hurricane
In other parts of the city, there isn't running water!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pressure's on as thirst grows in New Orleans
Nearly 2 months after Katrina, there's water everywhere but few drops to drink outside of the French Quarter and business district
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0510200190oct20,1,479388.story
If the link doesn't work you might have to "register" but I think it's free.
Subject: Himes on New Orleans Jazzfest
Date Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2006 4:23 PM
From: geoff himes <geoff.himes@verizon.net>
To: Geoffrey Himes <geoff.himes@verizon.net>
Dear Folks,
{NOTE: This letter is drawn from my articles for the Cleveland
Plain-Dealer and Offbeat Magazine as well as my own personal notebooks.}
This year's Jazzfest--the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival--was
different from the previous 36. As in most years, the smells of draft
beer, grilled oysters and sun-block lotion were omnipresent; the sounds
of jazz combos, rock groups, R&B singers, Mardi Gras Indians, brass
bands, Cajun groups, gospel choirs and zydeco bands overlapped like a
car radio drifting between stations, and a party atmosphere prevailed at
the 10 stages. But there was an undercurrent of anxiety and anger this
year that gave the event a distinct edge.
The lingering damage and disruption from Hurricane Katrina and
the controversial response was on everyone's mind. The mood was set on
April 27, the night before Jazzfest officially began, during a kick-off
concert sponsored by the Grammy Organization in the Harrah's Casino
downtown. Headlining the show was the New Orleans Social Club, a band of
five legendary Louisiana musicians who had been scattered by Hurricane
Katrina to Texas and beyond.
There's a reason that the New Orleans Social Club adapted their
name from the Buena Vista Social Club. Henry Butler, Ivan Neville, Leo
Nocentelli, George Porter and Russell Batiste feel as dispossessed as
pre-Castro Cuban musicians. They feel they are guardians of a tradition
as neglected and endangered as pre-Castro Cuban music.
The quintet played Fats Domino's "Walking to New Orleans" and the
Meters' "Loving You Is on My Mind," two prime examples of that
precarious tradition. As half of the original Meters (Porter and
Nocentelli) and half of the current Funky Meters (Porter and Batiste)
churned up the funk, one could glance past them to the casino's ersatz
Mardi Gras décor and the flashing lights of the slot machines. It was a
glimpse of the theme-park future that some say awaits the city--a future
that threatens the tradition as much as any weather system.
The evening's highlight, however, came from an unexpected source:
British pop diva Annie Lennox. Her romantic break-up song, "Why," was
delivered by guest singer John Boutte, backed by the New Orleans Social
Club, as an impassioned gospel hymn. When this New Orleans survivor
sang, in his high, piercing tenor, of standing at "the water's edge,"
the lyrics suddenly had a whole new meaning. And when the short, wiry
singer climaxed with the cry, "You don't know what I feel," he reminded
us that no one knows what it's like to have one's city shattered by a
storm unless one has lived through it.
To get an inkling of that feeling, thousands of out-of-towners
descended on New Orleans for the festival that ran April 28-30 and May
5-7. In some ways the festival became a dialogue, with local performers
trying to explain "what I feel" about the hurricane and visiting
performers trying to empathize.
That dialogue went on in the audience as well. It wasn't unusual
to stand on the grassy dance floor of the Fais Do Do Stage, for example,
and strike up a conversation with a local resident eager to talk. Before
long, the story always came around to the events of last August and
September, and the conversation always included a precise measurement of
the water in the person's house and the name of the city to which they
had evacuated. If the depth of the water had been less than three feet,
the person was probably back in New Orleans; if it was more than three
feet, probably not. But every local tried to communicate the same
paradoxical message: It was worse than you could ever imagine but the
city will survive nonetheless.
Almost all the out-of-towners stayed in the French Quarter,
Garden District or Uptown neighborhoods which hadn't been flooded and
which bore little evidence that a hurricane had ever hit New Orleans.
Again and again, local performers at the festival pleaded with visitors
to leave the "sliver by the river" and explore the rest of the city. If
one drove away from the Mississippi River and towards Lake
Pontchartrain, it didn't take long before the bustling restaurants and
hotels gave way to the white FEMA trailers and piles of ruined lumber
sitting in front yards in Mid City. Nearly every house still bore a
brown horizontal line that marked sea level, the height where the
sewage-filled water had sat for two weeks.
