The song belongs to a musical sub-genre—practically a cannon—of mournful mash notes to the city. Others would include Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans,” “It’s Raining,” by Irma Thomas," and “Louisiana” by Randy Newman. Even before Katrina hit, it was impossible to separate New Orleans from its rich, and utterly unique, cultural heritage: birthplace of jazz, the French Quarter, Creole cooking, second line funereal marches , Mardi Gras. Without the music or the gumbo there can be no New Orleans. So says Nick Spitzer, host of Public Radio’s “American Routes” and a folklorist specializing in American music and cultures of the Gulf South. Spitzer recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about a regional culture that has proven difficult to wash away. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What’s happening in the New Orleans music scene?
Nick Spitzer: From the beginning I was arguing the importance of the return of music and musicians—and the whole holy trinity of New Orleans culture: music, food and the built environment, our architecture.
A year after the storm, are they coming back?
Is music fully back? No. This is a town of nightclubs and neon and lots of little hideaway spots where people play. It’s still very much too dark around the city at night and there is nowhere near the offering of music there had been. That said, the big events—Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest—were two gigantic stepping stones that encouraged musicians to come back and be back to playing. Musicians, like everybody else, need a place to stay, but unlike other people they also need places to play. Having places to play means more of the city is in good repair and there’s more people back here to be audiences.
Has there been music written since Katrina that’s worth hearing?
What’s happened more than anything is that people have brought those songs out and they’ve acquired new meaning. A song like “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” is a very schmaltzy song that most people would normally consider tourist music. That has been elevated into a new position. One of the most obvious [new] things is the Allen Toussaint-Elvis Costello collaboration, “River in Reverse.” In terms of inside local culture folk, James Andrews, a trumpet player who calls himself the “Satchmo of the Ghetto,” did a really nice tune that we aired called “Katrina, Katrina.” It’s a takeoff on “Corinna, Corinna.” The new Wynton Marsalis work, “Congo Square,” has got a whole call and response section in it. [It features] improvising about FEMA, criticizing the Red Cross and “why don’t you listen to what the poor people say?” It’s very much in that classic African American improvisatory protest group communal singing [tradition].
And local rappers the Legendary KO almost instantly released “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” riffing off Kanye West.
Yeah, that kind of thing for sure. Then Juvenile had that video which I thought was very powerful and a great way to connect to his audience. Do uptown white New Orleneans see that? No. But that communicated to a whole other audience.
You mention songs that take on new meaning. The one that really hit me was Randy Newman’s “Louisiana.”
It’s interesting about that song: you can portray him as the Jewish Tin Pan Alley West humorous songwriter, but, it’s made it here. It’s been pulled in and made our own. And he has a new stripped-down version of it on the Nonesuch record - just him and the piano. It’s in some ways more powerful.
Talk about rap in New Orleans. When people think of the city, they don’t think of hip-hop, but it’s really big and there’s some interesting and exciting stuff going on.
I go to second lines where you hear rap and hip hop elements in there. Some of the brass bands- the Hot Eight and Soul Rebel [Brass Band]—do that and I think they do it really well. It’s another oral tradition music that’s been made local. There’s a type of hip hop here that’s called “bounce” and it’s got a New Orleans beat to it. It’s a huge part of the music scene here and it reaches a national audience, yet oddly enough it’s somewhat unidentified with New Orleans and it’s not included in a serious way in the Jazz Fest and it’s just not included in a lot of public things that represent New Orleans as New Orleans.
Why is that?
Maybe because it is new. But it’s strong. Cash Money [Records] came out of here. My larger feeling is that—whether it’s in the music scene or its the Creole plasterers and ironworkers and bricklayers, or it’s the great chefs—New Orleans’ biggest ace in the hole is creativity. The only thing that will fully bring the place back to something that feels not terribly different from what it was. Creativity is what we have. People didn’t live here in the old days or move here because they thought it had great infrastructure, because it doesn’t. We’ve got an almost Third World level of infrastructure with lots of neighborhood life and lots of family life that’s tied to the arts and creativity. That’s a different model from how mainstream America operates. That’s why I think it’s so hard for governments and foundations and even the private sector to easily deal with this place.
How is food relevant to this discussion?
Music moves all over the world—on the Internet, on CDs and performance. Food doesn’t travel quite as easily. I think we’re struggling with food because small businesses are struggling. If your place was damaged by floodwaters, it’s a struggle to put back the kind of investment and the insurance you need to get a kitchen up and running. Like music, it’s a symbol of a return of the life that people care about and love here. We have to focus on rebuilding the culinary scene here.
And architecture?
Architecture moves the least readily of all because of what it is. For years many, many musicians were also plasterers, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers. Louis Armstrong’s banjo player was a plasterer. Jelly Roll Morton decided not to be a bricklayer. Sydney Bechet’s family is full of plasterers. Even today someone like Eddie Bo, the piano player, is a carpenter. All these Creoles had these guild craft skills in their families. In particular antebellum free people were valued for their craft skills. Some of that persists in this city.
There’s an opportunity for whole cloth reinvention of neighborhoods now.
Absolutely and the local building trades guys could be very central to that.
What is it about New Orleans that it became the birthplace to such a unique culture?
It is at once America’s most African and most Mediterranean place. It has remained separate and apart because of its relative economic [and geographical] separation from the country, particularly after the Civil War. People always loved jazz but so many of our great artists had to leave to make a living and get respect. Same thing with R&B, the scene moved on to other places. But nonetheless the place has remained creative. That sets it apart. In Anglo-Saxon America, culture is usually with a capital C and it’s made official. Here, culture just is … and it’s with an “S” at the end. And it’s shared by people across lines of race and class. It’s not marginal, it’s the center of civitas .
