles. kreweofcarrollton.org. Krewe of King Arthur and Merlin: One of the largest New Orleans krewes,

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Arthur and Merlin’s signature throw is the King Arthur Grail—hand-made goblets that are bestowed upon the most esteemed parade-goers. Follows Carrollton at 1 pm. kreweofkingarthur.com. Krewe of Atlas: This Metairie Krewe was founded on the principle of equality for all. 4 pm down Veterans. mardigrasneworleans.com.

February 7 Krewe of Druids: This secret society is known for its wit and tendency to ruffle feathers. One year it featured a float saying: “Seriously...The Parade Behind us is not Worth the Wait.” 6:15 pm down St. Charles. mardigrasneworleans.com.

February 8 Knights of Babylon: Traditional to the max, this Uptown krewe designs their floats exactly as they were drawn up over eighty years ago. The king’s identity is never revealed to the public. 5:30 pm. knightsofbabylon.org. Knights of Chaos: Parading on the traditional “Momus Thursday,” Chaos picks up where Momus left off—in the grand tradition of satire. Follows Babylon on the Uptown Route at 6 pm. mardigrasneworleans.com. Krewe of Muses: Let’s get some shoes— one of the most coveted throws of the season comes from this incredibly popular

all-female parade. Follows Chaos Uptown around 6:45 pm. kreweofmuses.org.

February 9 Krewe of Bosom Buddies: This French Quarter walking parade celebrates women of all walks of life, and throws out handdecorated bras along the way. 11:30 am. bosombuddiesnola.org. Krewe of Hermes: Every year, the Hermes’ captain leads the Uptown procession in full regalia on a white horse, followed by innovative neon floats and 700 male riders. 5:30 pm. kreweofhermes.com. Krewe d’Etat: Led by a dictator instead of a king, this secret society gets a kick out of throwing blinking skulls at its audience. 6:30 pm down St. Charles. mardigrasneworleans.com. Krewe of Morpheus: Looking through the chaos and tomfoolery for an “old school” parade down St. Charles? This one’s for you. 7 pm. kreweofmorpheus.com.

February 10 Krewe of NOMTOC: The Krewe of New Orleans Most Talked of Club was founded in 1969 by the Jugs Social Club. The all Black krewe tosses out ceramic medallion beads, jug banks, and signature Jug Man dolls. Starts in the Westbank at 10:45 am. nomtoc.com. Krewe of Iris: One of the oldest and largest Carnival organizations for

women, Iris members continue to follow tradition with white gloves and masks. Its 3,400 members pass through the streets throwing decorated sunglasses and king cake babies, as well as a bunch of Iristhemed items. 11 am down St. Charles. kreweofiris.org. Krewe of Tucks: This one got its start at a pub, and has developed a cherished reputation for its potty humor, including toilet paper throws draping St. Charles’s live oaks. Watch out for the King’s throne (a giant toilet). Noon. kreweoftucks.com. Krewe of Endymion: If you’re heading to watch this New Orleans “Super-Krewe,” be sure to get out to your viewing spot on Canal early. The Krewe hosts Samedi Gras, a block party that draws 30,000+ people to kick off the parade. 4:15 pm. endymion.org.

pearl bead necklaces, plastic tridents, and polystone medallions. 5:15 pm. kreweofproteus.com. Krewe of Orpheus: This parade was established as a superkrewe immediately after its debut, which rolled out 700 riders, and celebrates forty years this year. One of their most famous floats is the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbara Streisand. This year, monarchs include Golden Globe-winner Darren Chris and pop icon Joey Fatone. Fatone will headline Orpheusapade, the post-parade gala which is open to the public. Rolls on the Uptown Route at 6 pm. kreweoforpheus.com.

Krewe of Centurions: The familyfriendly Centurions parade is comprised of over 350 men, and rolls on the Metairie route. 6:30 pm. kreweofcenturions.com.

February 13 Krewe of Zulu: A parading krewe since 1909, Zulu was the first and for many years the only krewe representing New Orleans’s Black community. Its extraordinary costumes, float designs, and history distinguish it from other Mardi Gras parades. 8 am on St. Charles. kreweofzulu.com. Krewe of Rex: Elaborately decorated, hand-painted floats, masked riders in historic costumes, and a rich and

colorful history make Rex one of the cultural centerpieces of Mardi Gras. Rex was formed in 1872, making it the oldest continually-operating krewe. The identities of Rex’s king and queen remains secret until Lundi Gras. 10:30 am down St. Charles. rexorganization.com. ELKS, Krewe of Orleanians: The world’s largest truck parade features over fifty individually designed truck floats and comprises of over 4,600 riders. Follows Rex at 10:30 am. neworleans.com. Krewe of Crescent City: Each truck in the Crescent City Truck Parade represents a different Carnival organization.

Krewe of Isis: As Jefferson Parish’s oldest-consecutively parading Carnival organization and largest all-female krewe, the Metairie Egyptian-themed parade features marching bands, dance teams, and spectacularly-attired maids. Starts at the Esplanade Mall at 6 pm. kreweofisis.org.

February 11 Krewe of Bacchus: Revered as one of the most spectacular krewes in Carnival history, this parade is known for staging celebrities Bob Hope, Dick Clark, Will Ferrell, and Drew Brees as its namesake, Bacchus. The parade ends inside the Convention Center for a black-tie Rendezvous party of over 9,000 guests. 5:15 pm. kreweofbacchus.org. Krewe of Mid-City: This one is famed for its foil-covered floats and childrenoriented themes. 11:45 am along the St. Charles Route. kreweofmid-city.com. Krewe of Okeanos: Back in the ‘50s, Okeanos started as a small neighborhood parade, and evolved into the over 250-rider krewe it is today, traveling on the traditional Uptown/Downtown route. 11 am. kreweofokeanos.org. Krewe of Thoth: This parade’s route is uniquely designed to reach extended healthcare facilities so that individuals unable to attend other parades can participate in the holiday as well. This year, the theme is “Thoth Goes Festin’” Noon on the Uptown route. thothkrewe.com. Krewe of Athena: Jefferson Parish’s newest all-female krewe, founded on Sisterhood, Service, Fellowship, and Fun, will be tossing out hand-decorated fedoras down Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard. 5:30 pm. kreweofathena.org.

February 12 Krewe of Proteus: Founded in 1882, this St. Charles parade is the second-oldest krewe in Carnival history, and still uses the original chassis for their floats. Once known as the most miserly throw-ers, they now joust 60-inch red-and-white // F E B 2 4

CARNIVAL CALENDAR

Road to Angus Drive. cajuncoast.com.

Parades in New Orleans, the Cajun Coast, and Baton Rouge Follows ELKS Orleanians at 11 am. crescentcitytruckparade.com. Krewe of Argus: One of Jefferson Parish’s largest and most family friendly parades, Argus draws nearly one million revelers to the Veterans Memorial Parade Route in Metairie. 10:30 am. kreweofargus.com. ELKS, Krewe of Jeffersonians: Featuring more than ninety trucks and 4,000 riders, this krewe shares the Elk mascot with its sister krewe, the Krewe of Elks-Orleanians. 11 am on the Veterans Memorial Boulevard route. neworleans.com. CAJUN COAST MARDI GRAS

February 2 Krewe of Hercules: A favorite along the traditional West Side Route in Houma, Hercules celebrates its thirtyseventh anniversary this year. 6 pm. kreweofhercules.com.

February 4 Krewe of Shaka: Noted for its remarkable contributions to the Thibodeaux Community, this parade’s King and Queen are annually presented with the Key to Thibodeaux. 12:30 pm in downtown Thibodaux. lacajunbayou.com.

Krewe of Hyacinthians: The Ladies Carnival Club, Inc. is the largest carnival club in Terrebonne Parish, and surely not a force to be reckoned with. Kicking off at 12:30 down Houma’s West Side Route. hyacinthians.org.

February 9 Krewe of Cleophas: Thibodaux’s oldest parade will march again, featuring over fifty floats, bands, stilt walkers, dance teams, and more. 12:30 pm. lacajunbayou.com. Krewe of Nereids: Golden Meadow keeps the fun rolling with this festive parade. 6 pm. lacajunbayou.com. Krewe of Chronos: One of Thibodaux’s most celebrated parades of the season, Chronos believes in the slogan “Every Man a King,” and “Every Woman a Queen.” 2 pm. lacajunbayou.com.

February 10 Cypremort Point Boat Parade: Spend the day at Cypremort Point State Park, watching the iconic boat parade pass by. 1 pm. cajuncoast.com. Krewe of Lul Parade: Rolling at noon, Luling’s parade will begin on LA 52 at Angus Drive to LA 18 to Sugarhouse

February 11 Krewe of Galatea: St. Mary’s first female Krewe has been rolling the streets of Morgan City since 1969. Begins on 2nd Street, rolling through downtown, and lands at the Morgan City Auditorium. 2 pm. cajuncoast.com.

February 12 Krewe of Amani: Patterson’s official Mardi Gras parade begins at Patterson High School, and lands at Place Norman Shopping Center. 2 pm. cajuncoast.com. Krewe of Cleopatra: The six hundred plus ladies of Cleopatra steal the night for the only Lundi Gras parade in Terrebonne Parish. 6 pm down Houma’s West Side Route. houmatravel.com. Krewe of Hera: One of the Cajun Coast’s newer parades, this Morgan City procession is all excess and excitement. See them heading down Second Street to Onstead to the auditorium on Myrtle. 7 pm–9 pm. louisianatravel.com.

February 13 Krewe du Gheens Celebration and Parade: Kicking off the parade schedule on Mardi Gras day in Louisiana’s Cajun Bayou region, the Krewe of Gheens will roll at 11 am, beginning on Gheens Shortcut Road. lacajunbayou.com. Krewe of Ghana: Fun floats and dancers will make their way through downtown

Thibodaux on Mardi Gras Day. 1 pm. lacajunbayou.com. Franklin Mardi Gras Parade: Bringing together all the krewes of the little Cajun town of Franklin, this Fat Tuesday parade can be traced back to 1934. It runs from Franklin Senior High School, along Main Street, then turns back around onto Willow and Third. 1 pm. cajuncoast.com. Krewe of Houmas: This historically-rich krewe was the first to ever parade down Houma’s West Side Route. On each float, family is honored with at least one father-son duo or pair of brothers. 1 pm. kreweofhoumas.wildapricot.org. Krewe of Hephaestus Parade: The oldest krewe in St. Mary Parish dates back to 1914, rolling on Mardi Gras day from Sixth and Sycamore to the Morgan City Municipal Auditorium. 2 pm. cajuncoast.com. BATON ROUGE

February 2 Krewe of Artemis: The first all-female krewe in Baton Rouge begins and ends at the corner of St. Philip Street and Government Street. Revelers will be treated to themed throws, including the Krewe of Artemis signature high-heeled shoe. 7 pm. kreweofartemis.net.

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St. Mary’s first female krewe, Krewe of Galatea, rolls through downtown Morgan City on February 11 at 2 pm. See listing on page 16. Courtesy of Cajun Coast Tourism. February 3 Addis Mardi Gras Parade: In the little town of Addis, the Volunteer Fire Department will sponsor its familyfriendly line of celebration for all. 11 am. westbatonrouge.net. Krewe Mystique de la Capitale: The city’s oldest parading Mardi Gras krewe continues its mission to uphold Carnival season in the Capital City. Family oriented and fun for all ages, it starts at the River Center and winds around downtown. 2 pm. krewemystique.com. Krewe of Ascension Mambo Parade: Prepare to be awed as the creative masterpieces that are Ascension Parish’s Mardi Gras floats pass down Irma Boulevard to the corner of Highways 44 and 30. 4 pm. Details at the Krewe of Ascension Mambo Facebook Page. Krewe of Denham Springs: The Antique Village comes to life with people throwing trinkets at each other at noon starting at Denham Springs High School, and ending at Veteran’s Boulevard. 3 pm. Free. livingstontourism.com. Krewe of Orion: A Carnival-themed tractor pull through downtown Baton Rouge, this year’s celebratory theme is “Orion’s Silver Anniversary”. Begins and ends at the River Center, where the afterparty masquerade will be held. 6:30 pm. kreweoforion.com. Krewe of Diversion: The annual Livingston boat parade benefiting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital floats starting at noon at Manny’s. Free. For more information, call (225) 939-2135.

February 4 Mid City Gras: Baton Rouge’s freshest Mardi Gras parade returns to Mid City. The one-afternoon revel down North, from 22nd Street to Baton Rouge Community College, invites locals to “get nuts,” featuring Mid City artists, musicians, and more in a wildly

unpretentious neighborhood strut. 1 pm. midcitygras.org.

February 9 Krewe of Southdowns: Catch this flambeaux-inspired nighttime parade glittering and glaring along its usual route from Glasgow Middle School through the Southdowns neighborhood. This year’s theme is “Southdowns in Wonderland”. 7 pm. southdowns.org.

February 10 Krewe of Tickfaw Mardi Gras Boat Parade: Mardi Gras comes to the Tickfaw River on Saturday, with boats decked out in ways unimaginable. 2 pm. Details at the Krewe of Tickfaw-Mardi Gras on Tickfaw Facebook Page. Baton Rouge Mardi Gras Festival: An incredible line-up from Henry Turner Jr.’s Listening Room in North Boulevard Town Square is the highlight of this family-friendly Mardi Gras celebration. This year’s lineup to date features blues, soul, R&B, reggae, gospel, jazz, pop/ rock, spoken word, and comedy. Packages that come with meal tickets range from $50–$100. The festival, though, is free to the public, and will be held from 10 am–7 pm. bontempstix.com. Spanish Town Parade: Spanish Town’s annual parade of miscreants rolls from Spanish Town Road and Fifth Street, to Lafayette Street and Main. The krewes dole out dozens of infamously irreverent floats, with marching bands, dance troupes, and waves of pink throws. Come early. This year’s theme is “Flamingoville.” Noon. mardigrasspanishtown.com. Walker’s Kroux of Barkus: Doll-core galore meets pets on parade at Walker’s Kroux of Barkus, themed “Barkus & Barbie: Pawsitively Pink!” Held at Hutchinson Park, you can expect live Cajun and zydeco tunes, a farmer’s market, food trucks, and kids’ activities. 10:30 am. livingstontourism.com. // F E B 2 4

CARNIVAL CALENDAR Parades and more in Baton Rouge & beyond February 11 Krewe of Good Friends of the Oaks Parade: Residents of the Port Allen community “The Oaks” established this krewe in 1985, and it has been rolling right along ever since. 1 pm. westbatonrouge.net.

102 years now the population of New Roads multiplies tenfold as parade-goers searching for a more laid-back time flock to the “Little Carnival Capital”. Rolls at 11 am through downtown New Roads. Find it on Facebook for more information.

Must Luv Mardi Paws Parade: This adorable pet parade will start out on all fours in downtown Zachary at 2 pm, with the theme “Bark on de Bayou”. Proceeds from local food and dog-related vendors will go toward homeless and stray dog rescue efforts. mustluvdogs.org.

New Roads Lion Club Parade: This bead-heavy annual parade follows right behind the Community Center of Pointe Coupee Parade. 2 pm. pctourism.org.

February 12

Krewe of Eve: It began with six women, and now has over five hundred members (who wear elaborately decorated sweatshirts). With beautifully decorated Blaine Kern floats, this parade begins on LA-22 and continues down West Causeway Approach above Monroe Street, crossing 190 and ending on East Causeway Approach. 7 pm. kreweofeve.com.

Krewe of Comogo Night Parade: See Plaquemine like you never have before when Comogo rolls, sure to dazzle. 7 pm down Bellevue Drive. kreweofcomogo.com. Krewe of Shenandoah Parade: This brand-new Baton Rouge parade rolls beginning at 7 pm near Woodlawn Middle School, with the golfcentric theme “Par for the Course”. kreweofshenandoah.com. February 13 Community Center of Pointe Coupee Parade: Every Carnival season for

NORTHSHORE

February 2

Krewe of Mona Lisa and MoonPie Parade: Celebrate forty years of Slidell’s original marching club, the Krewe of Mona Lisa and MoonPie, as they shimmy, dance, and boogaloo through Olde

Towne Slidell. With the route starting and ending at KY’s in Olde Towne Slidell, this creative walking parade promises a family-friendly event filled with whimsical costumes, creativity, and, of course, Moon Pies. 7 pm. visitthenorthshore.com.

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February 9

Krewe of Push Mow: A group of artists in Abita Springs decided it would be a hoot if they decorated lawn mowers for a parade (spoiler alert: it is). Noon starting on Main Street. mardigrasneworleans.com. Krewe of Tchefuncte: Cruising down Madisonville’s Tchefuncte River, this boat parade celebrates maritime life on the historic river. 1 pm. kreweoftchefuncte.org. Krewe of Olympia: The oldest parade in St. Tammany, King Zeus’s identity is kept secret until the parade, which starts on Columbia Street. 6 pm. kreweofolympia.net.

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February 10 Krewe of Omega: See the regal King and Queen when they roll through the streets of downtown Hammond as monarchs of the Omega parade, this year with the theme “Spirit of Louisiana!” 6:30 pm. kreweofomega.org.

February 12 CMST Kids Krewe Parade: Celebrate Carnival with the Children’s Museum of St. Tammany Kids Krewe Parade on Lundi Gras. Secure your spot by registering your wagon and join the festive procession. Noon. cmstkids.org.

Krewe de Paws of Olde Towne: Join the fun with Slidell’s canine Carnival krewe for a dog-friendly parade through Olde Towne Slidell at 10 am. facebook.com/ krewedepawsofoldetowne.

Carnival in Covington: Covington’s main parade includes full-sized floats, hand-built floats, marching bands, dancers, walking groups, horses, cars, and a kids’ costume contest at

For life’s moments, big and small. We’re here with the strength of the cross, the protection of the shield. The Right Card. The Right Care.

Krewe of Selene: Slidell’s only all-female krewe tosses out one-of-a-kind handdecorated purses. Rolls at 6:30 pm down Pontchartrain Drive and Front Street. kreweofselene.net.

Krewe of Slidellians: Join the grandeur of the Krewe of Slidellians’ Bal Masque with the newly crowned King and Queen Samaritan, along with maids, dukes, and live performances in the 73rd edition of this Mardi Gras celebration. 7 pm. facebook.com/swcc2016.

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Krewe of Dionysus: Named for the Greek God of wine and “inspired madness”, Slidell’s first all-male krewe will set out at 1 pm on Berkley Street. kreweofdionysus.com.

February 13

the mid-point of the parade route through the downtown area. 10 am. carnivalincovington.com. Tammany Gras: This free party immediately follows the Carnival in Covington parade at the Covington Trailhead. Features live music, food trucks, drinks, a “Little Jesters” area with crafts, costume contests, and more until 4 pm. louisiananorthshore.com. Krewe of Folsom: An eclectic parade invites all to join in on the fun with the citizens of Folsom. 2 pm. Begins and ends at Magnolia Park. 2 pm. mardigrasneworleans.com. Krewe of Bogue Falaya Parade: This is a vibrant parade rolling at 10:15 am, featuring twenty traditional Mardi Gras floats, marching bands, walking groups, horses, and costume contests with prizes, promises a day of family-friendly festivities. carnivalincovington.com.

February 17 Krewe du Pooch: This pet parade brings dogs for days out to the Mandeville Lakefront with the theme “Great Gatsby by Krewe du Pooch”. Noon. krewedupooch.org.

February 18 Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws: This dog parade in downtown Covington is a lot more bark than bite. 2 pm. mardipaws.com. NATCHEZ

February 4 Mardi Paws Parade: Join the HoofBeats and PawPrints Rescue at North Broadway in Natchez at 2 pm for their festive event. Mayor and Mrs. Gibson will preside over contests, including costumes, best-dressed dog, best dog/owner combo, and the most creative animal float competition. hoofbeatsandpawprintsrescue.org.

February 9 Krewe of Pheonix: Up in Natchez, the Krewe of Pheonix goes pretty big. Lit-up floats, live bands, plenty of throws, and more free fun surrounding the parade will abound at North Broadway starting at 6:30 pm. kreweofphoenixnatchez.com. SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA

February 9 Merchants Parade: Local business and civic leaders march the streets of downtown-midtown Lake Charles during this community-oriented parade. 7 pm. visitlakecharles.org.

February 10 World Famous Cajun Extravaganza and Gumbo Cook-off : Amateur and professional teams compete for the chicken & sausage, seafood, and wild game gumbos. 8 am–2 pm at the Civic Center. $10, kids ten and younger free. visitlakecharles.org.

Mystical Krewe of Barkus Parade: Furry and fabulous, costumed pets parade down Gill Street in Lake Charles for one of the most highly-attended parades of the season. 1 pm. visitlakecharles.org. Krewe of Omega Parade: The only Southwest Louisiana Krewe to hold its own parade, Omega celebrates the African American community of the region. 2 pm. visitlakecharles.org. Louisiana Saturday Night in DeRidder Parade: This first-annual parade departs from the corner of Pine Street and 171 South, heading north on Pine Street and ending at Steamboat Bills. 4 pm. Head there in the morning for the 10th annual gumbo cook–off. louisianatravel.com.

February 11 Krewe of Krewes: Over a hundred floats from a variety of local krewes roll through downtown Lake Charles starting at 5 pm. visitlakecharles.org. Iowa Chicken Run: Even if you don’t catch a chicken, you can have some gumbo after the chase. Parade departs from the Iowa Knights of Columbus Hall at 8 am. $10 for adults and $5 for children 12 and under. visitlakecharles.org. Second Line Stroll: Skipping the floats, area groups strut their Mardi Gras spirit down Ryan Street to the tunes of Mardi Gras music in this walking parade. 1 pm. visitlakecharles.org. CENTRAL LOUISIANA

February 10 Pineville Light of Nights Parade: This parade glows and shimmers through the streets of Pineville, beginning at Louisiana Christian University and ending at Alexandria City Hall. 7 pm. mardigrascenla.com. Mardi Gras Block Party & Mutt Strut: Join the Garden District Neighborhood Foundation’s Mardi Gras Block Party & Mutt Strut at the corner of Albert and 20th streets in Alexandria. Enjoy the Mutt Strut, a lively doggy costume contest, and live entertainment by the four-piece band Sound of Change. Admission is a canned food donation, with prizes for the best costumes, so bring your furry friends, dancing shoes, and support for the Food Bank of Central Louisiana. 2:30 pm. alexmardigras.net.

February 11 Krewes Parade: Alexandria’s Krewes Parade is one of CenLA’s biggest, and rolls at 2 pm from Texas Avenue to the Mall. alexmardigras.net.