At one time last September every building in New Orleans bore a
spray-painted X, often in bright orange. In the west quadrant of the X
were the initials of the National Guard unit that checked out the
house--CA 6 for California 6th company, for example, or IN 4 for the
Indiana 4th . In the north quadrant was the date, such as 9-13. In the
south quadrant was the number of living people found; in the east
quadrant the number of dead. Eight months after the storm, most
buildings still carried these symbols--some as adopted folklore but most
because the buildings were still uninhabited.
Spray painted on many houses was additional commentary: "Cirque
de FEMA: Greatest No Show on Earth." "I'm back. I kill looters. Have a
nice day." "Thanks Police and National Guard." "Do not take dogs; owner
lives here." "I need plumbers." "Vote this year."
By the time one crossed under I-610 and reached the Lakeview
neighborhood, where block after block of middle-class brick houses stood
empty, New Orleans resembled a ghost town. One could stand on an empty,
eerily quiet street and hear birds twittering from blocks away. One
could enter a house and see clothes, furniture and books lying where
they were left on August 29, as if this were an American Pompeii.
If one drove to the Lower Ninth Ward, where the Industrial Canal
levee burst, it looked as if a bomb had gone off. Giant oak trees were
toppled; a detached V-shaped roof sat in a front lawn; a gray-shingled
house had landed atop a blue sedan; clothes were caught in the branches
of trees; a wheelchair sat in a rectangular pattern of rubble indicating
a former house; decontamination workers in white spacesuits and pink air
masks carried plastic buckets from houses; concrete steps led up to
buildings that had been completely blown away.
A California photographer was snapping pictures. "I was here in
November," he said, "and that was shocking. But, in some ways, this is
even more shocking, because it's eight months later and almost nothing
has changed."
"We toured around New Orleans yesterday in the Ninth Ward," Bruce
Springsteen told the Fairgrounds crowd on April 30, "and I saw sights I
never thought I'd see in an American city. The criminal ineptitude makes
you furious. It's what happens when political cronyism guts the agencies
that are supposed to serve the American people.... So this is dedicated to
President Bystander."
With that he sang "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,"
Blind Alfred Reed's 1929 song about the Stock Market Crash that
Springsteen had rewritten to include new verses about New Orleans.
Strumming his acoustic guitar, he sang, "I got family scattered from
Texas all the way to Baltimore; I ain't got no home in this world no
more."
His wife Patti Scialfa and five other harmony singers bolstered
the next line, "Gonna be a judgment that's a fact," with gospel
harmonies. By the time Springsteen repeated the title question, six
horns had joined the swelling sound, and the song suddenly resembled a
New Orleans funeral, where the brass band plays slow and sad on the way
to the cemetery and resiliently boisterous on the way back.
Springsteen was clearly pumped up for the show. Not only was he
clearly affected by what he'd seen in New Orleans, but this was also the
first-ever public appearance by his new ensemble, the Seeger Sessions
Band, the group he had assembled for his new album, "We Shall Overcome:
The Seeger Sessions."
He began the show with a ringing guitar chord and a waist-high
kick as he belted out the old gospel hymn, "Mary, Don't You Weep," with
the telling line, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the
fire next time." He played 10 of the 13 songs from "We Shall Overcome"
and dedicated "My City of Ruins," originally written for Asbury Park,
New Jersey, "to the people of New Orleans." When he shifted from the
quiet, melancholy verses to the rousing chorus of "Rise up, rise up,"
the horn section and gospel singers pumped up the sound and clenched
fists rose spontaneously throughout the crowd.
When Springsteen sang "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," he began
with just his own voice and acoustic guitar, as if he were performing in
a 75,000-seat coffeehouse. Soon the banjo and fiddle joined in and now
the old hymn that Bob Dylan recorded as "Gospel Plow" sounded like an
Appalachian string-band number. Then half a dozen harmony singers leaned
into their mics and it became a choir selection. Then the tenor sax,
trumpet, trombone and tuba jumped in and suddenly it was a brass-band
parade tune. It was a remarkable demonstration of how New Orleans'
carnival music and Dixieland can find its place in what we usually think
of as folk music and how easy it is to leap from one branch of that tree
to another.
