New Orleans Rhythm and Blues After Katrina

Apart from a small handful of people today whose activities during an earlier musical era had catapulted them into the status of international celebrities—say, Dr John, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint or Irma Thomas—no one playing rhythm and blues (R&B) music in New Orleans these days entertains reasonable expectations about achieving fame and fortune by spearheading a revival of this music. Too many things have changed since the halcyon days of the city’s R&B explosion in the two decades following the Second World War—mass musical tastes, the appearance of multiple niche-music cultures, the demographics of the city itself—to seriously allow for the supposition that history is somehow poised to repeat itself. To be sure, there are R&B musicians in the Crescent City who have an international audience that they reach by touring, over the radio waves and with their recordings. Many of them appear in this book. But while they are able to pursue successful careers in music, that pursuit is most unlikely to result in stardom. Nonetheless, they remain “in that number”, performing the music first created by their legendary forebears, doing more than any other collection of individuals on the planet to keep alive a storied and profoundly influential musical tradition, introducing it to at least some members of a younger generation.

I got into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame as its youngest member. That makes me proud. But the highlight of my career, you know, was being in the Olympia Brass Band when you got your red pants. And I got my red pants with my yellow stripe.—Glen David Andrews

The title of this chapter refers to a group of people distinguished from their counterparts elsewhere by both a shared, self-referential narrative and an attendant set of individual and collective practices. The former is immediately observable in the fact that no other city in the US has generated such a robust signifier for those making music within its borders as has New Orleans. Of course, it is possible to speak of, say, Los Angeles musicians or Nashville musicians, but the connotation in these instances is a pale one. We learn from these terms where the musicians reside and not much more. We are little informed about the music that they play there. Do they play something called “Los Angeles music” or “Nashville music”? The latter might suggest country music but that is as far as it goes. There is no such commonly recognized thing as “Nashville music”. As for “Los Angeles music”, that signifier would be even more elusive if not entirely empty. Not so with something called “New Orleans music”, which gestures toward a variety of musical genres—jazz, R&B, swamp pop and zydeco—through which run the common and distinctive threads spun on the city’s musical sound-scape. For instance, when speaking about the various jazz styles that had emerged in one or another quarter of the US nearly a century ago, the legendary Sidney Bechet pointed out that their variety simply reflected the fact that they all stemmed from the jazz created in New Orleans, but that differentiation occurred because these musicians were not New Orleanians and thus there were things in the New Orleans Sound that they were unable to hear and feel, but plenty in their own experience that could be substituted.

In addition to holding down day jobs as a seaport and commercial hub, historically New Orleans also has enjoyed a separate existence as a mythopoetic space, home to all manner of extraordinary beings: pirates and parade princesses, vampires and voodoo queens, Mardi Gras Indians and dancing skeletons and, closer to our topic, piano professors and piano princes. This chapter concerns the significance that the city’s musical history and heritage hold for those continuing its rhythm and blues traditions today, outlining how a remembered, imagined and reimagined past informs their sense of identity and place in the world. Accordingly, in order to provide something of the flavor of these processes, the following section taps into the text of interviews recording the comments of contemporary performers on their forebears from the halcyon days of New Orleans R&B. Thereafter, the discussion turns to that extraordinary period itself, bringing into focus those forces and conditions accounting for the unparalleled impact that New Orleans has had on American popular music in the latter half of the last century. The final portion of the chapter takes the discussion of the city’s R&B scene up to the advent of Hurricane Katrina. Because the story of that music prior to Katrina has already been told, I make no attempt to be exhaustive, here.

When I asked my respondents to tell me what they would call the music that they played, many of them were reluctant to categorize it. Similarly a number of them balked at my question about the distinctive characteristics of New Orleans rhythm and blues. In either instance, they would explain that they simply did not think in such terms. They saw little point in putting labels on an ineffable thing such as music and, to the extent that they might want to engage in categorization, notions of “feel” or “groove” were quite sufficient. To these (initially) reluctant respondents, my only retort was that theirs was the luxury of a musician: their job is to make music. I, on the other hand, was attempting to write about it. Could I get away with telling a reader that New Orleans R&B involves a certain “feel” or “groove” and leave it at that? I would then point out the obvious: “That’s why I am asking for your help”. Invariably, this plea would be met with sympathetic understanding, and once-reluctant respondents would open up every bit as much as those who had addressed these questions straightaway when first they were put to them.

Making one’s living in New Orleans by playing rhythm and blues— or, for that matter, any other style of music—will bring an individual into close contact with a host of organizations constituting a sort of music support structure on which effectively all musicians have come to depend. As I wish to show in this chapter, this support structure consists of a number of interrelated organizations whose various activities are carried on in concert, inputs from one contributing to the outputs of another. This organizational complex is further cemented by informal personal relations among their members, making this reticulated arrangement a music community every bit as much as it is an organizational complex. Music support structures, of course, are common to any population center in which music making amounts to a substantial sector of the local economy. What is distinctive about New Orleans in this respect, however, is the fact that the relatively low prevailing rates of remuneration for playing professionally there mean musicians require services either outside the market economy or subsidies so that they can participate in it. This condition, along with the goodwill and hard work of those in the support structures, sheds much light on the issue of why this organizational complex is so well articulated and robust in the Crescent City.

This book has focused on the specifics of a musical community cohering around the production, mediation and enjoyment of New Orleans-style rhythm and blues. Those specifics refer to both the norms and practices associated with the myth of the city and its music—that is, to how community members (re) interpret and enact the myth—and to the forms of capital that they acquire, accumulate, and exchange in the course of so doing. The notion of myth on which I have been relying—the capacity of a narrative to raise certain aspects of experience above the mundane and to invest them with an enhanced significance—is relatively straightforward and, perhaps, requires no further elaboration. The same is not true of the forms of capital, whose elements may not only elude commonsensical thinking but which appear in contemporary studies of culture, society, politics and so forth in manifestly dissimilar ways, owing to the fact that various authors might be using identical terms to talk about very different things.¹ This confusion requires some clarification. That is my first objective in this chapter, to make explicit the meaning of the terms that I shall be using to discuss what could be called the anatomy and metabolism of the New Orleans rhythm and blues community—things that don’t necessarily meet the eye unless one knows where to look for them. Thereafter, the discussion turns to the question of how this complex of myth and capitals informs the remarks of those in my interview sample, revealing the cultural groundwork on which this musical community is based.