February 17 Taste of Mardi Gras: Area restaurants and vendors offer their top-tier Carnival f lavors, all at the Randolf Riverfront Center. 7 pm. mardigrascenla.com. // F E B 2 4

Other Events

Beginning February 1st - February 3rd UNTIL MAR 16th

HISTORY IN PHOTOS I AM A MAN: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AT THE OLD STATE CAPITOL Baton Rouge, Louisiana

A series of powerful images depicting some of the most pivotal moments of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, from the march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama to Martin Luther King Jr,’s funeral, is coming to the Old State Capitol. Southern folklorist and author William Ferris has curated a walk through some of the most important moments of this period, inviting the viewer to reflect on this transformative era that ended segregation and secured voting rights for African Americans. louisianaoldstatecapitol.org. •

Eginli, Sarah Burke, and Alex Cook. 8 pm. Free. February 17: Swamp Alps, an exhibition by Curtis Schreier, member of the 1970s utopian architecture salon The Ant Farm. Guest-curated by Liz Flyntz, the show features a model envisioning the future of Louisiana’s oil industry with an artificial “Alps” made from abandoned oil derricks. There will be an opening reception 6 pm– 9 pm. Free. February 20: Drummer Chris Corsano will perform a set at the intersection of free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music. 8 pm. Free. yeswecannibal.org. •

FEB 1st - FEB 29th

LOCAL LEGACIES BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVENTS AT THE RRAAM Donaldsonville, Louisiana

FEB 1 - FEB 2 st

BICENTENNIALS BEAUSOLEIL FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY AT ACA

In 2024, the River Road African American Museum celebrates thirty years of sharing

FEB 2nd

SPRING INTO ART HILLIARD SPRING RECEPTION Lafayette, Louisiana

The Hilliard University Art Museum is pleased to announce its spring 2024 season, with a celebration surrounding the current exhibition Sitting with George Rodrigue. Free. 6 pm–8 pm. hilliard.org.•

FEB 2nd - FEB 16th HOMETOWN SHOWS MONTI SHARP ART EXHIBITION Monroe, Louisiana

Monroe’s prodigal artist and Emmy award-winning actor, Monti Sharp, returns to his roots for a poignant exhibition, showcasing the evolution of his talents that have graced stages from coast to coast. This touching celebration of Monti Sharp’s homecoming is at the Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum. A reception with the artist will take place on February 2 from 3 pm–7 pm. africanmuseummonroe.com. •

Denham Springs, Louisiana

Livingston Parish’s Annual Juried Exhibition themed “New Year! New Beginning!” is currently on display at their facility. This diverse showcase of artistic expressions sets the tone for a fresh start. artslivingston.org. •

FEB 1 - FEB 20 st

EXPERIMENTAL ART FEBRUARY AT YES WE CANNIBAL Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Yes We Cannibal continues to raise the stakes for boundary-pushing art with the following programming: February 1: An evening of experimental electroacoustic sound art with Ipek 20

HISTORY ON PARADE AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY PARADE Shreveport, Louisiana

For the thirty-sixth year, Shreveport’s African American History Parade will roll and march beginning at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium at 11 am. Free. visitshreveportbossier.org. •

FEB 3rd

HARD CONVERSATIONS DISSONANCE BY THREE CORD PRODUCTIONS Dissonance, by Florida-based actor-writers Marci J. Duncan and Kerry Sandell, is a ninety-minute drama exploring the challenges of race in an open, honest, and difficult conversation between two friends of over twenty years. Catch this acclaimed production at the Fine Arts Theatre, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College-Harrison County Campus with a powerful post-show discussions led by the actor-writers. 3 pm & 7 pm. For tickets visit dissonanceplay.com. •

Celebrate the fifty-year milestone of BeauSoleil at the Acadiana Center for the Arts James Devin Moncus Theater with local legend Michael Doucet and two electrifying concerts featuring an ensemble of guest artists who have joined the band over the course of its illustrious career. Additionally, explore the band’s legendary journey through the decades with the exhibit 50 Years of BeauSoleil: Memorabilia & Archives in the Coca-Cola Studio on display until February 10. $35–$55. 7:30 pm. acadianacenterforthearts.org. •

CREATIVE COMPETITIONS ARTS COUNCIL OF LIVINGSTON PARISH’S JURIED EXHIBITION

FEB 3rd

Gulfport, Mississippi

Lafayette, Louisiana

FEB 1st - FEB 17th

troupe NoGravity Theatre as they bring Dante’s Divine Comedy to life at the Jefferson Performing Arts Center. This night will present surreal visuals, a mesmerizing musical backdrop, and a dream-like journey inspired by Dante’s scenes. This unique multidisciplinary performance, supported by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, marks NoGravity’s inaugural U.S. tour, showcasing their extraordinary blend of Renaissance and Baroque influences. 7:30 pm. $43–$73. jeffersonpac.com. •

Baton Rouge photographer Courtland Galore’s debut photography exhibition, No Matter What Kind of Black You Are, will be on display at the River Center Branch Library on February 9. See listing on page 22. Photo courtesy of the artist.

the narratives of the African American communities in Louisiana’s rural river communities. For the occasion of Black History Month, the RRAAM will host the following programming at its restored Rosenwald School: February 7: Live Oral History Recording. 2 pm. Free. February 10: Civil Rights Commemoration Install & Reveal. 6 pm–8 pm. $25. February 17: Genealogy Workshop. 10 am–noon. $75. Tuesdays and Thursdays: 365 Days of Wellness Soul Line Dance Class. 6 pm. $10. Saturdays: Freedom Garden Medicine Making with local Louisiana Herbalist. Noon. Free. africanamericanmuseum.org. •

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FEB 2nd - FEB 29th

JUST-DRIED PAINT FRESH OFFERINGS: ARTS FOR ALL MEMBER SHOW Saint Francisville, Louisiana

The artists who make up St. Francisville’s Arts for All are hosting an exhibition of new member works, titled Fresh Offerings, at the West Feliciana Parish Library. An opening reception on February 2 from 5 pm– 7 pm will feature refreshments, music, and artists. Free. For more information, contact artsforallstfrancisville@gmail.com. •

FEB 3

ITALIAN DANCE NOGRAVITY PRESENTS DIVINE COMEDY AT JPAC Metairie, Louisiana

Descend into the inferno with the Italian

FEB 3rd

GOOD EATS & CAUSES CHILI FOR THE CHILDREN Vicksburg, Mississippi

Spice things up at Washington Street Park with the Chili for Children cookoff, benefiting the Warren County Children’s Shelter and Jacob’s Ladder Learning Center. Teams can enter for $50, showcasing their culinary skills for a good cause. For details, email sabrina@ radiopeople.com. •

FEB 3rd - FEB 4th

DINO-MITE JURASSIC WORLD LIVE TOUR New Orleans, Louisiana

Embark on a thrilling Mesozoic adventure with the Jurassic World Live Tour at the Smoothie King Center. Your prehistoric journey begins at Isla Nebular as you encounter life-sized dinosaurs close up, pulse-pounding stunts, captivating scenery, and an unforgettable storyline.

A special advertising feature from Keep Louisiana Beautiful

This Festival Season, Louisiana is Going Green With its Greener Grounds initiative, Keep Louisiana Beautiful is helping reduce waste and manage litter at major outdoor events

t’s no secret that Louisiana knows how to throw a good party. Throughout the year, music, food, history, and holidays inspire more than 400 festivals and events. Unfortunately, with these events, comes the issue of waste and litter. With Mardi Gras parades rolling and the 2024 spring festival season underway, Keep Louisiana Beautiful (KLB) and Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser are calling on event organizers and eventgoers to do their part to keep our state clean. “Parades and festivals are at the heart of Louisiana’s culture, but the litter and waste generated is unsightly and harmful to our environment if left unaddressed,” said Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser. “Have fun, but don’t leave your trash behind.” All too often, after everyone has left the party, litter is what’s left behind. Fast food wrappers, beads, cans, and plastic bottles enter our environment, harm our wildlife, clog our storm drains, and pollute our waterways. During Mardi Gras 2023, the City of New Orleans reported that 1,162 tons (2.5 million pounds) of trash were transported to the landfill in just 11 days. Carnival season is a statewide celebration spanning several weeks, so just imagine the astronomical amount of waste and litter that results. Fortunately, our litter problem at outdoor events is entirely solvable, but it will take buy-in from event organizers and eventgoers. In 2023, KLB partnered with French Quarter Festivals, Inc., to create the Greener Grounds Guidebook and Workbook—offering a detailed roadmap to help outdoor event organizers better manage and prevent litter, reduce waste, and increase recycling. Understanding the Severity of Louisiana’s Litter Problem According to KLB’s 2023 litter study, Louisiana spends an estimated $91.4 million each year on litter prevention, education, remediation, and enforcement. This is a 65% expenditure increase since the 2010 KLB study. That’s taxpayer money that could be used to benefit the state in other ways if Louisianans put an end to our litter problem. Most residents are tired of living in a dirty state. In fact, 92% of KLB’s litter study survey respondents believe litter is a problem. Respondents also shared the reasons why they think people litter at outdoor events: • • • •

ATTENDING AN EVENT? Here are ways to help! •

• • •

•

Take your trash with you, sort out your recyclables, and dispose of everything properly. When you see litter, pick it up and throw it away. Bring a reusable water bottle instead of plastic single-use bottles. Use a pocket ash tray or ash receptacle to dispose of your cigarette butts. Bring two bags when you go to a parade, one for trash and one for throws. Donate your Mardi Gras beads and other throws to local organizations collecting such items. Help by volunteering for an organization’s post-event cleanup.

27% - Not enough trash cans 26% - Misconception that it’s someone else’s job to clean up 25% - Trash can not close enough 22% - Trash can was overflowing

“If adequate infrastructure is made available for trash disposal, we will experience less littering,” says Susan Russell, KLB Executive Director. “We must all adopt best practices for litter prevention in our daily lives, whether we are at home, at work, or at a music festival.” Greener Grounds Guidance for Event Organizers The Greener Grounds Guidebook and Workbook serve as a springboard for determining your tactics for minimizing litter and waste. Event organizers can download both publications for free online and reach out to KLB for printed copies. Topics covered in the guidebook and workbook include: • • • • • • •

Determining your sources and types of waste Achieving stakeholder buy-in Goal setting Waste stream selection Sourcing materials Managing your team Creating your event footprint map

Scan this QR code to visit keeplouisianabeautiful.org and get more information about Greener Grounds and KLB’s other programs. KLB wants to hear from you at info@keeplouisianabeautiful.org.

Start small or take your Greener Grounds efforts to the next level. To help support you, KLB has created the Greener Grounds Grant. In 2023, KLB awarded 25 organizations in 15 parishes a total of $141,133 to support large outdoor events in going green. The grant application will open on March 15.

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Other Events

Beginning February 3rd - February 17th

For tickets and showtimes, visit jurassicworldlivetour.com. •

FEB 3rd - FEB 4th

HOME IMPROVEMENT HOME & REMODELING SHOW & RALPH’S MARKETS FOOD FEST Mandeville, Louisiana

If your New Year’s resolutions include home improvement projects, this is your chance to discover all the inspiration you need for a successful home renovation. From kitchens, to bathrooms, to siding, and beyond, everything from roof to floor will be at the Castine Center in Gonzales this weekend. Also catch Ralph’s Markets Food Fest, with plenty of free samples, coupons, and recipes to explore—plus the potential to win $500 worth of groceries. $6, military $2, children under twelve free. 10 am–5 pm. jaaspro.com. •

FEB 4th

CHAMBER CONCERTS PRELUDE TO SPRING New Iberia , Louisiana

Ready to welcome warmer, greener seasons after the chill of winter? The

Iberia Cultural Association presents this free, candlelit chamber orchestra concert performed by the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra, who will blend classical music with Broadway favorites, and will even feature some vocal selections. Called A Prelude to Spring, the performance will take place at St. Peter’s Church. Free. 3 pm. iberiacultural.com. •

FEB 4th

QUEENS OF WINTER DAVID MIZELL MEMORIAL CAMELLIA SHOW Folsom , Louisiana

A display and celebration of miraculous camellia blooms will take place at the Giddy Up in Folsom in memory of David Mizell. Even those with no camellia knowledge can bring blooms to be identified, buy plants, and talk with experts. 11 am–4 pm. Free. giddyupfolsom.com. •

FEB 8th

GOOD EATS TASTER’S CHOICE Eunice, Louisiana

Eat, dance to live music, eat, enjoy a

beer from the cash bar, eat, bid on a silent-auction item, eat … The common denominator reflects the obsession of a part of the world that can’t help but revel in its rich culinary heritage. Come and enjoy food prepared by twenty-five amateur and professional chefs at this taste-bud-busting event all to benefit the Eunice Community Health Center Clinic. In addition to great food, live music will be provided by Geno Delafosse and French Rockin’ Boogie. $40. 6 pm at the LSUE Mumphrey Center. cajuntravel.com. •

FEB 8 - FEB 10 th

EVALUATING HISTORY NAVIGATING THE STORMS OF SLAVERY: RESTORE, REFLECT AND RECLAIM CONFERENCE Baton Rouge, Louisiana

For the first time, the LSU Deptartment of Geography & Anthropology is hosting an international conference devoted to exploring and reckoning with the complex impacts of slavery in Louisiana throughout history, and those which still resonate today. This multi-institutional, interdisciplinary conference intends to examine all of the various ways enslavement infiltrated communities and culture, in the process determining best practices and action items for LSU to

implement in order to more effectively work towards more fairly centering narratives and resolving community concerns on university and civic levels. The conference is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University, who established a genealogy database for enslaved individuals in Louisiana. Find more information and register at lsu.edu/ga/ events/sos2024. •

FEB 9th

PHOTOGRAPHIC IDENTITY NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF BLACK YOU ARE: COURTLAND GALORE PHOTO EXHIBITION Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Photographer Courtland Galore’s debut exhibition brings viewers on an enlightening journey into the complex and beautiful narrative of Black identity at the River Center Branch Library. The artist invites the viewer to explore the various dimensions of being Black—recognized yet sometimes unappreciated—in a display that unfolds the wisdom and authenticity of this multifaceted experience. The requested attire for this showcase is all black. 6:30 pm–9:30 pm. Free. ellemnop.art/nomatterartshow. •

Cajun Jams, Zydeco Breakfast, Authentic Dancehalls, St. Martin Parish is your ultimate music destination, every weekend!

Scan to find all the live music hotspots! 22

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FEB 15th

GREEN THUMBS SPRING SEED SWAP Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Embrace the season of growth at Pennington Biomedical Research Center where from 8 am–noon you will have the chance to meet and connect with fellow gardeners to exchange seeds as well as tips and ideas, and contribute to the local plant ecosystem. Free. breada.org. •

FEB 16

SUPPORTING THEATRE BROADWAY, BITES, AND BUBBLIES 2024 New Iberia, Louisiana

Join the Iberia Performing Arts League for an evening filled with drinks, food provided by local chefs, music, and performances. 7 pm at 25 Shadows Bend New Iberia. $50. ipaltheater.com. •

FEB 16th - MAY 10th

SECRET SOCIETIES MYSTERY AND BENEVOLENCE: MASONIC AND ODD FELLOWS FOLK ART AT THNOC New Orleans, Louisiana

A traveling exhibition from the American Folk Art Museum explores the folk art to emerge from societies like the Freemasons and the Independent Order of Odd

Fellows, including unusual and intriguing pieces like serpent-headed staffs, grave markers, and more. The companion exhibit, A Mystic Brotherhood: Fraternal Orders of New Orleans, features objects and images from THNOC’s holdings about how such organizations shaped civic life and culture in New Orleans. hnoc.org. •

FEB 17

WRITE ON ST. FRANCISVILLE WRITERS AND READERS SYMPOSIUM Saint Francisville, Louisiana

Each February, West Feliciana Parish flies the literary flag high when the Celebration of Literature and Art’s Writers and Readers Symposium invites accomplished authors to present readings and discuss works, this year at the Hemingbough Cultural Center. The goal of this annual symposium is to offer audiences a well-balanced appreciation for the art of literature in all its forms through a focus on the work of Louisiana writers. This year’s featured authors include: Claudia Gray, Alison Pelegrin, Robert Mann, Kevin Couhig, and Sarah Guillory. Readings and discussions about their work and the creative process will be conducted throughout the day from 8 am to 3 pm. Arts for All will host an

exhibition in conjunction, A Novel Image, for which artworks take inspiration from works of fiction. $75. bontempstix.com. •

FEB 17th

COMMUNITY CELEBRATIONS MISS-LOU BLACK HISTORY PARADE & BLOCK PARTY

from Mississippi history. 5 pm. Free, but attendees are asked to bring two canned goods or non-perishables for the Stewpot. (601) 870-6343 for more information. •

FEB 17th - FEB 18th

BUDDING BEAUTIES CAMELLIA SHOW & SALE

Natchez, Mississippi

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King and all of the rich Black history throughout Mississippi and Louisiana at this community block party and parade. The parade will roll at noon from the Adams County Department of Human Services, ending at the MLK Triangle, where the community block party will immediately follow. Free. visitnatchez.org. •

All are invited to peruse the beautiful blooms, which should be at their seasonal peak, when The Baton Rouge Camellia Society sets up its annual show at Burden Museum and Gardens. Camellia experts will be available to answer questions and provide insight. Home gardeners are invited to enter their own blooms, too. Approximately 1,500 blooms will be on display, and plants will be available for sale, as well. The show and sale will be open to the public on Saturday from 1 pm–4 pm, and on Sunday from 10 am– 3 pm. Free. lsu.edu/botanic-gardens. •

FEB 17th

LOCAL LEGENDS BACK DOWN MEMORY LANE: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN PAST AND PRESENT WHO CHANGED CULTURE Natchez, Mississippi

Celebrate the achievements of Black women throughout history at this special program organized by Dr. Carolyn Myers at Natchez City Auditorium, which will feature various female community leaders portraying important women

FEB 17th - FEB 18th

BOTANICAL ART TABLESCAPES FLOWER SHOW Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The Baton Rouge Garden Club’s annual Tablescapes Flower Show this year features displays interpreting photographs taken by the Louisiana Photographic Society, titled “Pretty as a Picture”.

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Other Events

Beginning February 22nd - February 29th

1 pm–4 pm on Saturday and Sunday at the Baton Rouge Garden Center. $5 entry, which will be designated to the Garden Club’s scholarship fund. Find the Baton Rouge Garden Club on Facebook for more information. •

FEB 22nd

COUNTRY LEGENDS GRITS AND GLAMOUR AT THE MANSHIP Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Country legends Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan bring the “Grits and Glamour” to the Manship Theatre. With illustrious careers and timeless hits like Tillis’s “Maybe It Was Memphis” and Morgan’s “Something In Red” these accomplished artists, accompanied by Nashville’s finest musicians, offer an intimate and unforgettable night of musical storytelling. 7:30 pm. $56–$66. manshiptheatre.org. •

FEB 22nd - FEB 24th LOOK UP EAGLE EXPO

Morgan City, Louisiana

The Eagle Expo, hosted by Cajun Coast Tourism, is back for another year of gimlet-eyed education and observation, all set deep within the Atchafalaya Basin, which is home to this and other rare species of flora and fauna. Those that wing it westward to the Morgan City area will have opportunities to join boat tours into surrounding waterways to view eagles nests, enjoy raptor demonstrations, and sit in on presentations by wildlife professionals on a wide variety of topics. Register for various events at cajuncoast.com. •

FEB 22nd - FEB 24th BOOKS & FILMS NATCHEZ LITERARY AND CINEMA CELEBRATION Natchez, Mississippi

Back for another year celebrating Southern authors and filmmakers, this year’s Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration will be held at the Natchez Convention Center. Themed, “Rites, Rituals and Religion in the Deep South,” the festival will feature lectures and panels on topics like historical cemeteries and their inf luence on landscape design, death and burial sites, ancient rituals of the Catholic Church, mourning rituals, Voodooism, and more. 8:30 am–6 pm each day. Most events are free. Learn more and find the full schedule at colin.edu/community. • 24

FEB 22nd - FEB 25th ROLLER DERBY Y’ALLSTARS SOUTHERN SKATE SHOWDOWN Thibodaux, Louisiana

Lace up your skates for the Y’Allstars Southern Skate Showdown, a roller derby extravaganza bringing over twenty teams from across the USA to Thibodaux at the Warren J. Harang Municipal Auditorium. More information on this thrilling weekend to come at yallstars.com. •

FEB 22nd - FEB 25th

OTHERWORLDLY SHOWS CIRQUE DU SOLEIL’S CORTEO Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Cirque du Soleil graces the Raising Cane’s River Center once again with their new production Corteo. Directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca, this joyous procession blending theater, acrobatics, comedy, and interplay of illusion invites the audience to witness a whimsical carnival where the clown envisions his own funeral, surrounded by caring angels. For showtimes and ticket information visit clubcirque.com. •

FEB 22nd - FEB 26th MISE-EN-SCÈNE FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL New Orleans, Louisiana

The twenty-seventh New Orleans French Film Festival, one of the longestrunning foreign language festivals in the country, will once again represent excellence in contemporary and classic francophone cinema for audiences, this year at the Prytania Theatre and the Prytania Theatres at Canal Place, with films available to stream at home. Live music and lectures will accompany a curated selection of short and featurelength French films, all of which will be screened with English subtitles. All access passes are $120 ($40 for students and teachers) and get you free admission into all in person and virtual festival screenings. Virtual screening tickets will also be available for $9. neworleansfilmsociety.org. •

FEB 22nd - FEB 29th PROVOCATIVE PLAYS NOLA PROJECT’S THE COLORED MUSEUM New Orleans, Louisiana

In 1986, acclaimed playwright and director George C. Wolfe put together eleven “exhibits” that challenge and reinterpret perceptions of Black

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American culture into what became The Colored Museum. This expressive and emotionally wrecking play is now being presented by the NOLA Project at the New Orleans African American Museum in an immersive experience characterized by unwavering humor. $10–$38. For showtimes visit nolaproject.com. •

FEB 22nd - MAY 4th

CREATIVE CONTESTS 61ST ANNUAL JURIED COMPETITION Monroe, Louisiana

The Mansur Museum’s juried art competition has been a staple of the North Louisiana art community since 1964, and this year returns to present artworks by hundreds of artists in a variety of mediums and styles, judged by guest juror Kerry Inman, who owns and directs the Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas. $3,200 in cash prizes will be on the table for the winning artists, so the stakes are high. mansurjuried.org. •

FEB 23rd - FEB 24th

GET OUTSIDE CASTINE FAMILY CAMPOUT Mandeville, Louisiana

Join a campout at The Groves in Pelican Park for a night of fun-packed family adventure. In addition to camping and astronomy demonstrations, the night will include scavenger hunts, games, wildlife encounters, s’mores and much more. 5 pm. Register at pelicanpark.com. •

FEB 23rd - FEB 25th

DYNAMIC DANCE AGUA MOLE PEDRA DURA: BRAZILIAN CONNECTIONS AT MARIGNY OPERA HOUSE New Orleans, Louisiana

“Agua Mole Pedra Dura” is Portuguese for “soft water, hard rock”—a proverb celebrating perseverance, as well as the title of the upcoming performance presented by the Marigny Opera Ballet at the Marigny Opera House. Featured will be two compelling works choreographed by Jarina Carvalho and Diogo de Lima with renowned multi-instrumentalist Geovane Paiva Santos at the helm, crafting scores and leading the ensemble through a dynamic exploration of the intricate rhythms and diverse styles of Brazilian music. Doors open at 7:30 pm. $35–$60. marignyoperahouse.org. •

Enjoy concoctions shaken and stirred by the area’s best bartenders, all vying to win the title of “Best Cocktail of 2024.” 7 pm–10 pm. $40; $75 for VIP Experience, which includes a special cocktail hour form 6 pm–7 pm featuring first tastes of all cocktails and special hors d’oeuvres. Ages 21 and up. hammondarts.org. •

FEB 24th

CELEBRATING LEADERS SHADES OF SUCCESS BANQUET Gonzales, Louisiana

Baton Rouge-based journalists V Squared Visuals are again honoring the many accomplishments of Louisiana’s women of color with the Shades of Success 2024 Calendar. Among the honorees featured are Senior Vice President of Health Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer of Woman’s Hospital Renada W. Deschamp, Executive Director of The Bridge Center for Hope Charlotte Claiborne, Pastor Tonya McGill, Attorney Anya Jones, and many others. The calendar was created with the intent to inspire younger generations with living role models, and to give back to the Baton Rouge community–particularly given the timeliness of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. The honorees featured in the calendar will receive awards at a banquet featuring music and dinner at Drusilla’s Seafood Restaurant from 6 pm–9 pm. $75 per person, $540 per table. Tickets available at theshadesofsuccess.net. •

FEB 24th

EXTRA, EXTRA! ABOVE THE FOLD: A HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS IN LOUISIANA AT THNOC New Orleans, Louisiana

The Historic New Orleans Collection’s 2024 History Symposium turns its attention to the important and complicated role newspapers have had through Louisiana history. A slate of impressive speakers and panelists will dive into how local news media has evolved through the decades, from the approach to the Civil War through the modern day. 9 am–5 pm. $75. hnoc.org/ symposium2024. •

FEB 24th

MIXOLOGY ART OF THE COCKTAIL

LIVE MUSIC ARTS COUNCIL OF POINTE COUPEE PERFORMING ARTS SERIES

Hammond, Louisiana

New Roads, Louisiana

Hammond Regional Arts Center directs its curatorial eye towards the bar for its annual Art of the Cocktail.