But it was more than a lesson in aesthetic theory; it was a
terrific bit of showmanship. Every time the horns entered the
arrangement, they made the sound both bigger and brassier, providing a
dramatic shift any time a song threatened to become routine. And when
the horns dropped out again, they provided another dramatic shift,
making the song suddenly more intimate. It was as if Springsteen was a
film director, moving from close-ups to wide shots and back again as the
mood required.
Lots of people have tried to assemble rock'n'roll big bands, but
no one other than Alejandro Escovedo had ever made it work before this
year. Springsteen pulled it off at the Fairgrounds because he banned
electric guitars from the stage and relied instead on a wide variety of
acoustic instruments--banjo, fiddle, upright bass, dobro, pedal steel,
accordion, drums and the horns--that were less likely to get in each
other's way. But for all the unorthodox instrumentation, it was a
rock'n'roll show. How else could you define the punchy 4/4 beat that
drove "Old Dan Tucker" and "Pay My Money Down"?
As the sun went down, Springsteen insisted on playing one more
song, long after the festival curfew had passed. He chose the song most
identified with New Orleans, "When the Saints Go Marching In," and
delivered it as a slow hymn, as if comforting a wounded metropolis. Soon
many in the crowd were singing along.
Susan Cowsill borrowed the same tune for the coda of her song
about Katrina, "Crescent City Snow." A former member of both the
Cowsills and the Continental Drifters, Cowsill has been a New Orleans
resident long enough to know how rarely the city sees snow. So when it
did snow on Christmas Day, 2004, she began a song about the delights of
nature. When a very different kind of weather anomaly hit the town eight
months later, she contrasted the two events to capture the mixed
feelings the locals now have about nature and their hometown.
Wearing an orange cotton dress with black leotards and black
boots at the Fairgrounds on May 6, Cowsill ended the song with a vision
of her displaced neighbors coming home like saints marching in. With her
husband Russ Broussard back on the drum kit and their three young kids
shaking maracas and singing along, Cowsill appended the hometown
football chant, "Who dat say they gonna beat them Saints?" as if
declaring that no politicians or developers were going to stand in their
way.
When the Dirty Dozen Brass Band played "When the Saints Go
Marching In" at the Fairgrounds later the same day, the nonet played it
the way New Orleans brass bands have been playing the tune for close to
a hundred years. But as the old hymn progressed from call-and-response
vocals to horn solos, it seemed to leap forward in time as well. The
baritone saxophone virtuoso Roger Lewis wailed with echoes of modern
masters such as Gerry Mulligan and Hamiet Bluiett, reminding everyone
that the brass band tradition--like most things in New Orleans--is not a
historical artifact locked in a case but a living, changing tradition.
Springsteen wasn't the only one who altered the lyrics to old
songs to reflect the new circumstances. Don Vappie, the trad-jazz banjo
player, took time out from his April 30 set to thank all the jazz clubs
that reopened soon after the hurricane. "They weren't making money," he
acknowledged, "but they wanted to let the musicians know it was OK to
come home. They wanted to get things back to normal as soon as possible.
It's not about the money. If you think it's about the money, you're not
from New Orleans." He then turned the old blues lament, "Corrina,
Corrina, gal, where you been so long" into some new lyrics, "Katrina,
Katrina, your water can't keep me gone."
When the Mahogany Brass Band played "St. James Infirmary," the
nine-piece marching band in identical white shirts and black slacks
changed the line, "She may search the wide world over; she'll never find
a sweet man like me," to "she'll never find another city like New
Orleans." When vocalist Glenn Andrews sang, "I was born by the river,"
from Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," it was clear what river he
was talking about and how desperately that change was needed. When he
dedicated "Every Breath You Take (I'll Be Missing You)" by the Police to
"all those who lost their lives in Katrina," the melody suggested a
different kind of missing.
