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Still Singing Those Post-Katrina Blues
Singer John Boutte, in front of his Seventh Ward house, says, "Why should I leave? This is my home. My ancestors' bones are here."
(By Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)
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I cry Hey mama
In the morning time
Yi-Yi-Yi
"Only in New Orleans," Ruffins chants, laughing and laughing. "Only in New Orleans."
* * *
This is the city that spawned Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Sidney Bechet, Randy Newman and Master P -- not to mention a long line of famous musical families: the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Toussaints.
Folks like to brag that New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, a sentiment that has little to do with geography. It's a sensibility, evident in the food, the culture, in the French and Spanish surnames, in the old folks who cling to Creole, an Africanized French patois.
New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. All this informs the music here, marinating it in nostalgia and a sense of defiant joy. New Orleanians are peculiarly tied to place, ever cognizant of history.
Drive by Congo Square, and without fail, a local will remind you that it was here that the slaves played their music on Sundays, drumming away their worries, and where a slave could earn enough extra money to buy freedom. Where the Creole orchestras played in brass band concerts -- many of whose members were the black sons of rich white fathers who sent them to Europe to be educated.
"In New York, you learn jazz, you learn the blues," Paul Sanchez says. "In New Orleans, you're born into it. Baby comes out the womb chasing the rhythm."
He's waxing lyrical as he tools around the Lower Ninth Ward, cruising in his green minivan.
"I tell you, this place is magic," Sanchez says. "I say this with sadness in my voice."