The Arts Council of Pointe Coupee’s annual Performing Arts Series for 2024 comes packed with high-energy

FEB 24th

musicians. This month, hear the Foto Sisters. Doors open at 6 pm; performances start at 7 pm at the Poydras Center in New Roads. $30; $10 for students. artscouncilofpointecoupee.org. •

FEB 24th

GOOD EATS & CAUSES WILD GAME COOKOUT 2024 Port Allen, Louisiana

The annual Wild Game Cookout will be a full day of cooking by teams from all over East and West Baton Rouge parishes, all for the good cause of supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They’ll be grilling, stirring, and frying all manner of wild game—which will be followed by dinner, a silent auction, and a rowdy live auction. This event is a fundraiser benefitting Dream Day Foundation, which supports the patients and families of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. 7 am–8 pm, dinner begins at 4 pm. Free, but dinner wristbands to eat are $15 on the day of the event—which will take place in the Pavilion next to Sandy’s Daiquiris in Port Allen. dreamdayfoundation.org. •

FEB 24th

CAMPGROUND COMMUNITY PARTY IN THE PARK Morgan City, Louisiana

Join the festivities at Lake End Park

Campground for a “Party in the Park” starting at noon. Enjoy a jambalaya cookoff, vendor stalls, a lively dog costume contest and parade, and a selection of treats from soft-serve ice cream to daiquiris. Be sure to catch performances by Ryan Foret & Foret Tradition, Mike Broussard, Night Train, and South 70 throughout the day. lakeendpark.net. •

FEB 24th - FEB 26th

RUBBER TO ROAD RAMBLIN’ OLDIES CAR SHOW Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The Ramblin’ Oldies of Denham Springs (convenient acronym: “RODS”) car club will hold its thirty-ninth annual streetrod show and automotive swap at the Gerry Lane Cadillac Dealership in Baton Rouge. Vendor displays, door prizes, and the glittering, snorting, chrome-clad engines of the pre-1949 streetrod set are all on the agenda. 10945 Reiger Road. (225) 9217530 or streetrods.org. •

FEB 24 - MAR 23 th

MUSICAL EDUCATION BLUES CAMP III Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Grab your harmonica or guitar and get ready to learn the art of the blues. Henry Turner Jr.’s listening room is offering a free blues camp in five hour-and-a-half-

long sessions each Friday. Each session will be split into half an hour on blues instrumentation and structure, half an hour on history and syntax, and half an hour on entertainment business applications. The only component of blues music they won’t provide is a personal tragedy like breaking your heart. All ages are invited to participate, and participants are not required to attend all of the classes to tune in. The class will be lead by none other than Baton Rouge bluesman Henry Turner Jr. himself, along with Flavor band members and other special guests ranging from entertainment industry executives to public relations professionals. The sessions will also be streamed via Facebook Live. Noon–1:30 pm each Friday. To register, visit henryslisteningroom.com. •

FEB 29th

NO PICKY EATERS WILD GAME SUPPER Larose, Louisiana

Let the chefs from across the bayou take your taste buds on a unique and flavorful journey at the Larose Civic Center for the Wild Game Supper, featuring over forty dishes made from delicacies such as ostrich, wild boar, and local seafood. For more information please visit lacajunbayou.com. •

FEB 27th

LOCAL HISTORY HISTORIC NATCHEZ FOUNDATION: ANNE MOODY’S COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI” Natchez, Mississippi

Join Visit Natchez’s Cultural Heritage Tourism Manager Dr. Roscoe Barnes III for a lecture on local civil rights leader Anne Moody at the Natchez Historical Society’s annual meeting, held at the Natchez Historic Foundation at 6 pm. Free. visitnatchez.org. •

Find our full list of events, including those we couldn't fit into print, by pointing your phone camera here.

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V I S I T S T. F R A N C I S V I L L E The Times They Are A-Changin’ As St. Francisville evolves, spring’s event lineup confirms that the historic Mississippi River town has something for everyone “Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam, “And admit that the waters around you have grown … “… For the times, they are a-changin’ ”

hen Bob Dylan wrote those words, he was on to something. It was 1963, and his anthem captured the excitement that Baby Boomers were feeling as they took control of America’s cultural landscape. Fifty years later you can feel some of that same excitement in St. Francisville. The historic river town is experiencing a burst of creativity-fueled growth, with dramatic new developments changing what West Feliciana has to offer to visitors and residents alike. In downtown’s heart, the four-acre complex known as North Commerce is fast becoming a community hub that, when complete, will house a half-dozen retail, entertainment, lodging, and food & beverage venues. The Corbel interiors store, Barlow and Deyo fashion boutiques, and The Mallory event center are already open. The eight-room, luxury Hotel Toussaint will open its doors mid-February; Big River Pizza Company, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, ice creamery, and bar will follow in April. Down on the corner, Bayou Sara Brewing Company will break ground this spring, to begin transforming the old Bennett Ford building into a brew pub serving ten craft beers—three IPAs, a golden wheat, a citrus wheat, a black lager, raspberry and watermelon sours, and American and honey pale ales. Also coming this spring are three events that demonstrate the diversity of experiences that St. Francisville has to offer. Saturday, March 9: Rouge Roubaix XXII Rain or shine, Louisiana’s toughest bicycle race, the Rouge Roubaix, returns to lead riders on a punishing (but scenic) tour of the remotest parts of West Feliciana Parish. The 22nd annual event pits the toughest and most masochistic cyclists and their machines against 93 miles of hills, mud, gravel, potholes, decommissioned bridges … and occasionally, stretches of smooth, fast blacktop. Those ready to put some teeth into their new year’s resolution can sign up for either the short (51-mile) or long (93-mile) circuits. Or watch the fast and furious action from the roadside while simply enjoying the great outdoors. Rougeroubaix.com Saturday, March 23: Tunica Hills Music Festival & Jam This unique community festival attracts amateur and professional musicians to picturesque stages in Parker Park and the 3V Tourist Court. They come not only to hear high-quality Cajun, Blues, and Bluegrass music performances, but also for the chance to join impromptu jam sessions that break out in tents, along sidewalks, and on park benches around downtown. Upwards of twenty bands and sixty performers take part, including renowned singer/songwriters like Clay Parker, Jodi James, Ryan Hatcher and Denton Hatcher. But any musician is welcome to join a jam. So, dust off that fiddle, banjo, harmonica or mandolin, and bring it, along with your lawn chairs, picnic blankets, and coolers, and be part of this home-grown homage to the joy of making music … alltogether now! 10am–10pm in and around Parker Park. Free. Search Tunica Hills Music Festival & Jam on Facebook for updates. Sunday, April 14: Azalea Polo Classic The second annual Azalea Polo Classic thunders back into the West Feliciana Sports Park. An official polo match played between members of the New Orleans Polo Club, the event offers both a demonstration of superb horsemanship, and a Hamptons-style garden party at the height of springtime. Attendees dress in their fashion-forward finest to watch the action from a tented enclosure stocked with champagne, craft cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and live jazz. With sponsorship support from Maker’s Mark Bourbon and Veuve Clicquot Champagne, provisions will be elegant, so dress in your spring finery and come raise a glass, because all proceeds benefit the West Feliciana Historical Society and Museum. Tickets on sale February 1. Get yours before they sell out. westfelicianamuseum.org/azaleapolo *Need a Ride? St. Francisville now has a dedicated, 15-passenger trolley providing shuttle transport between stops around town. The free trolley runs 5 pm–10 pm Thursdays, 10 am–10 pm. Fridays and Saturdays, and noon–5 pm Sundays. To schedule pickup, call or text (225) 721-7060. 26

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E - YO U ’ L L L OV E I T H E R E

MUSEUM * Black History Month Exhibits: History of the Hardwood Community & Hatian Art from the Stokes Collection

TOURS DAILY • HOTEL • RESTAURANT 1796 • ELTA COFFEE

* Revamped Museum Store: Louisiana books and handcrafts, including Grandmother’s Buttons jewelry 225-635-6330

11757 Ferdinand St. St. Francisville

ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA • WWW.THEMYRTLES.COM • (225) 635-6277

Meet me at the Mag! Cross Stitch and Quilting Supplies • Quilting Classes 225-635-7316 • 5237 Commerce Street, Suite C • St. Francisville, LA 70775 Monday - Friday 10am-5pm • Saturday- 9am-2pm • Closed on Sunday

www.crossquilter.com

Closed Mondays 5689

3-V Tourist Courts •1940’s Motor Hotel • Reservations: 225-721-7003 // F E B 2 4

ENOUGH

Flavor,

STYLE

AND SOUL FOR TWO CITIES.

SHREVEPORT-STYLE STUFFED SHRIMP Orlandeaux’s Café

These large, succulent shrimp are stuffed with fiery Creole dressing, deep-fried, and served with a spicy tartar sauce.

Indulge your senses in the diverse culinary wonders of Shreveport-Bossier. From sizzling Cajun and Creole delights to savory Southern comforts, each bite tells a tale of our region’s unique culture. Join us on an adventure as we celebrate the artistry of our local chefs, the warmth of our dining establishments, and the unforgettable blend of cultures that make Shreveport-Bossier a destination for food enthusiasts.

MEAT JEFFRO

Flying Heart brewing Wood-fired pizza is the entree of choice at Flying Heart Brewing.

BOILDED CRAWFISH B&D Seafood

Uber-casual roadside seafood joint serving up seasonal Louisiana favorites like boiled crawfish, shrimp, blue crabs and more.

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GATOR

Beauxjax Bacon-wrapped, boudinstuffed alligator that is well-seasoned and grilled whole. A specialty item that is great for parties.

GUMBO

marilynn’s Place A dark full-bodied gumbo with Louisiana gulf shrimp, crab, oysters, and andouille.

FIVE-SPICE PORK BELLY “BURNT ENDS” Fat Calf BRASSERIE

Served on a charred scallion pancake, complemented by black garlic shoyu caramel, topped with crisp Asian pear and a hint of chili crunch.

HOT CHICKEN & BISCUITS Sauvage

Sauvage, has quickly established itself as a go-to restaurant for anyone who appreciates perfectly fried chicken and flaky, buttery homemade biscuits.

Scan for more food options

VisitShreveportBossier.org

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Features

FEBRUARY 2024

THE MUSIC LOUISIANA MADE

30 ACADIANA'S FRENCH MUSIC GENRES: CAJUN, ZYDECO, AND SWAMP POP B L U E S // 4 0 N E W O R L E A N S ' S J A Z Z

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MUSIC HISTORY

La Musique Française

THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTIONS OF CAJUN MUSIC, ZYDECO, AND SWAMP POP

Story by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot • Artwork by Bryant Benoit

hough the word “Cajun” has come to eclipse most people’s understanding of Louisiana’s French culture, and especially its music—the truth is that in those early days that defined these genres, the Acadian refugees were not alone on the Southwest prairies. And the musical traditions that emerged so prominently from that French-speaking region bore the influence of the Acadians, yes, but also the French, the Spanish, and the Germans. The Native peoples who lived on those prairies for centuries before any of those Europeans arrived— they contributed their piece, too. And then, of course, there were the people of African descent—diverse in their own right: the enslaved people coming straight from West Africa, those coming from Haiti before and after the revolution, and the free people of color. Bryant Benoit, "Going to da Zydeco".

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Much of the foundational knowledge of Louisiana’s French vernacular music traditions depends on the field recordings collected by John and Alan Lomax in 1934 for the Library of Congress. Concentrating on music already deemed “old” by that time, the Lomaxes captured some of the “purest” precursors of Louisiana’s French music genres, just as the onset of popular culture started to change them forever. These included traditional French ballads and folksongs from Canada and mainland Europe, jurés (a Black Creole style of singing without instrumental accompaniment), waltzes and two steps, and some of the first American fiddle music ever recorded. At that point in the early 20th century, the influences of all these distinct musical expressions, along with others, were already coalescing into early

versions of what we today define as Cajun, zydeco, and swamp pop. Though there were indeed important distinctions between the music played by white Cajuns (which by the 19th century came to encompass most French-speaking Caucasians, of varying backgrounds) and the music played by Black Creoles of this time, to the untrained ear they were relatively subtle, each tradition borrowing and trading influences from the other. The two communities lived and worked side by side, interacting often, if still maintaining a degree of hierarchical, prejudicial separation. At the time, the music was defined by both French-speaking groups as musique Française— distinguished more from English-language, or “American,” music in the region than by the race of the person performing it.

The Classic Period of Louisiana French Music In the 1920s, the advent of recording technology and, subsequently, the recording industry, affected Louisiana French music in three significant ways. First, it preserved the orally-transmitted music in time, for the first time in history, for future generations. Second, it created a standardization that the genre hadn’t operated by before. The free-flowing intricacies of improvisation and interpretation performers once brought to the music, allowing it to organically evolve from house to house and generation to generation, was subsumed by the authority of the recorded version. This also resulted in a more concrete repertoire, the recorded songs quickly becoming the ones everyone knew and loved best. And finally, the recording industry introduced Louisiana French music to the outside world, creating the first “famous” Cajun musicians and recording artists. This earliest period of recorded Louisiana French Music is known as its “classic period,” establishing the foundations of the music as we recognize it today. The first-ever recording of Louisiana French music was by Columbia in 1928, of guitarist Cléoma Breaux and accordionist Joe Falcon performing “Allons à Lafayette”. Other early recording artists from this period included Angelas LeJeuene, Mayeus Lafleur with Leo Soileau, Lawrence and Elton Walker, and the Breaux Brothers (brothers of Cléoma). The first Black Creole recording artists were fiddler Douglas Bellard and accordionist Kirby Riley, whose “La Valse La Prison” (recorded by Vocalion in 1929) became a classic. The most influential figures of this era, though,

The World of Zydeco

he Louisiana French music performed by Cajuns and Black Creoles at the start of the twentieth century was, for the most part, a shared tradition between the two overlapping cultures—each borrowing freely from the other’s influences. Still, if the boundaries of segregation and racial inequality were more fluid in rural Southwest Louisiana than other places—they weren’t absent. This separation preserved, in the styles of playing, deep-rooted idiosyncrasies that might define, to the attuned ear, important distinctions between the music of Black Creoles and Cajuns that would, over the course of the twentieth century, develop into separate genres. A 1970s record of field recordings by folklorist Nick Spitzer captures examples of the Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms present in the old Black Creole music of Eraste and Joseph “Bébé” Carriere, whose careers date to the 1920s. The social disruptions of the 1930s and 1940s re-enforced racial lines that had previously been blurred within the working-class rural communities of Southwest Louisiana. Black Creole musicians began to lean into the subtleties that distinguished their musical culture from their Cajun neighbors’, while at the same time incorporating elements from other Black musical traditions around them, including the Delta blues and the emerging R&B styles coming out of the country’s urban centers.

The Term “Zydeco”

The term “zydeco” has been associated with Black Creole music, and how it evolved, at least since the early twentieth century, though originally by way of the Louisiana French word for snap beans, “les haricots”—usually used in the context of the phrase “les haricots sont pas sale,” or “the snap beans aren’t salted,” an idiom for “the times are hard”. The phrase was a frequently-used lyric within the musical repertoire—even appearing on several of Lomax’s recordings of Creole French singers from 1934. Some ethnomusicologists, such as Barry Ancelet and Nick Spitzer, have posed the theory that cultural connections between beans and music and dance may extend through the Caribbean all the way back to West Africa. The current spelling of “zydeco” was penned by record producer Mack McCormack in the early 1950s when he was transcribing the word used to describe the style of music and dances of in the Frenchtown neighborhood of Houston—which was populated largely by Black Creoles from Louisiana who had come to work in the city.

Clifton Chenier

By 1955, when Specialty Records discovered the lively Louisiana French accordionist Clifton Chenier, “zydeco” was already common parlance for the blend of Creole French music and contemporary R&B of the moment. Chenier legitimized the style as a genre though, when he released the hit “Ay-Tete-Fee” and the anthem “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé,” both adaptations of the old juré tradition to suit the sentiments of the electric piano accordion and R&B styles. Chenier, to this day, is credited as the most important proponent of the zydeco genre, the self-proclaimed “King of Zydeco”. Atop the foundation of French lyrics (though he did often incorporate English lyrics, as well) and the Creole French rhythmic style, he layered on the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and faster, more danceable tempos. His career lasted through the 1980s, refining the genre as a synthesis of the old and new that has sustained itself into the modern age.

Zydeco in the 1980s–90s

Major performers stepping into Chenier’s footsteps include accordionist Wilson Anthony “Boozoo” Chavis, who later in his career would return to the old-style diatonic accordion, bringing a refreshed sense of antiquity to the highly stylized world of contemporary zydeco. This departure from the R&B-inflected Chenier style would result in two schools of performance within the genre. Following Chenier’s tradition are icons such as the nationally-acclaimed and Grammy-winning Stanley “Buckwheat Zydeco,” Dural and his band Ils Sont Partis, as well as Nathan Williams and his Zydeco Cha-Chas. The more old-school accordion route has been represented by performers the likes of John Delafose (who would even, on occasion, bring the fiddle back into the band) and Andrus “Beau Jocque” Espre, who launched the “nouveau zydeco” movement by drawing in elements of classic rock and hip-hop into his performances. Other major figures of the early zydeco scene include Rockin’ Sidney Simien, whose 1985 single “My Toot-Toot” hit the Billboard charts, and was the first zydeco song to receive significant airplay on major national radio stations, later garnering a Grammy. In Europe, Rockin’ Dopsie came to represent the genre with his band The Twisters, and famously played accordion on a song in Paul Simon’s Graceland album. The 1990s brought bands like Terrence Simien & The Zydeco Experience, who served as cultural ambassadors for the United States Department, bringing a version of zydeco that incorporates reggae and New Orleans funk into the intricate layers of the genre.

Legacies of Zydeco

Legacies continue to play an enormous role in the deeply heritage-based zydeco scene, and a large percentage of today’s most popular performers are carrying on family traditions. These include Sean and Chris Ardoin, sons of zydeco musician Lawrence “Black” Ardoin, who is the son of Bois Sec Ardoin, and a relative of Amédé Ardoin. Child prodigies, Sean and Chris have each gone on to start their own zydeco bands, Sean specializing in zydeco Gospel and Chris in nouveau zydeco (his latest album, nominated for a Grammy in 2023, is a collaboration with the LSU Band from Tigerland, and features raps from Cupid). John Delafose’s son Geno, leader of the French Rockin’ Boogie, is one of the most-demanded performers on Louisiana’s festival circuit; and Lil’ Nate & the Zydeco Big Timers is led by Nathan Williams’ son, an accordion master who has performed alongside R&B greats the likes of Juvenile, Kevin Gates, and Cupid. The Frank Family Band, led by patriarch Preston Frank, age seventy-five, is still performing traditional pre-zydeco Creole music. Their 2023 album, Seventy-Five, features Preston’s son, the zydeco star Keith Frank, along with siblings Jennifer and Brad—and revitalizes Preston’s best-loved songs from his repertoire alongside old Creole songs originally recorded by Canray Fontenot. // F E B

And then, there’s CJ Chenier, “the Crown Prince of Zydeco,” Stanley “Buckwheat Zydeco,” Dural Jr., and the Alton Jay Rubin (Rockin' Dopsie) sons—all talented artists carrying on their fathers’ legacies by leading the same iconic bands into the next generation. Rubin's youngest son Dwayne, of Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers, and Dural’s Ils Sont Partis each received a Grammy nomination this year.