When the set ended with a version of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me,"
the song was changed from one man's romantic request to a whole city's
plea for moral and material support. Bandleader Brice Miller introduced
the song by saying, "Don't worry about what the media says. Don't worry
about what some fool who's mayor says. We're going to stay right here
and carry on. We may have to sleep on floors and in trailers, but we'll
be here."
I spent my 10 nights in New Orleans on the floor. I was staying
at the crowded home of Julianna Padgett, a woman I met at my first
Jazzfest back in 1985 and who has become one of my very best friends.
Her house, just a few blocks from the Mississippi River levee, came
through the hurricane unscathed, but many of her friends had lost
everything. She was my driver on my tour of the flood devastation, and
she took me inside the Lakeview houses of her friends Jean and Richard.
We compensated for those disturbing scenes by cramming as much eating
and dancing as we could into a week and a half. And there's nothing like
eating and dancing to remind you why New Orleans is worth saving.
I spent half a day by myself out in the swamps at Jean Lafitte
National Historic Park in Barataria. Unlike the Army Corps of Engineers'
canal levees, nature's swamps are designed to absorb hurricanes, and
aside from lanes of dead trees blown down by wind gusts, there was
little lingering damage. The spring flowers were out; the young
alligators were swimming, and a yellow-crowned night heron waded between
the cypress trees.
The street signs for the intersection of North Dupre and Orchid
Streets are attached to a telephone pole. During the second weekend of
Jazzfest, the signs were draped with heavy chains of Mardi Gras beads
and the pole was wrapped in brightly colored ribbons like a Maypole. At
the bottom of the pole were three candles and two bouquets of flowers
atop a large pillow of coiled Mardi Gras beads. Fastened to the pole was
a Xeroxed sheet in a plastic sleeve reading, "Daniel Breaux, May 1,
2004."
That was the date Breaux was murdered by teenage robbers a few
yards away. At every Jazzfest before then you could see Breaux in front
of the Fais Do Do Stage or on the wooden platform in the Economy Hall
Tent executing some of the most amazing dance moves you'll ever see,
often with his favorite partner, Claudia Dumestre. They never showed
off; they were obviously doing it purely for pleasure. Nonetheless, they
were reminders that some of the most creative art takes place off the
stages at Jazzfest. And this homemade shrine was further proof of that.
But for all six days that the Fairgrounds were open, I was out
there from 11 am to 7 pm. As often as possible I was dancing, and the
best dancing was to the Pine Leaf Boys. Word had been leaking out of
Acadiana for some time now that they most exciting young band in the
region, and as soon as Wilson Savoy began pumping out his
button-accordion riffs against Cedric Watson's sawing fiddle and the
thumping rhythm section, all doubts evaporated. Here was a biracial band
that played traditional swamp instruments and mostly traditional swamp
repertoire with an attitude that had nothing to do with preserving the
past and everything to do with communicating the hunger and impatience
of youth.
Chris Strachwitz, the legendary founder of Arhoolie Records, was
beaming in front of the stage, and so were many other longtime Cajun
fans who had worried that the genre was growing old with its
practitioners. During the next set on the same stage, Wilson joined his
fiddle-playing brother Joel and their parents Marc and Ann for a Savoy
Family Band show that rocked harder than any Marc & Ann show in the
past.
I made one startling new discovery at this year's Jazzfest:
Mississippi singer-songwriter Bobby Lounge. Imagine the early Tom Waits
playing maddened boogie-woogie piano like Jerry Lee Lewis rather than
beatnik-jazz piano like Bill Evans. Imagine Waits singing three vivid
verses about going to his sexual preference for a "Ten Foot Woman" and
then even more vivid verses as the song stretched past seven minutes and
the bounds of good taste. Imagine Waits arriving on stage in an
iron-lung machine and popping out in a feathered and beaded Mardi Gras
shirt only after a blue-uniformed nurse opened the door. Imagine Waits
playing a romantic Dixieland piano melody as he sang a convoluted
eight-minute story about an unwise entanglement with a 17-year-old girl
"eight weeks pregnant by a hometown married man." That's Bobby Lounge.
