NICK SPITZER of American Routes talks back

BY STEVE HOCHMAN

Nick Spitzer is rarely at a loss for words. His conversational ease and deep knowledge of music across a wide spectrum have been at the core of American Routes, the New Orleans-based and widely syndicated public radio show he’s produced and hosted since 1999, on which he’s talked with musical artists both obscure and famous from blues, country, folk and much more, eliciting stories and insights far beyond the common canon.

In this conversation with OffBeat, he readily referred to himself as “loquacious” (after giving a colorfully detailed account of his personal history in radio and with this show). But that wasn’t the case following a call he got at his home he shares with his wife and young son in February from Louisiana’s U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy. The politician was letting Spitzer know that he had been named one of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Heritage Fellows. Per the NEA, the “lifetime honorific celebrates artists and culture bearers,” with Spitzer specifically getting the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship “in recognition of an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.”

“I didn’t talk for three hours,” Spitzer says of the time after the call ended. “My wife kept saying, ‘Nick, are you okay with this?’”

Of course, during the call, he was his usual self, turning things around a bit and puncturing any sense of formality after the Senator read his clearly scripted congratulations.

“He said, ‘Well, what do you have to say, Dr. Spitzer?’” the honoree says, speaking from his office and studio on the Tulane campus, home to the show since 2008, where he also serves as professor of anthropology. “I said, ‘Well, Senator Cassidy, I want to thank you for being the more moderate of our two senators that called me.’ I thought it was funny. And he laughed and I said, ‘You have a good sense of humor.’ He said, ‘I have to in my business.’ I said, ‘You know, mine too.’”

It’s served him well through decades in and around radio, starting at college at the University of Pennsylvania and continuing in commercial stations in Philly and Austin, where he did his grad work in anthropology, focusing on Louisiana culture. (His PhD thesis was titled “Zydeco and Mardi Gras: Creole Identity and Performance Genres in Rural Louisiana”). Working for the state out of Baton Rouge, and then the Smithsonian out of Washington and a couple of years at a Santa Fe think tank, he returned to radio, settling in New Orleans where he established American Routes.

While he features music and musicians from a vast spectrum of North American cultures and traditions, his show at the core celebrates the city that has been his home now since 1997. Each edition at top has him declaring: “This is American Routes from New Orleans.”

How many times have you said that phrase? Well, I’ve done a little over 650 shows, right? I think we started saying “from New Orleans” right around 2000 and then Katrina really bonded us much more to the cityscape and all the recovery efforts. We say it at the top of each hour. So, it’s thousands of times with repeats. We never don’t say it anymore. It’s important. It means more to say “from New Orleans” than it would to say from anywhere else.

Where you are is very much part of the show’s character. It’s been that way from the start. I moved back to Louisiana to start Routes in 1997. I was affiliated with the University of New Orleans, which was the only school that would accept something sort of entrepreneurial meets cultural. They made it doable and set us up in the French Quarter. Our first set of studios were at 1118 Royal Street. It had been a water bottling plant, right next to Gallier House. So, we had some prominence in the French Quarter and then we were near the House of Blues. I mean, someone like Norah Jones could show up in sneakers and a tank top and say, ‘Oh, I had a lovely walk through the French Quarter.’ I interviewed so many people in that little room over the years, from [Arhoolie Records founder] Chris Strachwitz to [Elvis Presley’s guitarist] James Burton, Tremé Brass—everybody that could come to the French Quarter that was in town, either from town or elsewhere. And we always had a Mardi Gras party there on Royal Street. There will always be street parades going by. We did interviews with singing garbage men that did call and response down the street. We’ve always done little features on working people that are not known, but who are brilliant in their own realms.

You did come close to leaving New Orleans and moving the show elsewhere once, right? I finally got burned out at UNO and I was ready to leave. I had all these other offers out of state. But in the end Tulane made me a deal and I’ve been here since 2008. Harry Shearer, well, he said this to me and others. I’d gone to Chapel Hill [after the 2005 flood], which is a lovely community, great public radio. But it always felt to me when I was there, when I’d hear the political this or that—I said the politics were a granola fishbowl. And Harry said, “New Orleans broke is better than anywhere else fixed.”

Who has grabbed you in New Orleans lately? I’ve become a big fan of Detroit Brooks. I’d seen him. He was in Michael White’s band and then he was with Donald Harrison Jr. We had him on live from the New Orleans Jazz Museum. I was impressed that he could play contemporary jazz on guitar and trad on the banjo. He showed up in three bands and I said, “What can’t you do?” He brought in these total aces, the real regular working guys. It was such a great set. They played a little schmaltzy, “Wonderful World” and stuff like that. They played some Danny Barker.

It feels as if your anthropology career is a big part of your radio career, the stories being as important as the music, ways to connect people and traditions. Radio, with folklore, oral tradition, the mic just disappears. You’re having a conversation with somebody. For me, personally, I could tap into radio’s long history where people don’t have to go to the same bingo parlor to hear one another’s music in the South, I mean, White people could her the blues and Black people could hear country on the Opry. Ray Charles, Rev. [Al] Green and Rufus Thomas, all separately told me two things: How much they loved Elvis, which was not the common thinking of the time, and how much