Old Language, New Sounds Two of the biggest names in Lafayette’s world of Louisiana French performers are Cedric Watson and Corey Ledet—two Black Creole musicians who have exhibited a creative interest in revisiting the earliest eras of Louisiana French music history, and especially Black Creole history. Watson, a fiddler and accordionist who formed his Creole/zydeco band Bijou Creole in 2006 after playing with Wilson Savoy’s Pine Leaf Boys, draws out the influences of the original cultures that inspired the Louisiana French music — from Spanish contra dance and jurés, to forgotten Creole melodies and popular modern zydeco. A 2006 collaboration between Watson and Ledet culminated in Valcour Records’ first album, Goin’ Down to Louisiana—instantly becoming a classic and establishing the two young artists as leaders of Louisiana French music in the twenty-first century. Both artists are also at the forefront of the recent renaissance of the endangered Kouri Vini language, an offshoot of Louisiana French derived from the languages of the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana, melding with the French spoken in the region. Both have recorded and performed songs sung in the language for years, and in 2023, Ledet released Médikamen, which is comprised entirely of songs sung in Kouri Vini. •

were Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee and Black Creole accordionist Amédé Ardoin. The duo’s performances together were legendary across the region despite the segregationist attitudes of the time. A fiddle prodigy, McGee’s style of playing was both archaic and representative of the range available to players within the genre. He was a master of the old twin fiddle tradition, which he usually performed with his brother-in-law Sady Courville, as well as the stylistic evolutions brought about by the accordion—where he and Ardoin made history. Ardoin’s bluesy, highly-syncopated style of accordion playing set the standard that Cajun and zydeco performers would continue to emulate for over a century. He would come to be considered the father of both Cajun and zydeco music, his entire recorded repertoire becoming foundational to the genre for generations to come.

Americanization, Swing, and R&B

By the 1930s the French communities of Southwest Louisiana were undergoing an era of extraordinary social change. Education was being mandated for the first time within these rural communities, and the state was actively forbidding students from speaking the French of their ancestors. This coincided with the oil boom in Louisiana and Texas, which attracted outside workers to the region while simultaneously drawing Southwest Louisianans to Texas to pursue the economic opportunity there—exposing the formerly isolated communities to the larger American, Anglophone world. The World Wars exacerbated this effect while also establishing a sense of American nationalism within the French speaking communities. At the same time, advances in technology such as the introduction of the radio and improvements in transportation opened new doors

from which to access the increasingly urban, Americanized cultures around the Acadiana region. The Louisiana French ways of old began to be buried under the stigma of the old-fashioned, the ignorant, and the unsophisticated—the word “Cajun” itself becoming a slur of sorts. In music, this shift in social expression resulted in an eagerness to absorb the more popular styles heard on the radio. Black Creole musicians were incorporating into their repertoire elements of the emerging R&B style. Cajun music, now more formally associated as such, took on new melodic complexity. The accordion was almost entirely abandoned in favor of steel guitars, trap drums, and high-energy fiddling, aligning the genre with the rise of Western swing and country. Some of the most popular bands of the “Cajun Swing” era include Leo Soileau & the Three Aces, Leroy “Happy Fats” LeBlanc and the Rayne-Bo Ramblers, and Luderin Darbonne’s Hackberry Ramblers. The most famous of all, though, was Harry Choates, the “Fiddle King of Cajun Swing” and the first Louisiana French musician to experience true commercial success. His 1946 version of the traditional Cajun song “Jole Blon” was the one that was immortalized, earning the number four spot on the Billboard charts at the time and ranking number ninety-nine in Rolling Stone’s 2014 list of the “100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time”.

Cajun Music Post World War II

Just as it began to appear as though the traditional Louisiana French sound might fade permanently into the realm of “the old days,” in 1948 the song “La Valse du Pont d’Amour,” recorded by a twenty-yearold with an accordion, unexpectedly hit a nerve in Cajun and Creole listeners. Deeply inspired by the traditional style of Amédé Ardoin, Iry LeJeune im-

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pressed dancehall crowds with his soul-stirring sound and a virtuosic mastery over the instrument, thrusting it straight back into fashion. Credited with spurring the revitalization of accordion-led traditional Cajun music, LeJeune opened a door that brought old accordion masters of the “classic” style back onto the forefront of the dancehall and recording scenes, as well as a sense of pride for Louisiana French heritage as a whole. Still, sensibilities were different than they had been twenty years before. Even the “old ways” found new

modes of expression. A fellow Ardoin devotee, the accordionist Austin Pitre made a name for himself by developing a new, flamboyant style of performing the accordion—which included simply playing standing upright, as well as with the instrument in between his legs and behind his head. Nathan Abshire, considered one of the most prominent accordionists of his generation, adapted many popular country songs into the traditional Cajun style, and was heavily influenced by the blues. And Lawrence Walker, one of Cajun music’s earliest record-

ing artists, is credited with pioneering the “new style” of Cajun music that adapted the accordion to the swing style. Aldus Roger and his band the Lafayette Playboys merged the distinctive accordion style of LeJeune with the more contemporary sensibilities of Walker, performing with one of the first big bands of Cajun music. Even in smaller, more traditional bands, the electric guitar and bass became standard additions. Over the course of the 1950s and ‘60s Cajun music regained its place in the identities of Southwest

Swamp Pop Should Go On Forever

n the 1950s, while Black Creole musicians were leaning towards R&B and Cajun musicians were beginning to incorporate popular influences into the traditional styles of playing, a generation of performers was taking one step deeper into the realm of popular American culture. While Cajun musicians drew from the influences of stars like Elivs Presley and Hank Williams, Sr., too—the strain of Louisiana music that would become swamp pop brought them closer to the forefront. Often performed by seasoned Cajun and Creole musicians willing to adapt to the demands of more mainstream audiences, the genre was perhaps most concisely described by saxophonist Harry Simoneaux as “half Domino, half fais-do-do”. Swamp pop’s earliest pioneers emerged first from the Black Creole R&B communities as zydeco was just finding its shape, and included Guitar Gable and the Musical Kings, Elton Anderson, Lil’ Bob and the Lollipops, and Cookie and his Cupcakes (originally The Boogie Ramblers), who penned the 1959 charting hit “Mathilda”. Other major hits that defined the genre during its heyday, which spanned the late 1950s and early ‘60s, include Warren Storm’s “Prisoner’s Song,” Rod Bernard’s “This Should Go On Forever,” and Jimmy Clanton’s “Just a Dream”. Bobby Charles’s “Later Alligator” was later covered by Bill Haley & His Comets as “See You Later Alligator”—which reached number six on the Billboard charts and is credited with popularizing the catchphrase of the same name. The term “swamp pop” can actually be attributed to British music journalist Bill Millar in the early 1970s, who used it in a snappy headline to describe this strain of “Cajun rock ‘n’ roll” styles he observed thriving in South Louisiana in the ‘60s. By then, the heyday was coming to an end, with the British invasion commanding most music lovers’ attention worldwide. Ironically, it was Britain that re-energized swamp pop in the ‘70s; something about the Old World sounds sung in this altogether new way appealed to a cult British fandom. In 1974, while Americans were listening to Elvis’s cover of Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” on repeat, British audiences were shoving Johnnie Allan’s swampy version to the top of their charts. This new wave of interest in the genre, which now had a name, sent bands overseas to tour, and re-motivated local record producers to get Swamp Pop bands back in the studio. The 1970s Cajun Renaissance, with its focus on returning to Louisiana’s French music roots, was a blow to the esteem of swamp pop, which was itself a product of Americanization. As Louisiana recommitted itself to its folk origins, swamp pop started to lose its “cool factor”. For decades the genre mostly endured in local performances of classics by its own aging originators. Thus, swamp pop stayed stable, with very little development—facing an almost certainly inevitable end with the death of its pioneers.

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Still, the influence of swamp pop on broader culture cannot be ignored—its stylistic traits emerged in songs by New Orleans artists the likes of Fats Domino, Dr. John, and Slim Harpo. Rockabilly star Jerry Lee Lewis recorded covers of swamp pop ballads, including “Mathilda,” and Jimmy Donley’s “Born to be a Loser”. Elements of the genre can also be detected in the songs of internationally recognized performers the likes of Elvis and even the Beatles (South Louisianans have long held suspicions that “Oh! Darling” has an Acadiana source). Swamp pop has also inspired new generations of Cajun and Zydeco performers, particularly those playing with “prog rock” and other more diverse stylistic arenas, such as Zachary Richard, Beausoleil, and The Revelers. Thanks in part to the popularity of the collaborative supergroup project Lil Band ‘O Gold, founded by C.C. Adcock and Steve Riley in 1998, the demand for swamp pop performances began to increase throughout the early 2000s. Dedicated to reviving vintage swamp pop classics, the group featured pioneer Warren Storm, and later Clarence Jockey Etienne, as the centerpiece, along with a collective of the region’s most esteemed performers across the Louisiana roots spectrum. The group not only shot adrenaline into Storm’s career, but into the landscape of swamp pop—re-animating the stage as an avenue for new, aspiring Louisiana musicians. Today, despite the odds, swamp pop sustains its place—if less prominent than that of Cajun and zydeco—within the musical tapestry of Louisiana. Interestingly, the fanbase seems to have shifted across the Basin to recenter itself in Ascension Parish, which annually hosts the Swamp Pop Music Festival. The standards continue to regularly play on the airwaves at local radio stations across the state, from Houma to Lafayette to Ville Platte to Southwest Texas. More contemporary bands performing today include Don Rich (who might be credited with the popularity of the genre east of the Atchafalaya), Ryan Foret & Foret Tradition, Bobby Page & the Riff Raffs, and Damon Troy—whose “Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda Loved You” has become a classic. The genre is also finally extending itself into more experimental direction at the hands of Ben Usie and his band Bruisey Peets, who has self-consciously capitalized on the campy, overthe-top qualities of swamp pop to release their “piano-rooted, queer swamp pop” record Poached Eggs in 2021. All the while, many of the original swamp pop players are still out and about, playing, as the late Storm once promised, until they “have to pry the drumsticks from my cold, dead hands.” In 2022, Tommy McClain released I Ran Down Every Dream—his first album in over forty years at age eighty-two, a collaboration with a cadre of a dozen other swamp pop advocates and performers that references his 1966 Top 20 hit “Sweet Dreams”. The project caught national attention, with coverage from the New York Times and Rolling Stone, who had not forgotten McClain’s, and swamp pop’s, contributions to Louisiana music, and to Americana as a whole. •

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Louisianans, who were quickly realizing the costs of losing their now at-risk French heritage. The moment was captured most meticulously by the work of ethnomusicologist Harry Oster, who conducted an extensive fieldwork study of Cajun music in Vermilion and Evangeline Parishes, preserving some of the oldest still-existing songs as well as the way the genre was developing. At the time, a Louisiana recording industry with a special interest in roots music was also emerging, led by producers J.D. Miller, Eddie Shuler, Carol Rachou, and Floyd Soileau. On the other end of the spectrum, Louisiana French musicians willing to extend the tradition into the more popular genres, and to sing in English, found acclaim on larger stages. Following the success of Choates’s “Jole Blon” came more national hits, including Mamou guitarist-turned-Grand Ole Opry star Jimmy Newman’s country-Cajun crossovers and Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man”.

The Cajun Renaissance Perhaps one of the most significant moments in the history of Cajun music was when Gladius Thibodeaux, Louis “Vinesse” LeJeune, and Dewey Balfa stood onstage before the 17,000 attending the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The crowd did not dance to their rendition of “Grand Mamou”—a song first recorded (by the name “Basile”) by Mayuse Lafleur and Leo Soileau in 1928. The crowd just listened, and then they roared with applause. The trio’s Old World sound, reminiscent of the era of McGee and Ardoin, had been discovered by Ralph Rinzler, an ethnomusicologist from the Smithsonian Institute, while scouting for roots performers in Mamou—one of Acadiana’s most geographically-isolated towns. So the legend goes, Balfa would return home from the festival ready to dedicate his life to reigniting that applause in Louisiana. His activism would result in the ongoing prominence of traditional Cajun music performances at folk festivals across the country for years to come, in which he took part with his family band, the Balfa Brothers. He encouraged local record producer Floyd Soileau to publish recordings of the Brothers performing older songs with a newfound energy. These subsequently took off and became local hits, then classics. The momentum, fueled by Balfa’s fervent dedication, led to the organization of Louisiana music festivals dedicated to traditional forms of the genre

(including the precedents of today’s Festivals Acadiens et Créoles), and ultimately the establishment of CODOFIL as a means of fostering the French language in Louisiana’s future generations. Major collaborators and contemporaries of Dewey and his brothers included legendary accordionists Nathan Abshire and Marc Savoy, who continues his work as a preservationist to this day; as well as guitarist D.L. Menard, the composer of one of Cajun music’s most performed songs, “La Porte En Arrière”. Though firmly established within the cultural matrix as “Cajun,” the traditional music being revived during that time also encompasses the pre-zydeco styles of Black Creole musicians from the turn of the century. The most famous of these is the Evangeline Parish duo made up of fiddler Canray Fontenot and accordionist Bois Sec Ardoin—both of whom began their music careers playing with Amédé Ardoin. Canray and Bois Sec were among the musicians who joined the national and international roots festival circuits following Dewey Balfa’s triumph at Newport, and in fact played at that festival in 1966—bringing the Black Creole tradition to a national stage of its own.

The New Wave of Cajun Music Since the Newport Renaissance, a new generation of musicians has emerged that speak English as their first language. This, along with the academic elevation of Cajun music as a valuable, hyper-regional roots music, has made the calling to contribute to the genre a more self-conscious one than for musicians of previous generations. Decisions to lean into tradition or to break new ground have become less trend-driven and more directed by creative sensibilities. Perhaps no band demonstrates the possibilities of this newfound perspective better than the Grammy-winning band BeauSoleil—which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary on February 1 and 2 with a reunion concert at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. From the band’s beginning, bandleader and accordionist Michael Doucet demonstrated a creative philosophy of demonstrating respect for the tradition and its forefathers, while stretching the music to its most remote possibilities. BeauSoleil’s first album, released in 1977, included Cajun songs drawing from jazz, rock, and bluegrass; “Cajunized” treatments of popular songs; and forgotten traditional songs pulled straight from the Lomax field recordings. In similar form, the French language activist Zachary Richard’s fifty-plus-year discography is made up of traditional and original songs sung in Louisiana French superimposed with influences ranging from Haitian Creole to hip-hop to reggae. Less experimental but just as wide-ranging in style is Terry Huval and Reggie Matte’s popular dance band of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Jambalaya Cajun Band, whose performances might include anything from Cajun swing to Creole blues, to Cajunized country songs. This is also the era when the king of ZydeCajun, Wayne Toups, and country music accordionist Jo-El Sonnier were rising to fame, bringing several traditional Cajun songs, and the Louisiana French language, with them into the national spotlight. On the more traditional front came Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who rested their laurels on excellent and enlivened performances of the old stuff and traditional-style new compositions. Riley, an apprentice of Dewey Balfa and Marc Savoy, formed the band with fiddle virtuoso David Greely in 1988, and they have since recorded prolifically and to great critical acclaim, mostly staying within the standards set by the traditionalists of the Renaissance. In 1992, the repertoire of Cajun music gained its first recorded album by a female accordionist, Sheryl Cormier and Cajun Sounds. With a style influenced by the 1940s sound of Abshire, Roger, and Walker—Cormier also led one of the first all-female Cajun bands. She received a Grammy nomination in 1993 and was named a “Living Legend” by the Acadian Museum in 2002. This was around the same time that the accordionist Kristie Guillory was recording her first albums as a teenager, including the 1994 CD New Cajun Generation. A later collaboration between her and Dewey Balfa’s daughter Christine would ultimately lead to the formation of the groundbreaking all-women group Bonsoir, Catin—a band formed with future generations of Cajun female musicians in mind, bringing a sometimes poetic, sometimes rock ‘n’ roll treatment to the traditional Cajun repertoire, including the old forgotten “home music” sung by Cajun women in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the years since Cormier and Guillory's launch onto the scene, women performers have become increasingly integral to the modern Cajun music world, and several women-led and all-women bands have become favorites at local venues and on the national festival circuit, including the early Cajun and Creole danceband, the Daiquiri Queens; the string-style duo Renée Reed and Juliane Mahoney's Holiday Playgirls; and sisters Gracie and Julie, the Babineaux Sisters. Also significant to the scene of the late 1970s through the ‘90s were family bands, including Les Freres Michot, whose repertoire reaches further back into the late 19th century to specialize in new renditions of the all-acoustic “bal du maison” tradition. Similarly, cultural preservationists Marc and Ann Savoy’s Family Band committed themselves to an acoustic, stripped down style of playing. And in 1992, to carry on the legacy of the Renaissance’s storied leader, Dewey Balfa’s daughter Christine started the Grammy-winning family band Balfa Toujours. Led by Christine and her husband Dirk Powell, over the past thirty years the group has also featured Bois Sec Ardoin, Dewey’s brother Burkeman, his sister Nelda, friends Craig Guillory and Todd

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Aucoin, Courtney Granger, and Christine’s daughter Amelia Powell. An example of how these family bands have continued on into the next generation, spawning a new collective of legacy music-makers in the Acadiana region— Amelia’s own traditional Cajun band Amis du Teche, which includes fiddler Adeline Miller and her brother Robert on bass, released their debut album in 2023, featuring a slate of old and original songs performed with a fiddle at the forefront. The Savoy family, perhaps more than any other family, has remained a pillar of the Louisiana French music community—Marc Savoy’s Music Center in Eunice not only providing accordions for most of the musicians of the area, but also a place where the musical tradition lives on in its purest form via the Saturday morning jam session tradition. Marc’s wife Ann, a musicologist in her own right, has played with various groups over the years, and started her own all-woman Cajun band, the Magnolia Sisters, in the 2010s. Their sons, Joel (fiddler) and Wilson (accordionist), have gone on to start impactful bands of their own—Joel's swing-era Red Stick Ramblers and Wilson's stylistically versatile Pine Leaf Boys, which have each featured many of the Cajun music scene’s best-known performers today. Pine Leaf Boys fiddler and vocalist Courtney Granger, before his death at age thirty-nine in 2021, was considered one of the biggest talents of his generation. Accordionist and fiddler Blake Miller, noted as one of the modern-day Cajun music scene’s most prolific composers, played in both of the Savoy boys’ bands before starting a new one, The Revelers, in 2010 with several other performers from the scene. Their repertoire includes songs across the range of Louisiana French genres, from Cajun to zydeco to swamp pop. Since the Ramblers’ last performance in 2006, Joel has gone on to found the independent music label, Val-

cour, and he plays guitar and fiddle in several of the most popular Cajun bands of the moment, including Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rôdailleurs—who have taken the scene by storm with a militant sense of cultural preservation delivered through raw, high-energy performances of original songs sung entirely in Louisiana French. The Pine Leaf Boys are still active on the scene, having accumulated four Grammy nominations and embarked on six world tours for the U.S. State Department. In the same vein, Freres Michot accordionist Tommy Michot’s sons Louis and Andre went on to start the Grammy award-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers in 1999, bringing a singularly psychedelic, punk treatment to old Louisiana French lyrics and melodies. In 2018, Louis founded his own record label for experimental and traditional South Louisiana music, Nouveau Electric, and in 2023, released his first solo album, Reve du Troubadour—a groundbreaking collection of songs written entirely in Louisiana French, but sung in arrangements that draw in hip hop, Nigerian Tuareg music, and jazz. Steve Riley launched his family band at the start of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, taking advantage of the slowdown of his typical performance schedule to hone in on his two young sons’ natural skills in Cajun music. They released their debut album, La Vie de Riley, in 2022, featuring a lineup of classics from the likes of the Balfa Brothers, Iry LeJeune, and a few new originals by Riley, including “King of Quarantine”. At the start of this year, Riley’s daughter Elise announced the formation of her own band, Chère Elise, which features her father on accordion. Riley was also behind the 1995 formation of one of the scene’s most dynamic groups, Feufollet—serving as a mentor and producer on their first album (when they started, everyone in the band was between the ages of eleven and seventeen). The band was in many ways the dream of Dewey Balfa’s Renaissance: a group made up

of young, creative musicians who—through Louisiana’s French immersion program—spoke Louisiana French in the twenty-first century. Though multi-instrumentalist Chris Stafford is the only original member today, the band remains a fixture of the regional French music landscape over twenty years later, known for producing imaginative and referential takes on the Cajun music genre, incorporating everything from string-band music to honky-tonk to time-honored waltzes. Former members of Feufollet, and many of the other previously-mentioned bands of the last thirty years, have frequently jumped from band to band, or played in more than one at a time, across the spectrum of Acadiana’s music scene—fostering an extremely tight knit, collaborative world of contemporary French music-making centered around the Lafayette area. Beyond the well-known collective of festival-playing Cajun bands are also dozens of lesser-known performers playing at small town venues, or privately for their families—an essential piece of carrying forward the tradition in its own right. The world of Cajun music looks very different from the way it did a century ago in the days of Amédé Ardoin and Dennis Mcgee. Bands, as they did with the rise of mass media in the 1930s and ‘40s, are pulling from the sounds of the popular music of our day and age, as well as from the rich repertoire of the past, and from more obscure creative wells. But today’s emerging Louisiana French musicians possess a foundational respect for the tradition and its language, a commitment to remembering and honoring the world it came from, and an urgency to explore pathways to bring it, resonant, into the future. After that, the possibilities are endless. • Find an expanded version of this article, with more on historic venues, instrumentation, and a reading list, at countryroadsmag.com.