"I heard a lot of friends had to leave town," Anders Osborne sang
on April 28, "and some of them may never return." The skinny redhead
played an elegiac slide guitar for those who mattered who were now
scattered, and tenor saxophonist Tim Green echoed the mood in long,
echo-laden lines full of wistfulness. But burbling up from underneath
were the percolating rhythms of organist Papa John Gros and the Dirty
Dozen Brass Band's original tube player, Kirk Joseph. If a second-line
rhythm powered by a tuba isn't enough to bring you back to the only city
where an instrument that resembles a spittoon can replace a bass, what
will it take? It was enough for Osborne, who sang, "I keep going back to
New Orleans again and again, to my sweet Louisiana rain."
When Bob Dylan first recorded "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965, it
was a vicious taunt aimed at a daughter of privilege who had tumbled out
of society into life on the street, the implication being that it served
her right to confront the hardships the poor and bohemian face every
day. It was a young man's approach, and it was brilliant in the fury of
its indictment.
But when Dylan sang the song again during his encore at the
Fairgrounds on the first Friday, the familiar song had a whole different
subtext. Instead of sounding accusatory, he sounded sympathetic, as if
the 64-year-old Dylan understood, in a way that the 24-year-old Dylan
never could, that no one's pain is easy or deserved. When he sang, "How
does it feel to be without a home?" the connection to New Orleans was
unmistakable, and the singer in the white cowboy suit seemed to imply
that it doesn't matter whether you lived in Lakeview or the Lower Ninth
Ward, your loss is just as real and just as deserving of empathy.
Instead of spitting out the line, he warbled it, as if he really wanted
to know how it felt and how he might help.
To do otherwise would be mere posturing, and there's been far too
much of that. "You and I, we've been through that, and this is not our
fate," he sang on the next song, "All Along the Watchtower." He sang as
if brushing aside all the lies, distortions and bombast surrounding our
current national crisis. Denny Freeman unleashed a guitar solo that
sliced through the obfuscation as effectively as Dylan's voice, which
added, "Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."
On the second Sunday, Paul Simon seldom reached the feverish
pitch of intensity that Springsteen, Dylan and Elvis Costello had
reached on the first. But Simon did have his moments, and the best was
his version of "An American Tune." Dressed down in a black T-shirt and
orange baseball cap, the diminutive songwriting genius strummed an
acoustic guitar and sang the first verse alone in a wistful, melancholy
tone that reinforced the observation: "I'm just weary to my bones.
Still, you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant so far away from
home." All those in the audience who had been displaced from their homes
perked up at the line.
One by one Simon's bandmates insinuated themselves into the
elegiac pacing of his guitar and the reflective attitude of his vocal.
The song may have been recorded in New York in 1973 but it sounded as if
it had been written in New Orleans this past winter when Simon added, "I
don't know a soul who's not been battered; I don't have a friend who
feels at ease. I don't know a dream that's not been shattered or driven
to its knees.... I can't help it, I wonder what has gone wrong." For a
moment, Simon captured the mood of a city, if not an entire nation.
For every reminder of tragedy, however, there was an instance of
defiant optimism. Eddie Bo, the 75-year-old New Orleans pianist who has
been making records since 1955, shouted out to the crowd on April 29,
"You've got to get something to drink; today is celebration day!" To
prove his point, he kicked off the famous carnival anthem, "Mardi Gras
Mambo," at the piano, then stood up and grabbed a fringed-and-beaded
umbrella for a hip-rolling dance across the front of the stage.
The highlights of the Los Lobos show at the House of Blues May 5
were the band's inspired reworkings of other people's songs. They turned
in a blistering version of the Who's "My Generation" with Conrad Lozano
executing John Entwhistle's diving bass figures perfectly. On Buddy
Holly's "Not Fade Away," David Hidalgo played a pretty guitar over the
stomping Bo Diddley beat as the audience sang the words. That segued
seamlessly into the Grateful Dead's "Bertha," which featured a rare
Louie Perez guitar solo.
Best of all was Lil' Bob & the Lollipops' swamp-pop classic, "I
Got Loaded." Terrance Simien came up on stage to play rubboard as
Hidalgo belted out this South Louisiana standard, a defiant celebration
of hedonism in the face of disaster. Soon Hidalgo was leading the
sunburned, shorts-wearing crowd in a sing-along as if he were a preacher
leading the choir.