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MUSIC HISTORY

Baton Rouge's Swamp Blues FROM J.D. MILLER'S STUDIO TO TABBY'S BLUES BOX AND BEYOND

Story by John Wirt • Artwork by Randell Henry

Randell Henry, "I've Got the Blues," 11x12' collage on canvas, 2022. This work, which Henry has said represents the significance of blues music in Baton Rouge, as well as around the world, served as the poster image for the 2023 Baton Rouge Blues Festival.

wamp blues—the music Baton Rouge can claim as its own—might never have been hheard beyond local juke joints if J.D. Miller hadn’t met Otis Hicks. In 1946, Miller, a musician and songwriter in the southwest Louisiana city of Crowley, produced recordings by country-Cajun musicians Leroy "Happy Fats" LeBlanc and Oran "Doc" Guidry at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans. In 1947, he built a studio at his home in Crowley and, during the next several years, launched several labels, recording artists the likes of Aldus Roger, Jimmy Newman, Clifton Chenier, Rusty and Doug Kershaw, and Wayne Toups early in their careers. In 1954, at the invitation of Ray Meaders, a disc jock-

ey at Baton Rouge’s WXOK known as Diggie-Doo, Miller traveled to Baton Rouge and listened to a blues band. “In my judgment, they wasn’t too much of a band,” Miller told British writer John Broven in 1979. “And I was walking out the hall when I heard a guitar playing some of the low-down blues. I said, ‘Who in the world is that?’ … I turned ’round and went back in there, started talking to him. I asked him if he did any singing. He said, ‘I knows a few numbers.’ You know how he talked, real slow. So he sang two or three songs. I tell you what, they did things to me. I knew right then and there we had somebody we could sell.” Otis Hicks was the “somebody” who inspired Miller to turn around. A forty-one-year-old blues singer and

guitarist from LaSalle Parish, he’d moved to Baton Rouge in the late 1940s, some years after he’d served a ten-year sentence for manslaughter in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Hicks wasn’t a particularly original artist, but it didn’t matter. “I thought his music was just so real,” Miller explained. Miller gave Hicks a new name: “Lightnin' Slim”. After his first three singles appeared on Miller’s Feature Records label, the producer’s 1955 deal with Ernie Young, owner of Excello Records in Nashville, secured national distribution for Miller’s recordings of Hicks and other Baton Rouge bluesmen. According to Miller, the Crowley sessions with those artists yielded ninety percent of Excello’s sales during Miller’s twelve years of dealing with the company. // F E B

“ALL THOSE GUYS, THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANYWHERE TO PLAY. THEY PLAYED LITTLE CAFÉS. PEOPLE DIDN’T PAY TO GO SEE THEM, DIDN’T CARE NOTHING ABOUT THEM. BUT THOSE GUYS HAD RECORDS OUT ALL OVER THE WORLD. THEY DIDN’T GET THE MONEY FOR THE RECORDS THEY MADE, BUT THEY KEPT THE BLUES ALIVE, PLUS THEY IGNITED THE PEOPLE OVERSEAS TO KNOW ABOUT BATON ROUGE.” —TABBY THOMAS, 1999 Hicks soon introduced Miller to the artist who’d become Excello’s and Baton Rouge’s biggest blues star. A singer, guitarist and stylishly expressive harmonica player, James Moore was born in the West Baton Rouge Parish community of Mulatto Bend on February 11, 1924— making 2024 is the centennial year of his birth. Before the release of Moore’s 1957 Excello debut, the otherworldly “I’m a King Bee,” Miller bestowed a colorful show business name upon him, too: “Slim Harpo”. “King Bee” wasn’t a breakout hit, but it has since become a classic that’s been re-recorded by innumerable major artists—including the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and John Belushi. In 2008, the Recording Academy inducted Moore’s original recording of the song into the Grammy Hall of Fame. His mournful 1961 country-blues ballad, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” became his first hit—rising to No. 17 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 34 on the music trade publication’s pop chart. In 1966, Moore reached Billboard’s No. 1 spot on the R&B chart with “Baby Scratch My Back,” a country-funky romp that also ranked No. 16 on the Hot 100 singles chart. Moore might have become even more successful if not for his unexpected death in 1970 at forty-five years old. He was preparing for his first European tour at the time of the fatal heart attack. Martin Hawkins, author of the 2016 Moore biography Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge, believes Slim Harpo had nowhere to go but up. “He’d have been known at blues venues all over the world,” Hawkins said following the book’s publication. Like Slim Harpo, Leslie Johnson entered Miller’s studio by way of Lightnin' Slim. A singer, guitarist and harmonica player from Scotlandville, Johnson met Hicks on a bus going to Crowley. Accompanying him to a recording session at Miller’s studio, Johnson played for the session because the scheduled harmonica 38

player didn’t show up. Renamed “Lazy Lester” by Miller, he soon recorded his own distinctive, country- and rock-androll-flavored blues classics. Even though Johnson, Lightnin' Slim, Slim Harpo, and other Baton Rouge artists who recorded in Crowley were influenced by Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, they were nevertheless all unique. The “swamp blues” label later attached to them was perhaps more a consequence of their geographical location (Baton Rouge) and Miller’s production values than anything else. Like Sun Records in Memphis—famous for its rock ’n’ and rockabilly acts—Miller’s Crowley studio and the recordings he produced there possessed a special sound defined by his high technical and musical standards. As session keyboardist Katie Webster told John Broven: “When you go into J.D. Miller’s studio, you have to cut perfect records—you cannot make one mistake. You cannot get away with nothing in that studio.” Miller also had an invaluable studio accomplice in Johnson (Lazy Lester). He worked as a resourceful arranger and session musician, adding harmonica and imaginative percussion to other artists’ recordings. His percussion work includes the woodblocks and bongos in Slim Harpo’s “Baby Scratch My Back,” and improvised percussion instruments for other recordings, such as newspapers and cardboard boxes stuffed with various quantities of paper. “All those effects that you hear, that was me,” Johnson told this reporter in 2006. “I heard the empty spaces and filled that up with something.” Johnson also helped create the Miller studio’s signature echo, often described as “doomy.” The secret, Johnson said in a 2017 interview, was stucco walls covered by fourteen coats of Dutch Boy paint. The slick surface created a room so sonically alive that “you could snap your fingers and bust your eardrums in there,”

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Johnson said. “Yeah, J. Miller and I, we’d fiddle around with stuff and come out with something different.” The procession of Baton Rouge bluesmen to Crowley continued into the mid-1960s with Lonesome Sundown (Cornelius Green), Silas Hogan, Moses “Whispering” Smith, and Tabby Thomas. Although Miller’s partnership with Excello essentially ended in 1966, Slim Harpo continued with the label under its new ownership, releasing “Tip On In,” a Top 40 R&B song in 1967.

Harry Oster and Folk-Blues

While Miller worked with Baton Rouge’s electric blues artists, Harry Oster, an English professor at LSU, was making field recordings of traditional music in Louisiana. Between 1956 and 1963, Oster recorded old French ballads, Cajun music, African-American fiddle tunes, spirituals, prison work songs and, yes, blues. He recorded the majority of the recordings in southwest Louisiana and the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The acoustic folk-blues he captured existed in a world apart from Miller’s carefully crafted, commercially aimed Excello productions. Oster met his greatest discovery, Zachary native Robert Pete Williams, when the singer-guitarist was serving a life sentence for murder at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Recognizing his talent and authenticity immediately, Oster recorded Williams at the Angola prison farm and founded an independent label to release the material, Folk-Lyric. Through Oster’s appeals to Louisiana’s governor, pardon board, and others, Williams received servitude parole in 1959 and was sent to work on a farm in Denham Springs. After the restrictions on his parole were lifted in 1964, he performed at folk festivals in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Oster later wrote that Williams’s improvisational, expressive style was “as close to pure folk tradition as anyone of his generation.” “All the music I play,” Williams told Oster, “I just hear it in the air. All of my blues that I put out, that was made-up blues. I make up my own blues, you see.” Williams introduced Oster to Willie B. Thomas and James “Butch” Cage. A Mississippi native who played fiddle, guitar, and cane fife, Cage moved to Zachary in the late 1920s. Thomas was a country-blues singer and guitarist born on the same West Baton Rouge plantation as Slim Harpo. They’d been performing together for thirty years when Oster recorded them—a rare example of the pre-blues string band tradition in the Baton Rouge area. After the 1960 release of their album, Country Negro Jam Sessions, the duo performed at that year’s Newport Folk Festival and appeared in television specials and documentary films. When Oster left LSU in 1963 to teach at the University of Iowa, his documentation of Baton Rouge folk blues was already extensive and invaluable. Recording opportunities for other

Baton Rouge artists stalled in the years after J.D. Miller’s partnership with Excello ended. But activity resumed significantly in 1970, the year Chris Strachwitz, owner of the California-based roots-music label Arhoolie Records, and Terry Pattison recorded Louisiana Blues. The multi-artist album features Arthur “Guitar” Kelley, Moses “Whispering” Smith, Silas Hogan, Clarence Edwards, and Henry Gray—a singer-pianist who played piano with Howlin’ Wolf’s band in Chicago for twelve years. Strachwitz also bought Oster’s Folk-Lyric Records and re-issued many of the label’s recordings—including those of Robert Pete Williams. Also in 1970, British producer Mike Vernon recorded the same lineup on Arhoolie’s Louisiana Blues for his Excello release, Swamp Blues. In addition, Excello went on to issue solo albums by Smith (Over Easy, 1971) and Hogan (Trouble, 1972 and Trouble: Best of the Excello Masters, 1995) as well as the multi-artist Blues Live in Baton Rouge at the Speak-Easy (1972).

The Blues Revival

In 1980, former Excello artist Ernest Joseph “Rockin’ Tabby” Thomas opened Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall in a former pharmacy on North Boulevard—creating a venue for himself and his peers Hogan, Gray, Kelley, Whispering Smith, and Raful Neal. “All those guys, they didn’t have anywhere to play,” Thomas told this reporter in 1999. “They played little cafés. People didn’t pay to go see them, didn’t care nothing about them. But those guys had records out all over the world. They didn’t get the money for the records they made, but they kept the blues alive, plus they ignited the people overseas to know about Baton Rouge.” The Blues Box also served as blues school for young performers, including Houma’s Tab Benoit, New Orleans’s Johnny Sansone, Baton Rouge’s Larry Garner and Troy Turner, and Thomas’s son, future Grammy-winner Chris Thomas King. Blues fans from across the world visited Thomas’s genuine juke joint, the low-budget establishment that preceded the much better-financed House of Blues and B.B. King Blues Club chains. “I was just chosen for this thing,” Thomas said in a 1997 interview at the Blues Box. “I’m not on no ego trip. I’m just out here hustling, trying to take care of business.” The 1979 opening of Tabby’s Blues Box and the 1981 staging of the first Baton Rouge Blues Festival signaled a local blues revival. Jimmy Beyer was the festival’s director, assisted by organizers Nick Spitzer, then director of the Louisiana Folklife Program, Joyce Marie Jackson (later chair of LSU’s Department of Geography and Anthropology), the Arts and Humanities Council of Greater Baton Rouge, and others. Thomas, Raful Neal, Moses “Whispering” Smith, and New Orleans R&B singer Ernie K-Doe performed at the

inaugural festival, held on the Southern University campus, overlooking the Mississippi River. “At the beginning of the blues festival, we were battling people who didn’t think a blues festival was appropriate,” Spitzer recalled in an interview conducted in 2023. “When we did it on the grounds of the Old State Capitol (in 1983), people asked why we were spending money on a blues festival—that kind of attitude. I got in trouble when I said the Baton Rouge blues guys were invited to Europe, but the Baton Rouge Symphony had to do car washes and bake sales to raise money to go to Europe. People didn’t like that, but it was true.” After Spitzer, who’d later launch his long-running national radio show, American Routes, left Baton Rouge in 1985 for a position at the Smithsonian Institution, the blues festival continued as an annual event under various stewardship. Tabby’s Blues Box operated for twenty-four years, surviving a relocation from North Boulevard to downtown’s Lafayette Street before it closed in November 2004 with a marathon grand finale. The Blues Box is fondly remembered history now, but another institution, the Thursday night blues jam at Phil Brady’s Bar & Grill, is approaching its fortieth anniversary. Like Tabby’s Blues Box, the Brady’s jam has served as a blues school for young and aspiring musicians, often placing them in the presence of blues elders. Other activities at Phil Brady’s in-

clude the Baton Rouge Blues Society’s annual all-star summer and Christmas events. Another beloved, still-active home to blues performers in the area is Lloyd “Teddy” Johnson’s nearly fifty-year-old venue, the world-famous, always-decorated-for-Christmas Teddy’s Juke Joint in Zachary.

The Baton Rouge Blues Scene Today

The Excello generation of performers and their peers inevitably passed from the local stages. In 2020, the blues community lost one of its best-loved and longest-performing members, Henry Gray. Another example of a local talent known nationally and internationally, Gray played his piano almost until his death at ninety-five years old. The Baton Rouge Blues Festival continues under the auspices of the Baton Rouge Blues Festival and Foundation. The foundation’s stated mission is “to promote, preserve, and advance the swamp blues music and culture native to Baton Rouge.” The lineup for the 2024 festival, scheduled for April 19–April 21, includes area talent as well as Mississippi blues artists Charlie Musselwhite and D.K. Harrell, and Baton Rouge-born genre-bending Louisiana French musician, Louis Michot. Kenny Neal (Raful Neal’s oldest offspring), also one of the 2024 Blues

Festival performers, and his fellow second-generation blues artist Chris Thomas King continue to spread the word about blues from Louisiana’s capital city. In 2021, King also contributed to blues literature, publishing his memoir/history of blues, The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music. Thomas’s and Neal’s decades-long international careers include a Grammy win for King and a nomination for Neal. Neal’s younger brother, Lil’ Ray Neal, their siblings, as well as younger Neal family members, form Baton Rouge’s first family of blues. They are joined by such other new-generation musicians as Jonathon “Boogie” Long, Leroy Bishop Toussaint, and others who keep the local blues flame burning. Fifty-four years after his death, Slim Harpo remains the most recognized swamp blues artist. He’s the subject of Johnny Palazzotto’s 2023 documentary The Original King Bee, and the name behind Palazzotto’s Slim Harpo Music Awards, which have shone a light on blues artists, past and present, since 2003. Other tributes include Gibson Guitars’ 2021 unveiling of the Slim Harpo “Lovell” model guitar; the 2016 publication of Martin Hawkins’s biography Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge; the 2015 compilation album Buzzin’ the Blues: The Complete Slim Harpo by Germany’s Bear Family Records; the 2014 dedication of a Louisiana State Historical Marker near Moore’s grave in Mulatto Bend Cemetery; and, of course, the 2008

induction of Moore’s debut, “I’m a King Bee,” into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Other classic bluesmen from Baton Rouge hold their places in the city’s musical memory as well. In 2019, Martin Hawkins showcased them in Blues Kings of Baton Rouge, the 53-track CD set he produced for Bear Family Records. The collection features Cage and Thomas, Lazy Lester, Lightnin' Slim, Raful Neal, Slim Harpo, Tabby Thomas, Silas Hogan, Henry Gray, and more. On the international stage, the Rolling Stones expressed their affection for Baton Rouge blues through their recording of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee,” a track on the group’s 1964 debut album, and in their remarkably faithful rendition of “Shake Your Hips” on the 1972 album considered their best, Exile on Main St. The Stones also acknowledged Slim Harpo’s predecessor at Excello, Lightnin' Slim, with their interpretation of his song, “Hoo Doo Blues,” a track on the group’s 2016 album, Blue & Lonesome. The British rock stars revisited the Baton Rouge scene again in 2018, selecting recordings by Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Slim, and one-time Baton Rouge resident Buddy Guy for their curated anthology of blues classics, Confessin’ the Blues. In the Blue & Lonesome liner notes, Keith Richards gives credit where credit’s due: “If you don’t know the blues, there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll.” •

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MUSIC HISTORY

How New Orleans Became the Cradle FROM ITS ORIGINS IN CONGO SQUARE, JAZZ CARRIES FORTH AS THE SPIRIT OF THE CRESCENT CITY

Story by Alexandra Kennon • Artwork by Frenchy

hen it comes to the origins of jazz, today often called BAM (Black American Music), there is one point that historians and scholars across the spectrum generally agree on: jazz would not exist were it not for Congo Square. Like its indigenous Creole Cuisine, New Orleans’s musical genre was born a product of the different international cultures that came together in the port city at the Mississippi’s mouth. Enslaved Africans and free people of color contributed high-energy syncopation and polyrhythms; Europeans brought advanced harmony and four-note chords; blues music’s simultaneous birth nearby added “blue notes” and a new interpretation of quarter notes known as “swing”. Jazz’s older cousin, ragtime, set the stage for all of these elements to come together in New Orleans venues and morph into the high-energy, intricate, inherently improvisational musical genre beloved across the world for over a century, and according to some, set to experience a revival in 2024.

Up From Congo Square In today’s Armstrong Park, Congo Square was designated by a city ordinance in 1817 as the only area in New Orleans (and far beyond) where enslaved Africans were allowed to gather in large groups. Throughout the early 19th century, every Sunday, hundreds of enslaved individuals would convene there to buy and exchange goods, play music, and dance. It is said that Louis Armstrong mused, “.... if New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” then the “Gold Coast” of West Africa “...must be the mother.” One of the very first to bridge the divide between the African sounds of Congo Square and the world of European classical music—before jazz or even ragtime—was New Orleans-born Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk was deeply inspired by the music he had heard and witnessed in Congo Square, and he incorporated those rhythmic components in his early piece, “Bamboula (Danse Des Nègres)”. His 1857 composition “Souvenir de Porto Rico” likewise incorporates African American as well as Latin American musical components, nearly half a century before ragtime and jazz would bring them into fashion. Randy Leo Frechette, "Frenchy". "Rebirth Bass Brand Live Studio."

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Where Uptown and Downtown Met It is said that in the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century, a “symbolic line” divided musicians on opposite sides of Canal Street. Often descended from those who were enslaved, the Black musicians upriver from the French Quarter were generally perceived as poorer and less educated than their downtown counterparts. They played by ear, usually without training, and their instruments were often those that resonated in the streets—drums, trumpets, trombones, and tubas; which later became fixtures in jazz as well as brass bands. Their “venues” were usually community events, including the antecedents of second lines and jazz funerals. The Downtown-residing Creole “gens de couleur” were generally regarded as being in better financial standing, and better educated— musically and otherwise. They could usually read sheet music, and their instruments were more likely to be fixed in place and designed for interior performances: upright bass, clarinet, piano, violin, etc. Approaching the end of the 1800s, these classically-trained Creole musicians performed in the city’s well-established venues and concert halls, frequently alongside white musicians. Though most historians attribute Jim Crow laws like the Separate Car Act of 1890 and the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling with pushing these two cultural groups closer together ahead of 1900, some assert that the two communities were already more intertwined than is usually acknowledged, and that they organically

became closer and experienced more cultural overlap during and after Reconstruction. Regardless of how the fusion occurred, historians mostly agree that it was from the space where the “Downtown” Creole musicians and “Uptown” Black musicians met that jazz emerged. Paul Dominguez, a Creole violinist-turned-fiddler working in New Orleans during this period, explained the merging and its impact to Alan Lomax in an interview conducted in 1950:

“Us Downtown people, we didn’t think much of this rough Uptown jazz until we couldn’t make a living otherwise . . . They made a fiddler out of a violinist—me, I’m talking about. A fiddler is not a violinist, but a violinist can be a fiddler. If I wanted to make a living, I had to be rowdy like the other group. I had to jazz it or rag it or any other damn thing . . . I don’t know how [the Uptown musicians] do it. But goddamn, they’ll do it. Can’t tell you what’s there on paper, but

just play the hell out of it.” An African American music teacher named James Brown Humphrey, born just before the Civil War on Cornland Plantation in Sellers, Louisiana (which is today Norco), is credited with advancing the musical assimilation of the two groups and their distinctive methods and styles. Humphrey was known to travel with his cornet and sheet music, teaching music to students across racial lines in the city, as well as to the young descendants

of the formerly-enslaved living in sharecropping cabins on the edges of nearby cotton and sugar fields. Humphrey’s most notable project was the Eclipse brass band, made up of musicians mostly from Magnolia Plantation. This group, according to some, marked one of the earliest instances of musicians simultaneously possessing the ability to read sheet music and to improvise and play by ear; the combination of which would be seminal to jazz’s identity.

Still a small child when Bolden formed his band, Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, better known by his stage name “Jelly Roll Morton”, began playing piano in brothels when he was around fourteen, according to some records. Despite the contributions of Bolden and other musicians, Morton famously claimed in 1902 to have “invented” jazz. Though the assertion is arguably exaggerated, Morton did contribute substantially to the solidification of the genre’s place in music and on the national stage. He was the first to formally arrange jazz, demonstrating that the music’s improvisational nature could also be notated on sheet music. And of course, no discussion of early jazz in and around Storyville is complete without Louis Armstrong. Born on a much-disputed date around the turn of the century in New Orleans, Armstrong (known famously as “Satchmo” or “Pops”) was raised surrounded by the early sounds of ragtime and jazz. After being arrested on New Year’s Eve of 1912

for firing his stepfather’s gun into the air, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif's Home. There, he took up the cornet and played in the school band, sparking his initial love of music. Armstrong’s innate talent eventually attracted notice from bandleader and trombonist Kid Ory, as well as cornetist, trumpeter, and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver. Oliver served as a mentor to Armstrong in his youth, offering the young trumpeter his role in Ory’s band when he left for Chicago. Armstrong and Oliver were also regular members of the Tuxedo Brass Band, led by bandleader Oscar Philip Celestin, or “Papa” Celestin. Oliver would also become a mentor to clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who has come to be regarded as one of the first great soloists in jazz. Armstrong would later write of Oliver, “ . . . had it not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.”

son to California in 1917. As jazz (still called jass or other variations in those early days) gained popularity outside of Louisiana, white musicians took interest and capitalized on the burgeoning genre. In Chicago, The Original Dixieland Jass Band (who would later change the spelling to “jazz”), was formed in 1916, led by Sicilian-American cornetist Nick LaRocca. LaRocca and five white band members would adapt and copy the New Orleans style of jazz, and because of the racially-fraught context of the early twentieth century, were able to secure a recording contract before any African American musicians from New Orleans could (though legend has it Black New Orleans-born cornetist Freddie Keppard was offered a recording opportunity in late 1915, which he turned down either out of fear of his music being “stolen” or lack of adequate compensation). Often compared to minstrel performances, this first jazz recording has become a controversial point in history. It marked the first use of the word “jass”

or “jazz,” on the national stage and on a recording, but took an artform expressive of Black experience and culture and reduced it to a simplified reproduction; lacking the improvisation and swing so crucial to defining the genre. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s early recordings are regarded as even more problematic because of LaRocca’s later blatant racism and declaration that he “invented” jazz, refusing to credit African American musicians from New Orleans. This fraught origin story around the use of the term “jazz,” is a large reason for the modern movement led by New Orleans musician Nicholas Payton to instead use the term “BAM,” or “Black American Music,” which many believe more accurately reflects the genre’s origins. Ory’s band would be the first New Orleans African American jazz band to record their music, releasing the original composition “Ory’s Creole Trombone” with Sunshine Records in Los Angeles in 1922. In 1925, Ory would move to Chicago, where he played with other New Orleans jazz greats like Morton,

Armstrong, drumset pioneer Warren “Baby” Dodds, and others. Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922 to join Oliver’s band in Chicago. Oliver went first in 1918, and regularly wrote to Armstrong imploring him to join him and his band there. After playing with Oliver in Chicago for close to a year, in April 1923, Armstrong and Oliver’s band recorded their first album in Richmond, Indiana, on the Gennett Label—it also featured Baby Dodds, Johnny Dodds, Lillian Hardin, Honore Dutrey, and Bill Johnson. By this point in the 1920s. The Big Band Era had taken hold. Originally called “jazz orchestras,” these larger iterations of jazz bands with ten or more players—headed by musicians such as King Oliver, Count Basie, Mamie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Coleman Hawkins—were gaining popularity across the United States. By the height of the Swing Era in the 1940s, these groups dominated jazz, and would lead the way for contemporary big bands.

vocal-focused genres including R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, and soul. Many local recording studios and venues turned

their attention to this more modern music, as artists outside the realm of jazz (if influenced by it) like Fats Domino,

Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Dr. John, Allan Toussaint, and the Meters rose to fame.

Storyville and the Fathers of Jazz Under Jim Crow, Creole and Black musicians alike were being pushed out of white venues, so they came together in a place where most laws became irrelevant: Storyville. The Tremé’s legal red-light district was founded in 1897 by a city ordinance proposed by Alderman Sidney Story, and was intended to regulate prostitution, an increasing problem at the time for the rowdy port town. Once brothels were established, dance halls, restaurants, and saloons began to appear. Besides the gambling, drinking, and prostitution, early jazz music became a fixture of such clubs. Musicians were free to play in a more rowdy and improvisational style, and the Creole musicians who were no longer allowed in more “respectable” venues joined and assimilated. At the same time jazz was rising in Storyville’s raucous ranks, cornetist Buddy Bolden’s band, established in 1895, was gaining significant musical influence in the city, frequently playing the saloons of the concurrent red-light district that

existed Uptown at the time, called Uptown Storyville or Black Storyville. Bolden had experience as a sideman playing in parades and second lines, perhaps influencing his “wide open” approach to cornet playing. His loud, powerful style of playing and looser, more improvised interpretation of ragtime, which also incorporated elements of blues and gospel music, is thought to have been one of the earliest iterations of jazz, inspiring other musicians throughout the city (notably Freddie Keppard and “King” Oliver). Another of the earliest musicians to influence the genre was Kid Ory from LaPlace, Louisiana—who some scholars cite as the conduit between the early jazz generation led by Buddy Bolden and the younger, more famous, generation of musicians the likes of Louis Armstrong. Ory, a trombonist and bandleader, was one of the early players to implement the “glissando,” or technique of sliding from one pitch to another, which would become another regular component of jazz.

The Export of Jazz & the Birth of the Big Band Era While it is usually thought that jazz’s early musicians first traveled outside of New Orleans with the federal government’s shutting down of Storyville in 1917 (the debaucherous port neighborhood became a problem for the Navy during World War I), many believe that musicians began bringing jazz north of New Orleans even earlier. Whatever the catalyst, it was around the late 1910s that New Orleans’s early jazz musicians—and therewith the genre itself—began to travel via train and steamboat up the Mississippi and elsewhere. Bandleader William Manuel Johnson, who is regarded as having fathered the “slap” style of playing double bass, is also credited with starting the first jazz band to tour outside of New Orleans, The Original Creole Orchestra—which became a popular vaudeville act across the country. He was also instrumental in forming King Oliver’s Creole Brass Band in Chicago in the 1920s. After years of touring with his own band, and spending some time performing and composing in Chicago, Morton followed John-

The Evolutions of Jazz Throughout the 1950s and into the ‘70s, New Orleans joined the rest of the country in embracing the rise of new

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LSU's International Conference

Navigating the Storms of Slavery: Restore, Reﬂect, Reclaim

February 8-10, 2024 HOSTS

Dr. Joyce Marie Jackson Conference Coordinator Chair of the Department of Geography & Anthropology

Chancellor John Pierre Co-Host Southern University Law Center

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

The 2024 conference will feature keynote addresses by individuals with local, national, and international reach and impact. They include:

Dr. Douglas Chambers

Dr. Haywood Hall

Dr. Isaac Saney

Dr. Ibrahima Seck

Dr. Ruth J. Simmons

Dr. Andrew Sluyter

This conference marks an important moment in scholarly inquiry and understanding of how the enslavement of Black and Indigenous people shaped Louisiana's history and the history of its universities.

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Live “trad” jazz performances in New Orleans steeply declined, inspiring venues like Preservation Hall to open with the goal of maintaining the tradition of the genre in the city in which it was founded. As early as 1950, the big bands of the Swing Era had become largely obsolete. The cost of hiring so many musicians, coupled with factors like a jazz musician recording strike from 1942–1944, World War II drafting musicians and making travel expensive, and a 1944 “cabaret tax” on New York nightclubs that allowed dancing all contributed to the subgenre’s decline. From this vacuum emerged new variations of jazz in major cities outside of New Orleans, including in the smaller, sit-down jazz clubs of New York that rose to popularity as a result of the cabaret tax, where a new, less-danceable version of jazz emerged, with traits like asymmetrical phrasing and complex harmony: bebop. Other new variations of jazz took over major cities outside of New Orleans, including the hard bop and West-Coast cool jazz of the 1950s, and the fusion and free jazz of the 1960s. One of the first artists to bring bebop back to New Orleans and also revolutionize jazz in his own right was Ellis Marsalis, Jr., patriarch of the famously-musical Marsalis family. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Marsalis worked with an ever-rotating group of musicians featuring himself on piano alongside other local artists interested in freer improvisation and a more avant-garde style. Among them at various times were clarinetist Alvin Batiste, drummers Ed Blackwell and James Black, bassist Richard Payne, and saxophonists Harold Battiste, Earl Tubinton, and Nat Perrilliat. While venues like the Dew Drop Inn provided a home for R&B music and late-night jazz, open-minded talent bookers at more obscure spots like the Playboy Club provided outlets for Marsalis and his band to experiment. In the 1980s, New Orleans jazz made a return to the national stage by way of composer and pianist Ahmad Jamal, who helped solidify the genre’s importance in the modern era. Recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy, Jamal was one of the most respected small bandleaders in the country—always insisting that his band consisted primarily of New Orleans musicians, including drummer Herlin Riley. Around the same time as Jamal’s rise to fame, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (Ellis’s son) was touring Europe and recording with legendary hard bop drummer Art Blakey, then touring with funk-jazz fusion star Herbie Hancock. By the end of the 1980s, Wynton founded the concert series in New York that would become Jazz at Lincoln Center; in the mid-’90s he became the Center’s artistic director as well as the musical director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. While Wynton was in New York maintaining and continuing the tradition of straight ahead jazz, the genre continued to evolve in its birthplace. Founded by saxophonist Toni Dagradi in 1978, a quartet called Astral Project started to gain prominence in the ‘90s—The Times-Picayune calling them, “The city's premier modern jazz ensemble.” Besides Dagradi, Astral Project today consists of drummer Johnny Vidacovich, bassist James Singleton, and 7-string guitarist Steve Masakowski. Pianist David Torkanowsky was originally part of the band before leaving in 2001, though he still regularly plays live jazz in New Orleans, sometimes with Astral Project or the Stanton Moore Trio. Today, Astral Project is a staple of the lineup of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, as well as a regular on the bill at venues like Snug Harbor and the Maple Leaf.

The Brass Band Revival Around the middle of the 19th century, America experienced a surge of big brass bands, and New Orleans didn’t hesitate to participate. Depending on the occasion, these bands generally played religious and popular music. When jazz entered the scene at the turn of the century, brass bands like the Original Tuxedo would incorporate the new style, bringing it into the streets as well as into venues. In turn, jazz would be shaped by the bold, less-polished influence of the brass bands, as well. Over the course of the twentieth century, as jazz underwent its shifts and undulations, so did the world of New Orleans brass band music and culture. Still drawing from the African beats and syncopation the Uptown street musicians used throughout history in events like Black Masking (Mardi Gras) Indian outings and second lines, groups like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, formed in 1977, wove funk and bebop into their interpretations of jazz. When they rose to popularity in the ‘80s, Dirty Dozen inspired a revival of brass bands throughout the city and beyond—further proving that live music audiences in New Orleans were eager to hear fresh interpretations of jazz, rather than the traditional, museum-quality version of the genre. Maintaining their relevance, in 2023, Dirty Dozen took home the Grammy for Best American Roots Performance. One of the most influential contemporary brass bands to emerge in New Orleans was Rebirth Brass Band, which trumpeter Kermit Ruffins co-founded in 1983 while still finishing high school. Rebirth started out busking in downtown New Orleans, and their high-energy, innovative blend of brass band music, jazz, second line music, funk, and hip-hop quickly vaulted them to popularity. Ruffins left the band amicably in 1993, and has since started another band, The Barbecue Swingers, which regularly plays his venue Kermit’s Tremé Mother in Law Lounge, the Blue Nile, and others. Rebirth has since toured North America and Europe, and took home the 2012 Grammy for Best American Roots Performance in the award’s inaugural year.

Rebirth’s success is still firmly rooted in New Orleans, however, with their long-standing Tuesday night residency at The Maple Leaf Bar widely regarded as a favorite live music experience both for locals and visitors. The band Soul Rebels would later push Rebirth’s brass band revolution even further into the realm of contemporary popular music by collaborating with superstars like Nas, Katy Perry, Robert Glasper, and fellow New Orleans local Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. Andrews is another musician representing jazz and brass band legacies who has landed in the national spotlight, elaborating upon the jazz his musical family played to incorporate funk, hip-hop, and rock.

Jazz Lives On

Traditional jazz still holds its place in New Orleans and up the river in Baton Rouge, too. In 2023, trumpeter and vocalist Wendell Brunious (who has played with legacy musicians ranging from Wynton Marsalis to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band), was named the musical director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Brunious, with experience playing at Preservation Hall since his youth, along with more contemporary gigs, bridges the divide between the traditional jazz born at the turn of the century and the evolutions that have emerged since. Preservation Hall’s lineups today range from trad jazz to more modern iterations. Other venues in the French Quarter promoting traditional jazz in the style of early greats like Armstrong and Morton include Fritzel’s European Jazz Pub and Mahogany Jazz Hall (where drummer Gerald French’s Original Tuxedo Jazz Band maintains a residency). The New Orleans Jazz Museum frequently hosts live music as well, ranging from hyper-traditional jazz nearly venturing back to ragtime up through progressive modern artists. In Baton Rouge, which has tangentially contributed to jazz history since bandleader Fate Marable began recruiting New Orleans

musicians like Armstrong to head up the river on steamboats around 1907, The Florida Street Blowhards carry forth traditional New Orleans jazz. One of the best indicators that jazz is very much living, breathing, and growing in New Orleans today is that multiple generations of musicians can be heard playing a wide breadth of interpretations of the genre. To experience jazz in New Orleans today even somewhat comprehensively, one should seek out performances by multiple generations of musicians, in a variety of styles. For example, though the Barbecue Swingers and Astral Project are from roughly the same generation, each group performs a completely different interpretation of jazz. Many still-active musicians of the older generation, like Vidocovich and pianist Lawrence Seiberth, spend part of their time teaching music at universities like Loyola and University of New Orleans, helping to usher in the new generations. Likewise, many of the younger generation of musicians carrying jazz ahead were the latter generation's students. Besides Wynton’s bringing jazz to the Lincoln Center, other children of Ellis Marsalis continue to play and extrapolate upon jazz in New Orleans. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis studied under Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Baton Rouge and also played with Blakey early in his career, before later forming the Branford Marsalis Quartet, which won a Grammy in 1992 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album. Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis founded the Uptown Jazz Orchestra in 2008, which is devoted both to celebrating the tradition of jazz and educating emerging artists. Ellis Marsalis’s youngest son, Jason, has also made a name for himself as a drummer and vibraphone player after apprenticing with James Black as a small child. Besides playing with popular jazz fusion groups like Snarky Puppy, Jason has an affinity for merging Latin American music with jazz— he joined Afro-Cuban percussionist Bill Summers and

since-disgraced trumpeter Irvin Mayfeild to form Los Hombres Calientes, which melded aspects of Latin and contemporary jazz in the ‘80s. Today, several New Orleans-based musicians weave jazz together with other international sounds—notably Moroccan-born guitar/oud player Mahmoud Chouki, who melds jazz with Arabic and Spanish soundscapes; and djembefola Weedie Braimah, who combines jazz with more traditionally West African sounds and instruments. Besides the New Orleans artists working in the city itself, there are also the performers who received their musical training there, and have since continued the tradition of exporting jazz to other cultural capitals like New York and San Francisco. Trumpeter Terance Blanchard was a student of Ellis Marsalis at The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. From there, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in New York, going on to compose multiple film scores for director Spike Lee, serve as the artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles, and become the first African American composer to write an opera produced by the Metropolitan Opera. He has also recorded dozens of jazz albums for respected labels like Columbia and Blue Note. New Orleans-born drummer Adonis Rose retains his birth city as his homebase, though he also has traveled to play venues like Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center with respected musicians, including Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis. A longtime member of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO), Rose was a member of the group when it claimed a 2010 Grammy for Best Large Ensemble. In 2017, he became the artistic director of the eighteen-piece orchestra, and has since been instrumental in founding The Jazz Market, a venue in the Central City neighborhood where NOJO plays. While another drummer originally from New Orleans, Stanton Moore, is known primarily for his funk/

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jam band Galactic, he also leads jazz-derived projects, including the Stanton Moore Trio and Garage a Trois. His trio often features older jazz legends, including David Torkanovsky and James Singleton; while Garage a Trois is considerably more progressive, featuring saxophonist Skerik, vibraphone and percussionist Mike Dillon, and keyboardist Marco Benevento playing music that fuses jazz with rock and funk. Trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, formerly Christian Scott, is another musician who takes inspiration from his musical heritage in New Orleans and Africa and carries it around the globe. His uncle Donald Harrison Jr. was a jazz saxophonist in the Crescent City; and Adjuah’s family possesses a long and storied history of leadership within the Black Masking Indian tradition, as well. In his original music, Adjuah draws from jazz, West African music, the Afro-Native inspired music of the Black Masking Indians, and hip-hop. With his 2010 album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, Adjuah coined the term “Stretch Music,” because he said he "wanted to stretch the definition of jazz." In the same spirit of pushing the boundaries of the genre is the trio Extended—made up of pianist Oscar Rosignolli, drummer Brad Webb and sometimes Peter Varnado, and bassist Matt Booth—which embraces the spirit of jazz while, as their name suggests, extending and pushing the boundaries of the elements that define it. Saxophonist Brad Walker regularly plays with Extended and other progressive jazz groups, and also leads his own modern jazz trio that plays his original compositions. Saxophonist and clarinet player Byron Asher, who self-describes his work as existing, “at the intersection of broadly experimental composition and jazz and improvised music,” leads an experimental ensemble called Skronch Mu-

sic, as well as a “free jazz party band” named Basher. Still active in New Orleans somewhere between the jazz orchestras, brass bands, and smaller trios and quartets is progressive six-piece jazz fusion band Naughty Professor. Saxophonist/clarinetist Nick Ellman, trumpeter John Culbreth, saxophonist Ian Bowman, drummer Sam Shahin, guitarist “Wild Bill” Daniel, and bassist Noah Young met while studying jazz at Loyola University, and have been performing across New Orleans and internationally for over a decade. Their high-energy, horn-and-rhythm driven music combines complex compositional arrangements with improvisation, elaborating upon their city’s lineage of jazz while melding it with elements of funk, rock, brass bands, and R&B. A remarkable point worth noting about contemporary jazz is that most musicians on the New Orleans scene today can, and do, play multiple styles of jazz, often within the span of a single week. A pianist like Rosignolli might, for example, play a traditional jazz gig in the style of Morton one night, followed by a more progressive set containing odd time signatures and intentionally discordant notes the very next. This is true of many musicians currently playing in New Orleans, showcasing the breadth of talent present as well as the full evolutionary spectrum of the city’s indigenous genre.

Where to Find Jazz Today

To hear it all for yourself, New Orleans offers a wide range of venues and festivals at which one can experience jazz in all of its iterations. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, while including musicians well outside the boundaries of jazz, still annually slates traditional jazz acts as well as progressive modern groups like Astral Project and Naughty Professor. French Quarter Festival, with its lineup of exclusive-

ly-New Orleans-based musicians, also regularly features a wide variety of jazz-influenced groups. Among the best places to hear traditional jazz as it was performed near the turn of the century are Preservation Hall, Fritzel’s, and Mahogany Hall. Venues offering fairly traditional as well as more progressive sets, depending on the day and players, are Snug Harbor, the Spotted Cat, Maison, Blue Nile, the Three Keys, and Bayou Bar. Historic venues like Professor Longhair’s Tipitina’s and The Maple Leaf offer a wide variety of New Orleans music as well as touring acts, and also regularly host modern jazz and jazz-adjacent artists. The thing about jazz in New Orleans that remains true today is, you never know where you might find it. It often makes its way into neighborhood bars like Carrollton Station, Hi-Ho Lounge, and Chickie Wah-Wah. Or, as the cliché goes, it “bubbles up” from the streets themselves—you’ll hear the Young Fellaz Brass band from multiple blocks away when they regularly play at the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres, and buskers inspired by jazz to varying degrees are still heard resonating throughout downtown. When an artform like jazz emerges organically as it did in the crescent between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, as a true child of the city and the lifeblood of its culture, it cannot be contained. Through wars, hurricanes, depressions, and counter-movements, jazz has not only remained strong in New Orleans, but evolved, outgrowing its original home and becoming the Crescent City’s most beloved and prized export. Even so, nowhere in the world is jazz more concentrated, more vibrant, or heard more loudly than in its birthplace. • Find an expanded version of this article, and a reading list, at countryroadsmag.com.

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// F E B

Cuisine

FEBRUARY 2024

46 SWEET POTATOES? POTATO SALAD? OR A PICKLE?

CONTROVERSY

F O O D WAY S

You Say Potato Salad, I Say Sweet Potato THE GREAT DEBATE OF THE GUMBO SIDE DISH

Story by Natalie Roblin • Photo by Alexandra Kennon

“I

got you a box of sweet potatoes,” my dad texts me one day in November. Immediately, I relay the good news to my husband, “Daddy got us sweet potatoes!” Exclamation point emojis follow. It’s gumbo season in Avoyelles Parish, and for us, that means making room in 46

the pantry to store cardboard boxes of freshly-harvested sweet potatoes. Come gumbo time, they’re washed, baked, and slathered in butter. Gumbo is a Louisiana thing, to be sure. But the associated fixings served alongside it can be even more hyper-regional. Potato salad—made with variations of mashed potatoes, eggs, green

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onions, and mayo-mustard mixtures— tends to reign supreme in the southern and southwestern part of the state, where the influence of German Coast settlers can still be tasted today. It wasn’t until I lived in New Orleans for a period of time that I began to appreciate a cool scoop of potato salad in a hot bowl of gumbo. I was a kid the first time I encountered it,

at my cousins’ house in Arnaudville for Christmas. The dish was wasted on me, a child too busy asking my Dad to strain the onions out of my gumbo to try something altogether new. Instead, I went for the familiar side-dish of sweet potatoes. An ode to home, baked to sweet fluff y perfection by my Avoyelles-born aunt. In the central and northern parts of Louisi-

ana, the sweet potato maintains a leg up. Sweet potatoes have long been an integral part of Louisiana foodways, used in cooking by indigenous groups and enslaved Africans. With varietal names like Beauregard and Evangeline, the sweet potato is all but a distant relative on our extended family trees. In the early 1900s, St. Landry Parish became the first commercial sweet potato district in Louisiana and by the 1940s was known as the “Sweet Potato Capital of the World.” The sweet potato was designated the official state vegetable of Louisiana in 2003 and featured as a side dish on the official menu of North Louisiana created by Chef Hardette Harris in 2015. As the sweet potato industry grew across the country in the early 20th century, researcher Julian C. Miller developed a sweet potato breeding program at Louisiana State University. His work produced several new varieties including a smooth and sweet potato that traveled well. Although technically a sweet potato, this new product was marketed as “The Louisiana Yam,” in an effort to differentiate from varieties grown elsewhere. These developments brought exponential growth to the sweet potato industry in Louisiana. Parishes such as Avoyelles, where sweet potatoes have been cultivated for generations, adapted to fulfill the increasing demands of consumers.“When the industry began to grow, Avoyelles was well-positioned to benefit,” explains LSU Ag Center Sweet Potato Specialist, Cole Gregorie. With a conducive climate, favorable soil and central location, the parish grew to have several commercial sweet potato farms. “Growing up, I always worked with my Dad and grandfather on their crop and in 2008, I planted my first crop for myself,” said Cory Juneau, a third-generation sweet potato farmer in Avoyelles, whose family owns and operates Earl Roy Enterprises. Up until last year, Juneau and his father farmed sweet potatoes independently and would then sell their harvest to the family business to be packed and sold commercially. A full-time position with the LSU Ag Center, coupled with increased costs and labor shortages, made it difficult for Juneau and his father to maintain their farm, but Earl Roy Enterprises still farms and ships sweet potatoes commercially. There are commercial sweet potato farmers around the parish, including in Bunkie and Moncla, but according to Juneau, the hub of sweet potato farming in Avoyelles lies in an area between Mansura and Hessmer known as “The Large” (pronounced läzh.) The prairie soil there produces, what some consider, a sweeter potato, and has people as far as Oklahoma and Arkansas pining for the crop. “Come September, the first big cold front comes in, you better be ready to sell some dirty sweet potatoes,” laughed Juneau. For Juneau, there’s no gumbo without sweet potatoes. “Up until about five years ago, I’d never heard of potato salad with gumbo,” he laughed.

It’s safe to say that gumbo talk can get a little heated. As the Louisiana Folklorist Maida Owens explains, “If eating and cooking gumbo are favorite pastimes in Louisiana, arguing about what is a good gumbo comes in a close third.” The same is true for what sits next to, or inside of, our gumbo bowls. Hoping to learn more about my friends’ and family’s gumbo rituals, I recently decided to stir one of the deepest pots on the scene: Facebook. Turns out “What do you eat with your gumbo?” is kind of a loaded question, and I got a plateful of passionate (and delicious) answers. As suspected, friends from the central and northern part of the state mostly grew up on sweet potatoes, with a few mentioning potato salad, and friends from the southern and southwestern part of the state leaned toward team potato salad. Some of them had never heard of sweet potatoes served with gumbo. “I thought you were joking about the sweet potatoes. Mind blown,” said a friend from Slidell. And for many, like myself, potato salad is a fairly recent introduction in the gumbo side rotation. Besides the popular potatoes, a slate of other intriguing side traditions arose. For those who go for a splash of acid to balance the richness of gumbo, there’s pickles or vinegar. “I must have my Dad’s pickled peppers,” said a friend from high school. I’m reminded of my uncle who always travels with a mason jar of vinegary chow-chow to family gatherings, spooning the relish-like vegetable compound into his gumbo. Bread and butter pickles are also a favorite of many, adding a sweet and crunchy break from the rich roux. Back in the day, many people would crack eggs into gumbo to add protein. Not so much of a necessity today, but a pleasant surprise when fishing for chicken and sausage. “I love a poached egg in my gumbo juice,” a friend of mine commented with heart emojis. Some folks sprinkle in saltines and oyster crackers to soak up the juice. After all, gumbo is technically soup. And of course, there’s the traditional topping of filé. Foodways and cultural practices shift as we find partners, move to new places and acquire new friends. I have several childhood friends who now often opt for potato salad instead of sweet potatoes, all in the name of love. “You’ve changed,” is what I would tell them, if I didn’t also occasionally step out on my sweet, sweet potatoes. We all agree that we like to switch it up from time to time, depending on how we’re feeling, how much time we have, and what kind of gumbo we’re making. But if asked to conjure up my earliest memories of gumbo for supper, there’s always the sweet smell of a freshly baked sweet potato intermingling with the roux. Picking the sticky candied syrup off of the pan brings me back into the kitchens that raised me. As a friend of mine proclaimed, “The sweet potato has given me far too much to turn my back on her now.” // F E B

Outdoors

FEBRUARY 2024

DIGGING IN

48 THE INS AND OUTS OF PRUNING AND LOOSENING YOUR WINTER ROOTS

Rootbound container tree; courtesy of Baton Rouge Green.

Why Loosen Your Roots?

O U R S U S TA I N A B L E G A R D E N

Though the history of the terracotta plant container can be traced back to ancient Egypt; the advent of plastic in the twentieth century produced the black nursery pot. Plastic pots are cheap and lightweight, and their invention revolutionized the travel of plants between grower and consumer. Plants can now be moved all over the continent in a quick and affordable manner, but alas, oftentimes the most convenient things in life are not the most sustainable. Forever and always, my greatest garden teacher is the surrounding natural world. One can look to our natural systems (our forests, meadows, waterways, clouds, etc.) and find endless ideas and solutions to inform your garden. From this perspective, let us look to the natural world and see how roots naturally thrive. When plants grow naturally in the earth, they germinate where conditions are favorable to them, and they rarely move from this spot of germination. In most cases, the roots of a tree, shrub, or perennial have endless space to grow, both laterally and vertically, as needed. By comparison, root systems of container-grown plants are deeply affected by factors at both the nursery and the final landscape environment—living for years in circular hot black plastic, being up-potted numerous times, and traveling large distances for sale. Plants do not like to grow in circles. When a plant is grown in a container, it can easily grow “root bound”. When transplanting, loosening and pruning a plant’s roots is essential to avoid compromising the plant’s overall health, stability, and establishment. Skipping this step, for example, can make a tree susceptible to “girdling roots” that circle the main trunk, causing pressure that in turn impedes both nutrient and water transport between leaf and root systems. The discourse on root pruning can get lengthy, intricate, and just dang nerdy. But ultimately, it's a simple concept: lets free up these living plant roots that have labored too long in plastic pots. Annuals and perennials usually live a shorter life in a plastic pot and can benefit from a simple loosening or “breaking up” of the root mass. Shrubs and trees, on the other hand, have lived a long life in those pots, some moving up in size year after year without proper pruning between new homes; and they might require more extensive pruning.

Getting to The Root of Things HOW TO CARE FOR ROOTS WHEN REPLANTING IN THE WINTER

By Jess Cole

he holidays have passed, friends from out of town have come and gone, and I am eager to bask in the cold and sunny moments that a Louisiana winter never fails to offer. These moments, for me, are best found fishing the marsh, romping through the leafless woods, and furiously tearing apart my garden at least twice—the past year’s growing season leaving me filled with new inspiration and an entirely new set of garden sentiments I hope to express and experiment with. Winter, when our plants are dormant, is a most excellent time to plant our perennials and woody plants. Now is the time to plant, divide, and rearrange within your garden. I often find that this surprises people; there tends to be a fear that freezing temps will harm the new plant. This can be the case with tender tropicals, but as far as cold hardy and native plants are concerned, the case is quite the contrary. The plant is now dormant, making it much more durable. Plants, like humans, are animate beings, and there are infinite factors that might affect their vitality throughout the life cycle. When planting, perhaps the most important factor to address is the root system. The loosening of roots should be integral to all container-grown plantings, and it is especially imperative to planting container-grown trees. 48

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How to Prune Your Roots

Scruff up the roots well with a trowel (or even better a sharp hori hori—if you do not already know this Japanese garden spade/knife, you are missing out!). Use hand clippers to prune any circling roots, focusing especially on cutting away the outer circling mass you see when you remove a plant from its container. Otherwise, the plant will continue to grow in a circle instead of extending its roots out to then receive the water and nutrients it needs to live a flourishing life. This method, and other valuable tips on root pruning, can be attributed to the experts at the tree-focused nonprofit Baton Rouge Green. Great info on the matter can also be found online from Dr. Ed Gillman with the University of Florida.

Alternatives to Container Growing

Of course, round plastic pots are not the option for growing plants. I personally utilize two other methods of starting perennials and trees. A brief explanation of these follows: Soil Blocks: I learned this method from revered organic farmer Eliot Coleman, and saw it firsthand with veggie growers in France, where old school gardening traditions remain widely respected and utilized. Soil blocks are squares of compressed soil pressed out of a mold; these squares can replace the use of plastic plug trays or four-inch pots. Plant directly into the soil block, using it as both the soil medium and the plant container. The practice can be traced back a thousand years to Central America; some form of it, historically, has been used in many different cultures. Keep the blocks moist to help hold everything together. Though there is a learning curve, I’ve found it absolutely worth the struggle, and now start all of my veggies, annuals, and a large majority of my perennials this way. Bareroots: This method involves sowing seeds directly into the ground to then be removed (anywhere from six months to six years, depending on your goals) down the road during the plant’s dormant season. Again, when plants are dormant, they are less susceptible to stress. Therefore, transport is easy, as long as the root system is kept slightly moist. Growing trees directly in ground also requires far less water, meaning this type of growing is less susceptible to drought.

Top: Pruned tree root after one year; courtesy of Baton Rouge Green. Bottom: Soil Block Roots; photo by Alex Scurria.

February Plant Spotlight: The Louisiana Trillium Trillium ludovicianum:It's mid-February. Cold, overcast days are frequent. Signs of spring still feel distant. I walk through the woods and spot a flower that somehow surprises me, without fail, every single late winter. The Trilliums are here already; the queen of spring ephemerals; a native woodland wildflower within the lily family. Trilliums are not the easiest plant to cultivate. They require time (years, even), patience, and great observation. Perhaps this is one reason the plant remains so magical? You don’t need it in your home garden after all. Find these beauties peppered across the shady forest floor before they quickly disappear to leave way for Spring’s arrival. Trillium; photo by Nikki Krieg.

Both of these methods are simple and offer us healthier root systems, and therefore, healthier plants. They are practices that have been around, in some form or another, for thousands of years. This is a recurring theme within my garden work. The “cheap and easy” methods are often worth ditching for more thoughtful, old-school ways that have been proven sustainable before “sustainable” became a buzzword.

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FEBRUARY 2024

Culture

50 THE BEAUREGARD TOWN DAYS OF HUEY "PIANO" SMITH

"Roots of Music Sousaphones on Orleans." Artwork by Emilie Rhys, our Perspectives artist this month. Read more about her on page 62.

TRIBUTES

// 5 2 P L A N S F O R A L O U I S I A N A M U S I C M U S E U M

// 5 4 L O U I S I A N A ' S F Y R E F E S T // 5 6 D E A C O N J O H N M O O R E , T H E V O I C E O F T H E J A Z Z F U N E R A L

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Photo by John Wirt, taken in 2000 in Smith's neighborhood of Beauregard Town.

LEGENDS

When "Piano" Smith Came to Baton Rouge

A YEAR SINCE HIS DEATH, WE REMEMBER THE QUIET FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE BLUES LEGEND LEFT NEW ORLEANS

By John Wirt

uey “Piano” Smith is the rock and roll star from New Orleans who lived out of the limelight in Baton Rouge for forty-three years. The songwriter and pianist recorded infectiously fun national and regional hits in the 1950s and ’60s. His best known songs include 1957’s “Rockin' Pneumonia & the Boogie Woogie Flu,” 1958’s “Don’t You Just Know It” and 1959’s “Sea Cruise.” And with his singing, dancing, clowning group, the Clowns, he performed everywhere from Catholic Youth Organization dances in Baton Rouge, to Dick Clark’s top-rated American Bandstand, to the Apollo Theater in New York. In 1980, Smith moved with his wife, Margrette, to Baton Rouge, shortly afterwards retiring from his music career. But the music never disappeared. From the 1950s to the present, major artists recorded and performed his material. That starry list includes Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jason Isbell, Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Sonny and Cher, KC and the Sunshine Band, Boz Scaggs, Chubby Checker, and Deep Purple. Johnny Rivers, the 1960s and ’70s recording star who grew up in Baton Rouge, released the biggest-selling remake of a Smith song: a 1972 take on “Rocking Pneumonia,” which reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100. 50

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Despite Smith’s songwriting talent, pianistic prowess, and chart success, the music business brought him many disappointments—not the least of which was the failure of Ace Records and Ace Publishing to make proper royalty payments for his compositions and recordings. Perhaps his greatest disillusionment came when Ace Records, the Mississippi label he’d signed with in 1956, replaced the original vocals on his song, “Sea Cruise,” with a solo voice track by another Ace artist, Frankie Ford. In the era of teen idols, Ace Records assumed that Ford, a white teenager, would sell millions more records than Smith, a Black artist in his mid-twenties. Smith temporarily left music after his recording career declined in the 1960s, though he returned in the late 1970s, at his manager’s behest, and recorded a new album. He also performed with the reunited Clowns at Tipitina’s and other New Orleans venues, at The Kingfish in Baton Rouge, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Smith’s brief second era in music continued until spring 1981. Leaving the stage and studio again, he made only one more major appearance, in 2000 at the Rhythm and Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Awards gala in New York City. In 1992, Smith, his wife Margrette, and their granddaughter Tyra were living in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard

Town. Rhadd Hunt, a young musician who enjoyed taking early evening walks in summer, encountered the neighborhood’s inconspicuous music star. “When he told me who he was,” Hunt recently recalled, “I was surprised that somebody quite famous was living just around the corner from me.” Hunt surprised Smith when he shared that he was listening to New Orleans singer-pianist Professor Longhair, one of Smith’s inspirations, on his Sony Walkman during his stroll. “Huey,” Hunt remembered, “was like, ‘You know who that is?’” Hunt added that he knew Smith’s own music, and recordings others had made of his songs. “The first time I probably put a name to it,” Hunt recalled, “was Dr. John’s album, Gumbo, where he does a medley of Huey’s songs. I remember thinking ‘these are really great songs.’” One evening as Hunt was driving to a gig with Henry Turner Jr. and Flavor at Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall, he spotted Smith on the sidewalk and stopped. Smith asked Hunt if he knew of the Rose and Thomas Café, the restaurant that shared one side of a single-story brick building with Tabby’s Blues Box. He knew it well. “I ate there all the time,” Hunt said. “I was a starving young musician, but I could get a giant plate of red beans or white beans and a big link of sausage and cornbread and greens for a buck-and-a-half at Mama Rose’s.”

Hunt gave Smith a ride and they had dinner together at the Rose and Thomas Café. Other patrons at the soul food restaurant on North Boulevard included swampblues musicians who played at Tabby’s Blues Box: Silas Hogan, Arthur “Guitar” Kelley, and Moses “Whispering” Smith. “They’d all put out records, but they were just regular folks,” Hunt said. At first glance, Huey Smith was a regular guy, too. “If Huey hadn’t told me who he was, I’d never have known,” Hunt said. “He was just a quiet, mild mannered fellow. Pleasant to chat with and he always waved if I rode by.” After Smith left New Orleans, his eldest child, Acquelyn Smith Donseroux, enjoyed visits with him in Baton Rouge. “My ex-husband is my best friend,” the recently retired nurse said. “He jokes and says, ‘You’re your daddy’s biggest fan.’ So, I started calling myself that.” Donseroux recalled that about thirty years ago, her father refused to autograph his records for one of her hospital operating room colleagues. “My daddy loved me,” she recalled. “He would do anything for me—unless it violated his religion. Daddy said, ‘Ackie, I don’t sign autographs.’ ‘Well, Daddy, why?’ So, he explained his religious reasoning. He didn’t want to be an idol. In his interpretation of the Bible, as a Jehovah’s Witness, signing autographs would mean he thinks he is beyond Jehovah. So, I had to bring the records back (unsigned)—but I’m never embarrassed about what my daddy does or doesn’t do. I love him and I respect his religion.” In December 2022, Donseroux brought the newly-published Japanese edition of Smith’s biography (originally published by LSU Press in 2014) to her father in Baton Rouge. The Japanese-language edition of the book had been a longtime dream for Masahiro Sumori, its Tokyo-based translator. “Huey, despite his great influence, isn’t properly appreciated for what he’s

done,” Sumori writes in his translation’s afterward. “It is true that some of the stories in the book are, contrary to the happy tone of Huey’s music, painful to read. But I want you readers to acknowledge the tough things Huey faced in his life, and then empty your head and enjoy his music once again. Ha, ha, ha, ha! Hey-ey, Oh! The time passes, but the party by the Clowns continues.” On February 13, 2023, a few weeks after his eightyninth birthday, Huey “Piano” Smith died peacefully in his sleep. “He just slept away,” his daughter said. “Daddy was the most positive person I know. He was easy going and funny, and a comedian until the last hours.” Major obituaries appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and Living Blues. National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition" aired a feature, too. And community radio programs devoted to New Orleans music and classic American roots music paid tribute. Nine months later, Smith and Fats Domino were the honorees for Tipitina’s annual Thanksgiving eve tribute concert to classic New Orleans artists. Billed as “A Tribute to the Instigators of Funk and Rock and Roll,” the show featured a huge cast of local all-stars. Donseroux, like Dr. John, a New Orleans music star for whom Smith was a beloved mentor, has no regrets that her father abandoned his musician’s lifestyle. “I had my daddy a long time,” she explained. “That’s priceless. He wasn’t angry at the music world. He wasn’t unhappy. He didn’t care about superficial things.” “We illustrate a person like me as being this caterpillar crawling,” Smith said in an interview in 2000 at his Beauregard Town home. “Well, that

was Huey Smith, the musician. So, now I’m studying the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and—what have you? A beautiful butterfly.” •

John Wirt is the author of the biography Huey “Piano” Smith and the Rocking Pneumonia Blues, published in 2014 by LSU Press.

Image of Huey "Piano" Smith, courtesy of Jonas Bernholm.

Evangeline Parish

Mardi Gras 2024 Mamou Mardi Gras February 10, 11, and 13

Swamp Pop Reunion Dance XVIII February 12

Visit eventbrite.com to purchase tickets. Scan the QR Code or visit evangelineparishtourism.org for more on tourism.. // F E B

MUSEUMS

The Louisiana Music & Heritage Experience

NEW ORLEANS MUSIC ADVOCATES AND THOSE WHO BROUGHT US THE ROCK 'N' ROLL HALL OF FAME HAVE HUGE PLANS FOR A MUSEUM IN NEW ORLEANS

By Alexandra Kennon

azz, sometimes referred to as “America’s classical music,” was born right in New Orleans. Blues, by most accounts, sprung up nearby—and from it sprouted Baton Rouge’s particular brand of “swamp blues”. Further Southwest, Louisiana French music, zydeco, and swamp pop emerged; all indigenous to Louisiana, too. Even Shreveport has a too-often neglected strain of country, gospel, and big band music history. Louisiana’s cultural capital is largely derived from the wide breadth of music born from its swamps, prairies, and city centers. So, why don’t we have a museum dedicated to the many stories of Louisiana’s music? It’s a question that New Orleans entrepreneur and social activist Chris Beary has wondered about for a long time. Now, he’s doing something about it, with plans barreling ahead to launch The Louisiana

Music & Heritage Experience—a comprehensive, modern museum where exhibitions and programming will aim to tell the stories of the state’s music, educating visitors and championing the many musical legacies born in the Bayou State. “There are close to fifty music museums in America now, and the most conspicuous place that does not have one is New Orleans,” said curator of The Louisiana Music & Heritage Experience Bob Santelli. “And if you consider the state of Louisiana being one of the most musically diverse and musically important states in the union, along with Mississippi, it's hard to believe that there isn't a major museum that ties in all the music forms, that tells the very comprehensive story that involves religion, and food, and language, etc., into this great music story.” In true New Orleans fashion, the idea for the Experience came to Beary

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as a result of his Mardi Gras sub-krewe, the Funky Tucks. During the Krewe of Tucks Parade, the Funky Tucks rolls The Funky Uncle Lounge, a rolling soundstage with studio-quality live music, performed from a parade float. When the COVID pandemic shut down New Orleans’s live music scene in March of 2020, Beary and the Funky Tucks pivoted their parade concept to produce live music streams, where local artists would perform hour-long music sets, followed by twenty-minute interviews. The primary goal was to raise money to pay musicians while gig work was scarce. And over the course of 113 shows, The Funky Uncle raised nearly a million dollars, helping over 900 musicians pay their bills and buy groceries in the process. But something else unexpected happened: while listening to the interviews, Beary realized that most local musicians have

incredible stories that seldom make it to their audiences. He was inspired to harness those stories, and help share them with the world. “It really gave me a sense of the depth of commitment that a lot of musicians have to their history,” said Beary, who is now serving as the Louisiana Music & Heritage Experience developer and board director. “That's when the light went off. I was like, ‘Wow, we have a treasure here that we need to take, and we need to really put this treasure somewhere in a way that preserves it so that we can inspire the future. That's kind of how the seed germinated. And I started talking to anybody who would listen.” Consequently, the Board of Directors reflects an impressive list of Louisiana musicians and music advocates, including Irma Thomas, Adonis Rose, and Sean Ardoin. Among those to whom Beary evangelized was Reid Wick, the Recording Academy’s New Orleans-based Membership & Industry Relations representative, who is now a developer of the project as well as board vice chair. Reid connected Beary with Terry Stewart, the former president and CEO of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, who excitedly joined the project as CEO of the Louisiana Music & Heritage Experience. “This is not just a historical entity, and something that preserves this music—it is a huge economic driver for the city and for the state,” Stewart said, pointing out

Louisiana schools and universities, she plans to create a statewide Teacher Advisory Board to help guide The Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience’s educational efforts. Besides the displays in the museum itself, plans include extensive digital exhibitions and online educational components, Museum rendering by architects EskewDumezRipple making the resources more accourtesy of Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience. cessible to those outside New Orleans. that the tourism hub of New Orleans “We want the state legislators, civic made perfect sense not only to maxi- leaders, teachers, parents, pastors to unmize the economic impact of the project, derstand that we're educationally driven, which will operate as a 501c3 nonprofit that this is not a something that is simply and educational institution, but the cul- a celebration of music, it is an opportunitural impact, too. “It's just so legitimate to ty to show how music, which is our greathave it right here in this town, which is, est national resource, it is the creator of again, the place that musically changed our national identity more than anything the world, with Congo Square and ev- else in culture. [We want them to undererything else. So there are both economic stand] how this can impact you, and how and cultural and historic and artistic rea- this can be brought into your community sons why it should be here.” to better serve it,” Santelli said. “And so Another major player in the project digital displays, streaming programs, usis curator Bob Santelli, who in addi- ing technology to get our points across is tion to authoring over a dozen books something we're going to be very bullish about American music, was one of the on, and are starting to do that right now.” founding curators of the Rock & Roll According to Beary, every dollar inHall of Fame and Museum. He is also vested into the massive project will return the founder of the Grammy Museums as a dollar in economic development each in Mississippi, Los Angeles, and New year moving into the future. He points Jersey. Santelli’s extensive background to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which studying music and curating experienc- cost around $92 million to build in the es around it makes him highly qualified early ‘90s, and now contributes over for the job, but he admits that weaving $200 million to the economy each year. all of Louisiana’s complex music history “So it's a phenomenal opportunity for us into a narrative is a task of monumental to get a world-class facility, a big economproportions. ic boon, bring recognition to what we're “This is, without a doubt, the most doing, and what we have done. And then complicated, most challenging muse- also inspire the future,” Beary said. “I um to put together. I've done nine of like to say preserve, educate, and inspire. these in my career, and not one comes That's kind of our mission.” close to the complexity and challengOf course, a mission that powerful es that this brings,” Santelli said. “Not is no small undertaking. The 120,000 only are there so many different mu- square-foot facility, which, in addition to sic forms, that weave in and out of each interactive, multimedia exhibitions, will other, but more than any other place in include performance venues and educaAmerica, you’ve got to tell the story of tional components, is estimated to cost food, you have to tell the story of religion, around $150 million to complete. you have to tell a story of geography and “We know we can have that economthe Mississippi River, you must tell the ic impact, just like the Rock & Roll Hall story of the difference between urban of Fame had,” Beary said. “We will be an and rural, you need to tell the story of institution on par with that. It also brings language.” an elevating of the level of music quality, Since educational initiatives and re- performance, treatment of musicians— sources are such an important part of that we don't have in the Louisiana area, the Experience, Beary has also brought that really supports musicians as individon Jan Jorgensen as project manager and uals and their future.” • education specialist. Besides multiple decades of teaching experience, Jorgensen Learn more about the contributed to developing the educaLouisiana Music and Heritage tional components of multiple Grammy Experience at lmhe.live. Museums. Acting as the “educational liaison” between the Experience and

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HISTORY

Before Fyre Fest, There was "The Celebration of Life" ALL THAT WENT WRONG WITH LOUISIANA'S DISASTROUS 1971 MUSIC FESTIVAL

By Kara Bachman

any remember the scandal of the much-publicized, 2017 Fyre Festival that took place on Great Exuma Island; its spectacular failure illustrated how mismanagement can spell a multi-million-dollar disaster. Fewer recall that back in June of 1971, alongside the banks of the Atchafalaya River, 60,000 festival-goers experienced a similar fiasco. Promotion for the “Celebration of Life” festival originally promised a lineup featuring the big name performers of the day: Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, The Beach Boys, and more. What took place onsite, however—in the undeveloped fields of the unincorporated community of McCrea, located about an hour’s drive north of Baton Rouge—was something else entirely. The festival made national headlines that included reports of death by drowning and typhoid infections, and its cautionary tale is an inter-

esting tidbit from South Louisiana’s cultural history. In 2013, documentary filmmakers Scott Caro and Nick Brilleaux chronicled it all as part of their graduate studies at Southeastern Louisiana University. Their film, McCrea: 1971, is perhaps the most comprehensive record of the mess. According to Caro, Celebration of Life was an effort to recreate the success of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. “Everybody was kinda trying to do their version of Woodstock,” Caro said, “to capture that magic … large scale rock festivals were kind of a new thing.” Celebration of Life wasn’t alone. “There were a couple of other festivals that went bad,” Caro added. “It was a bad run.” He cited similar Woodstock-esque concerts with major issues, including the violent 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival, for which Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club members were hired as stage security; when a frustrated, stage-climb-

ing festival-goer pulled out a gun, Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro stabbed him to death. Celebration of Life’s first mistake was no doubt its long duration of eight days, especially as a first-time event. “Eight days is ridiculous, that is too much,” said Caro. Another major issue was the fact that organizers started selling tickets nationwide before the location was naileddown—resulting in two or three relocations before they landed on McCrea. When the date of the event changed, though, “the scheduled acts just went up in smoke,” according to Caro. When time came for the actual festival to take place, the extremely muddy grounds were plagued with lack of food and clean drinking water, clashes with police, violence, and safety concerns. There were injuries, illnesses, and two drownings that occurred in the adjacent Atchafalaya. Organizers had not been adequately prepared for the conditions

in an underdeveloped corner of the Deep South, nor had they managed to get adequate cooperation from local law enforcement. Preparation and an understanding of your location are key to a successful event on this scale, Caro said, which is what differentiates the McCrea disaster from most well-run events in Louisiana today. “The fact that you’re gonna be dealing with, for instance, heat stroke victims … and bad mosquitoes. As far as South Louisiana goes, those are your biggest problems. What Jazz Fest and Essence Fest are doing right is they have the locations down,” Caro said. “That’s something they’re doing right.” Another annual event that is by all indications “doing it right” is the Baton Rouge Blues Festival. Baton Rouge Blues Festival & Foundation Executive Director Lauren Lambert-Tompkins adeptly summarized what McCrea organizers got wrong. “I think

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a clear lesson learned is to focus on basic human needs,” she said. “Festivals have to mimic a town, including all public services that a town provides its citizens. “It's easy to focus on the music and think everything will fall into place,” she continued, “but the environment you're providing to your attendees has to be a major part of your planning. Even if the headlining talent had shown up to the Celebration of Life, the attendees still would have been miserable in the festival's subpar conditions.” A similar recent example is last year’s Burning Man Festival, wherein attendees were trapped by flooded roads for several days at the isolated site in the Nevada desert. It’s clear that extensive pre-planning for such weather conditions is vital. “I tend to over-prepare and consider the worst possible scenario, which makes me super fun in meetings,” Lambert-Tompkins joked, “but if it's even a little possible that you'll get stranded in a muddy desert, maybe order more supplies than you think you'll need. Festivals that are on a literal or figurative island are exponentially more diﬃcult, because you're not benefiting off of existing infrastructure. You can't really get trapped at Blues Fest because we're in the middle of downtown Baton Rouge.” She added it’s wise to be nimble and able to “adjust the experience based on your attendees’ tendencies.” “Something as simple as bathroom placement may not seem like a huge

problem, until you hear someone say, ‘it was great music, but I had to walk a mile to use the bathroom.’ We're constantly trying to fix those ‘buts.’” Successful execution of such large-scale cultural events has resulted in their increased importance as part of Louisiana

tourism and culture. “Our economy in Louisiana … it is bolstered by these large events,” said Caro. Lambert-Tompkins described why she thinks Louisiana, which has come a long way since the McCrea fiasco, now enjoys such a high reputation as a site for

music festivals: “I think it stems from pride and sentimentality. Music is at the core of Louisiana's culture, and our artistic output is something to brag about. Songs are like recipes in our culture— they're passed down through generations, and no one sings it like grandma can.” •

You can find Caro and Brilleaux's documentary on the "Celebration of Life" Festival, McCrea1971 at mccrea1971.com. Image courtesy of Nick Brilleaux.

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HOW SWEET THE SOUND

The Funeral Singer

A NEW ORLEANS MUSIC STORY, TOLD THROUGH THE CAREER OF JOHN "DEACON" MOORE

By Cyril E. Vetter

he ragged Wurlitzer speaker mounted high above the blackboard in the seventh grade classroom at New Orleans's Corpus Christi Elementary School crackled to life, “John Moore please report to the choir loft.” Static. “John Moore please report to the choir loft.” John Moore closed his catechism, marched down the hallway and across the school yard to the church entrance. As he passed the depiction of Jesus’s suffering on the Stations of the Cross, he felt a combination of religious, social, and performance pressure. He thought: “They’re gonna make me sing ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Ave Maria’ in Latin.” Those were his go-to funeral songs. Now Moore is eighty-two, and even after the enormous social, cultural, and musical changes endured by his hometown of New Orleans and the country writ large, they still are. Since the middle of the twentieth century, Moore, affectionately known as “Deacon John,” has lived a rather typical atypical life as, in his words, “a Creole of color, socialized as a Negro.” Moore grew up on one side of a shotgun duplex with his parents and twelve siblings during the 1940s and ‘50s. His mother, Augustine Boudreaux, was a classically-trained pianist who wanted her musically-inclined children to be trained in the classical discipline. Moore's family, much like other large musical families in New Orleans at the time—like the Bouttés, the Batistes, the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Lasties, the Jordans, and others— shared and exchanged knowledge and expertise on piano, brass, reeds, vocals, percussion, just about anything that made music. From fathers and sons to mothers and daughters, to aunts and uncles and cousins extended, expertise, facility and the admonition to practice wound through these large family relations, a constant energy flowing through the culture. Moore’s eldest sister played viola and his brothers were classical guitarists. As for Moore himself—his mother recognized his vocal talents early on. He started taking voice lessons at a young age and became a soprano in the Corpus Christi Catholic Church choir. 56

Photo by Philip Gould, courtesy of Cyril Vetter.

The church, home of the large Creole Catholic community in New Orleans, was a comfortable gathering place for people of color in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. Besides the classical music loved by his mother and the liturgical music he performed for his community, Moore was an early fan of R&B and listened to the “race music” stations like WLAC in Nashville and XERF in Del Rio, Texas on his crystal radio with his head under the covers “so my

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Mama couldn’t hear me”. By middle school, in addition to singing in the choir, Moore was learning to play the guitar as the frontman for his R&B band, the Rockettes. New Orleans is well known as the so-called “Cradle of Jazz,” but the city’s wildly diverse conglomeration of cultures also contributed the first spark of this other genre of American popular music—the seminal expressions of what would later evolve into Rock and Roll. Here is where

icons like Fats Domino, Little Richard, Roy Brown, Lloyd Price, and others made their first records. There were the drummers—Earl Palmer, Charles “Hungry” Williams, Joseph “Smokey” Johnson—and the horn players: Herb Hardesty, Lee Allen, and Alvin Owen "Red" Tyler. And of course there were the piano players: Domino, Allen Toussaint, James Booker, Mac Rebennack—better known as "Dr. John", Huey "Piano" Smith, and Henry Roeland Byrd— better known as Professor Longhair. These innovative players established the piano as the dominant instrument in the New Orleans version of primordial rock music. The rolling left-hand bottom at first, and the staccato right-hand counterpoint, provided the distinguishing sound on those records—in contrast to the electric guitar, which would develop into its loud and sometime jarring prominence later in the timeline. Domino, with his lifelong producing partner Dave Bartholomew, adapted and used the “junker blues” left-handed piano pattern of Champion Jack Dupree in his first hit, “The Fat Man.” That record, and many of the other recordings of the era, was produced by Cosimo Matassa—first at his J&M Studio on Rampart Street (now with an historic place designation) and later at “Cosmo’s” on Governor Nicholls Street, a place as holy as the Vatican in New Orleans music lore. Moore found his way to Matassa’s studio by way of Allen Toussaint, who discovered him playing with his band The Ivories at the legendary Dew Drop Inn. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, Moore would work as a session player at the French Quarter studio, playing guitar on records of R&B stars the likes of Irma Thomas, the Neville Brothers, Lee Dorsey, and Ernie K-Do. In a great and possibly apocryphal song origin story, Moore was at Toussaint’s house when Chris Kenner dropped in and sang an a cappella version of “Land of 1000 Dances,” which he claimed to have written on a Leidenheimer French bread wrapper on the way over. Toussaint recorded it on a reel-to-reel tape machine above his upright piano. He polished it that night and brought Kenner to cut it at Cosimo’s the next day.

Over the course of his long career, Moore has become a beloved figure on the Crescent City Music scene, performing at weddings, debutante balls, Carnival, and for over fifty years at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He’s played at venues up and down the Chitlin’ Circuit, and even at the White House. In 2000, he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. And still to this day, when someone dies, especially members of the tightly-knit Creole musical community of the Crescent City, Moore and his version of “Ave Maria” have become a hallmark of New Orleans memorial service traditions at churches, banquet halls, theaters, cemeteries, and funeral home chapels. He was a major part of the 2015 Orpheum Theater funeral of music ambassador Allen Toussaint, who played such a large part in advancing Moore’s career, and the 2018 Jazz Fest memorial for Fats Domino. In the summer of 2019, he performed one of The Queen of Creole Cuisine’s favorite songs to bid her adieu. For Moore and his community, after all, Dooky Chase’s was a social touchstone. Dooky, a musician himself, managed his famous restaurant and occasionally tended bar, and his wife Leah—who became a New Orleans icon herself—helmed the kitchen. Moore recalls that “Dooky would cash musician’s checks after a gig because he knew they would use the cash to buy something to bring home to their wives or girlfriends for being out so late. Most of the time that was a fried shrimp, fried oyster, or roast beef po-boy, and they called it ‘the peacemaker’.” Famously, Dooky Chase’s was an important site of meetings and planning during the Civil Rights era, hosting the likes of Martin Luther King while he was organizing peaceful protests to end segregation. Moore smiles when recalling Leah Chase’s funeral, “She wanted me to sing her favorite song, ‘Peace In The Valley’ and the version she liked was sung by Elvis Presley.” Deacon honored her request, but with a version closer to Sam Cooke’s. Moore also sang at the 2003 funeral service of blues titan Earl King at the stately Gallier Hall on St. Charles Ave. King was one of the great songwriters of the era and his songs were born of observation. Sometimes King would hang out at Dorothy’s Steakhouse, next door to the Dew Drop Inn, and write about the sophisticates as well as the players who frequented both establishments. These characters would be the inspiration for Wilson Turbinton’s “Teasin’ You.” Turbinton, who performed as Willie Tee, collaborated with Wardell Quezergue, the A-list arranger for New Orleans’s most popular sessions, called the "Creole Beethoven".

Quezergue wrote his horn charts using a tuning fork. He is best known for arranging New Orleans classics like “Teasin’ You” and “Big Chief.” But, as an avid member of the Creole Catholic community, he was most proud of his arrangements for a Catholic High Mass performed at St. Louis Cathedral. The program for Quezergue’s funeral had an entry: Vocal performed by Deacon John Moore. In addition, Moore was a performer at the 2008 funeral of Chuck Carbo. Carbo had a magnificent baritone and was known for the 1950s hit, “Bells in My Heart.” He was born in an area of town called Zion City near Washington and Broad where the gospel group, the Zion Harmonizers, originated and got their name. Moore sang “Any Day Now,” a traditional Negro spiritual, at the funerals of Carbo and the original members of the Zion Harmonizers, including its founder, Sherman Washington, Jr. who died in 2011. There was no singing at the 2019 memorial service for Art Neville, patriarch of the famous Neville family. But Moore was one of several speakers. Art Neville’s late 1950s recording of “Cha Dooky-Doo” had the classic blues inflected rhythm pattern unique to New Orleans. Moore said that the guitar solo was so impactful on his own guitar playing that he asked Art Neville who played it. Neville told him that Walter “Papoose” Nelson played it after he poked a hole in the amp speaker with a butter knife to create a one of the earliest “fuzztone” distortions. At first blush, the demands of a funeral singer might seem off-putting or depressing or even a recognition of the singer’s own mortality. But for Deacon John Moore, singing at funerals has always been a way to comfort people in time of sorrow while celebrating his own longevity, talent, and passion for music. In addition to the New Orleans royalty, Moore has sung at the services of many other personal friends, relatives, fans, and people he didn’t even know—but whose families knew him. Even now, at age eighty-two, he is still very much in demand and his participation is a moving gift with which to gracefully and soulfully depart this dimension. (You can find an exhaustive list of the individuals Moore has sent off at countryroadsmag.com.) •

Look for our MARCH INTO THE GREAT OUTDOORS ISSUE on stands next month!

In 2003, author Cyril Vetter and his daughter, Baton Rouge attorney Gabrielle Vetter, wrote and produced Deacon John's Jump Blues, a critically acclaimed and awardwinning music CD, concert video and documentary film. A limited edition vinyl LP is currently in production and will be released this year. // F E B

Escapes

F E B R U A RY 2 0 24

58 JOURNEY TO THE

HEART OF THE

"THE

BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICAN

ON THE BLUES TRAIL

MUSIC"

•

F R O N T R O W S E AT S

A "Music City" in the Delta

CLEVELAND, MISSISSIPPI REENVISIONS ITSELF AS A LAUNCHPAD FOR NEW ARTISTS AND A HOTBED OF MUSICAL EXPERIENCES

he story of Cleveland, Mississippi is the story of many a small farm community. Over the last century, as agriculture became more mechanized, small family farms went under and mega farming conglomerates took over the landscape. Bigbox stores drove out Ma and Pa businesses and the charming, historic downtown was boarded up. Young people fled for anywhere-but-here, the population aged. What had once been a unique and thriving farm community was becoming just one more struggling, drab small American town. That’s when the story shifts, though, as people like Cleveland’s Music Ambassador Tricia Walker said: “Not on our watch”. In early 2020, Walker and others took steps to breathe life back into the town through one of its most spirited natural resources: music. Today, this slice of the Mississippi Delta is a vibrant music city that celebrates its history and nurtures its musical talent reminiscent of larger cities like New Orleans and Austin. The message Walker and others hope to convey is, “In this day of internet and technology, you don’t have to go to Los Angeles or Nashville to launch a successful music career. You can stay in the place you love, surrounded by people you love, and find success— and an audience for your music.”

By Mimi Greenwood Knight

The Avett Brothers performing at the Bologna Arts Center at Delta State University in Cleveland. Photos courtesy of Visit Cleveland.

Deep Roots Initiative

Walker herself understands the anywhere-but-here mentality. She fled her own hometown as a young woman, headed for the bright lights of Nashville, where she spent decades performing with top-name musicians, developed lifelong friendships and partnerships, and even earned a Grammy for one of the songs she penned. Now in her sixties, she’s doing everything she can to support up-and-coming singers, songwriters, and musicians, so they might have their own robust music careers without having to leave the Mississippi Delta. Her organizations Deep Roots and Big Front Porch Productions are not only taking young musicians in hand and walking them through the business side of the industry, but offering them ample opportunities to hone their craft right here in Mississippi. “The beauty of a place like Nashville or New Orleans is the way they value and support their musicians,” Walker said. “I wondered what we could do if we offered that same kind of support to our musicians here. Delta State University has amazing professors who came out of the music business and have been there, done that.” Walker began by collaborating with some of those seasoned professors to see how they might get such a campaign off the ground, then approached city officials and requested funding to pay local musicians to offer free live music five nights a week somewhere in or around Cleveland. Next, she liaised with local businesses to secure venues and began promoting the shows. Now on any given night, you can pop into a restaurant, the historic Ellis Theater, or during milder weather, bring your beach chairs and ice chest to an outdoor venue to enjoy musical talent you'd expect to hear only in a large city. Audiences at the shows range from young families with dancing toddlers to business-suited executives, to retirees, to students from nearby Delta State. The music itself usually falls under the umbrella of "roots music" which might include jazz, blues, R&B, soul, zydeco, or any of the South's indigenous genres. Top: The Grammy Museum Mississippi pays homage to past Grammy winners with interactive displays covering all music genres, as well as films, theatrical presentations, music education programs, and a state-of-the-art soundstage and studio. Bottom: Jason Isbell performing at the Bologna Arts Center at Delta State University. 58

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A Blues Pilgrimage

Even before the city’s current tourism initiatives, Cleveland was already hallowed ground to blues devotees. Just four miles outside of town is Dockery Farms, where revered bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, "Son" House, “Pops" Staples, and Howlin' Wolf got their start. The influence of Dockery Farms goes back to just after the Civil War, when Will Dockery bought 28,000 acres and turned it into a cotton plantation. While most plantations forbade alcohol, Dockery set up what was called a “frolic house” on his property—which quickly gained a reputation throughout the Delta for its musical performances. Cleveland Tourism Director Sean Johnson likes to take his guitar up to Dockery Farms to play and wax poetic about the environment that, historically, was ripe for creating a new musical artform. “When Will Dockery converted this land from timber to cotton, he didn’t chop down the trees, but set them on fire to slowly kill them,” Johnson said. “Imagine tens of thousands of acres of skeletal trees slowly burning. Delta sunsets are like ocean sunsets because it’s so flat here. It’s one hundred degrees and ninety percent humidity. The air is perpetually filled with smoke. The sun’s just setting and the first cords of the blues are being played. When you visit this place, you can almost hear the music.” There are over fifty other historic blues sites within an hour’s drive of Cleveland including, The B.B. King Museum in Indianola, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, and just outside of town the “crossroads” where famed bluesman, Robert Johnson, was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Dockery Farms, on the outskirts of Cleveland, is one of the Delta's most historically significant live music sites.

Grammy Museum

It’s natural that Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S. and host of the annual the Grammy Awards, would be the site of the Grammy Museum. But did you know Cleveland, Mississippi is home to a sister museum, The Grammy Museum Mississippi? That might seem incongruous until you consider that Mississippi has produced more Grammy winners per capita than any other state, notably including B.B. King with his fifteen Grammys, Muddy Waters with six, and Elvis Presley with three. Mississippians with Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards include Elvis, Robert Johnson, Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Pinetop Perkins, and Hank Jones, not to mention groups with Mississippi-born members such as the Allman Brothers Band, Blind Boys of Alabama, Earth Wind & Fire, the Staple Singers, and the Temptations. The 28,000-square-foot Grammy Museum Mississippi pays homage to these and other Grammy winners with interactive displays covering all music genres—from opera to funk—and outfits worn by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Charli XCX, and more. The museum also includes films, theatrical presentations, music education programs, and a state-of-the-art soundstage and studio.

Delta State University

Another music-centric aspect of Cleveland is Delta State University, which through its Delta Music Institute offers students education in the technological, creative, and business areas of the entertainment industry. The University also operates The Bologna Performing Arts Center, bringing world-class entertainment, including Broadway shows, to Cleveland. In addition, Delta State also operates tourist-worthy destinations including the Wiley Planetarium, The Hazel and Jimmy Sanders Sculpture Garden, and the “Boo” Ferris Museum, which chronicles the story of this Delta native son and his fabled Boston Red Sox career. Then, there are the sculptures. Cleveland boasts “the most sculpture pieces of any small town in the South”. The perfect base camp for your music exploration is Cotton House. Situated on Cotton Row in the heart of Cleveland’s walkable downtown and surrounded by shops, boutiques, and galleries, the boutique hotel includes farm-to-table cuisine at its Delta Meat Market and a rooftop bar, Bar Fontaine. If music is a consideration when you plan your next trip, consider New York, Austin, Las Vegas, New Orleans, or Chicago. But don’t dismiss Cleveland, the little Delta town at the heart of the state that calls itself “The Birthplace of America’s Music”.

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Directory of Merchants Akers, LA Middendorf ’s

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Slidell, LA Middendorf ’s St. Francisville, LA Cotton Exchange Cross Quilter Poppin’ Up Plants The Conundrum The Magnolia Cafe The Myrtles Town of St. Francisville West Feliciana Historical Society West Feliciana Parish Tourism Commission Ville Platte, LA Evangeline Parish Tourist Commission

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Sponsored by Tangipahoa Parish Tourism P E R S P E C T I V E S : I M A G E S O F O U R S TAT E

Art of Improvisation

IN HER CHOSEN HOME, LIVE PORTRAIT ARTIST EMILIE RHYS SEES THINGS AS THEY ARE By Sophie Nau

“Jon Batiste,” Image courtesy of Emilie Rhys.

f you frequent Palm Court Jazz Café, Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, or Bayou Bar, chances are you’ve noticed a woman with a sketchbook at one of the htables, raplidly drawing the performers onstage. That artist is Emilie Rhys, whose live portraiture has captured the spirit of New Orleans music again and again since a fateful day in 2011, when she sat down in Preservation Hall beneath the portraits on the wall, many of them painted by her late father Noel Rockmore, and began drawing. She’s filled over one hundred sketchbooks with vignettes of New Orleans’ musical life since. Rhys—who was born in New York and spent most of her childhood in Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California—grew up without knowing her father, who left the family when she was almost two years old. After meeting him for the first time at age nineteen in 1976, the next year she decided to move in with him in New Orleans—the artist’s city. She was already an artist in her own right, working with live models frequently. But Jackson Square was where her “real portraiture training ground was,” Rhys said. As a “Fence Artist,” she offered passerby full-color pastel portraits, drawn from life. “Back then, there [was] a goodly number of quality portraitists on the Square, and people came from throughout the South to get a portrait done,” she said. Her father wasn’t easy to live with, but being in the city granted her access to its thriving art scene. She stayed for a spell at the “Skyscraper building” at 638

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Royal Street with Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb, friend and muse of Rhys’s father and many other artists (she’s the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “Gypsy Lou”). “She asked me to paint something there,” Rhys said. “Perhaps she thought I might paint something decorative, I don’t know, but I ended up creating a rather epic painting, titled 'The Skyscraper Mural’.” Rhys parted ways with her father after ten months, and moved on to New York, Paris, back to New York, and finally Santa Fe, where she found the first inspiration for her live sketching, drawing musicians like Bill and Bonnie Hearne. In 2001, a creative drought descended, plaguing Rhys for almost a decade. Her ultimate return to New Orleans was seemingly heralded by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, when they made a tour stop in Santa Fe in 2011. At the show, the band began a second line through the crowd, which Rhys and husband John Heller recognized all too well. Before they knew it, the couple ended up on stage with the band, in front of an audience of local friends clapping along to the music. In a sort of epiphany, Rhys suddenly sensed that this was her future, with the New Orleans musicians on stage, and her time in Santa Fe was her past. After the show, Ben Jaffe, the son of Preservation Hall founders Allan and Sandra Jaffe and the current Creative Director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, said the words that sealed the deal: “You’re family. Come to New Orleans. Come to the Hall.”

Rhys has called New Orleans her home base since 2012, where she continues to experiment with style and learn from the musicians she renders. “Good musicians will always find ways to improvise,” Rhys told me. She follows suit. Her subjects are playing a live show, not sitting for a portrait: they move, sweat, switch soloists. Her view gets blocked, the image she’s capturing ends. And so she moves on as well. When the only view she has of a trumpet player behind his instrument is “a sliver of their cheek,” she has to seek out new perspectives. Even when artists sit for oil painting portraits in her studio, she doesn’t require them to hold one pose. “I don’t like prescribed times,” she said, and so she and her subject move and “improvise” together. Rhys and her father reunited before his death in 1995, and repaired their relationship. On the brink of the pandemic, an exhibit showcasing both Rhys’s and Rockwell’s work opened at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. It ran from January 30, 2020 to November 7, 2021 and is now catalogued in the book New Orleans Music Observed: The Art of Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys. You can find Rhys’s studio at 1036 Royal, filled with canvases depicting so many of the creatives who make up the city’s musical world just outside. •

See more of Rhys’s work at scenebyrhys.com or visit her gallery in person at 1036 Royal Street, open seven days a week by appointment.

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TASTING HISTORY by Max Miller

"EXPLORE the PAST THROUGH 4,000 YEARS of RECIPES"

KICKOFF PARTY Friday, March 8 • 5-7 p.m. Main Library at Goodwood Live Music • Free Food • Children's Activities Edible Book Festival • Community Organizations

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