There were notable encounters between locals and visitors all
week. Paul Simon invited Buckwheat Zydeco up on stage at the Fairgrounds
on May 7 to play accordion on "All Around the World or the Myth of
Fingerprints" and invited singer Irma Thomas and pianist Allen Toussaint
to help out on "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock
invited New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard on stage to play Miles
Davis' "Tutu" on April 29. The Edge, U2's guitarist, played with both
the New Birth Brass Band and the Dave Matthews Band on April 29. And if
you closely examined the crowd at Mulate's during the Beausoleil show on
April 28, you'd notice that that person trying to look inconspicuous as
he listened to the world's best Cajun band was Bob Dylan.
The best collaboration was the one between Allen Toussaint, the
city's legendary songwriter and producer, and Elvis Costello. The two
men had met in New York last October to co-write five new songs, and had
then recorded those songs plus seven of Toussaint's older classics and
Costello's own song about Katrina last November in Hollywood and New
Orleans. They unveiled the songs to the public at the Fairgrounds on
April 30 (just before Springsteen went on).
Their performance on the main Fairgrounds stage on the first
Sunday was one of sartorial splendor. Toussaint arrived first in a
canary-yellow blazer, gold pants and a shiny gold tie, and offered a bit
of his oldies show. Then Costello entered in a purple suit, purple shirt
and purple tie and immediately pushed the show into higher gear. He sang
"On the Way Down," a song Toussaint had written long before the two men
had met, and transformed the chorus--"The same people you misuse on the
way up you might meet on the way down"--from a folksy aphorism into a
prophecy of a day of reckoning.
You have to admire Elvis Costello for taking artistic risks, such
as his collaborations with Burt Bacharach and the Brodsky String
Quartet. But artistic risks are only real risks if there's an actual
chance of failure, and those pairings often proved underwhelming. The
problem was this: Costello favors complicated, ornate constructions and
putting him with another composer or arranger who also favors the
complicated and ornate produces a redundant overload in that department
without any compensating advantages. That's why Costello's collaboration
with New Orleans' Allen Toussaint makes such brilliant sense. Toussaint
is all about economy and focus, which is just what an overreaching
talent like Costello needs. And, conversely, Costello's penchant for
taking risks is just what the play-it-safe Toussaint needs.
Those risks paid off especially well on the title track from
their new album, "River in Reverse." The push-and-pull rhythms were
given the precision snap of Toussaint's work with Lee Dorsey, Ernie
K-Doe and Dr. John, but the political thrust of the song was clearly
Costello's. "Wake me up," he sang with a sharp shout backed by
Toussaint's regular horn section. "Wake me up with a slap or a kiss.
There must be something better than this, because I don't see how it can
get much worse. What do we have to do to send the river in reverse?"
To many it seemed that Jazzfest ended with something of a whimper
on its final day, May 7. The Neville Brothers Band, the traditional
closer on the last Sunday, had declined to appear amid rumors of health
problems and money wrangling. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Fats Domino
and jazz trumpeter Nicholas Payton were scheduled to play Sunday sets
but both canceled for health reasons. Taking Domino's place was Lionel
Richie, which just isn't the same, is it?
Overlooked in the general disappointment was one of the finest
sets of the entire festival, the modestly attended mid-afternoon set by
John Boutte in the Jazz Tent--an hour every bit as emotionally stirring
as Springsteen's acclaimed performance. Backed by trad-jazz players such
as trumpeter Leroy Jones and guitarist Todd Duke, Boutte may have struck
some as just another covers singer as he tackled everything from "Basin
Street Blues" to "Cottage for Sale." But he had a way of leaning on
certain lines with a gospel singer's shout or a jazz singer's variation
that wrenched the lyrics out of their original context so they resonated
in a new way.
Boutte bounced about the stage in an oversized blue shirt with
the sleeves rolled up and a round straw hat with the front brim turned
up, clearly agitated. He seemed intent on giving every song a new layer
of meaning so it echoed the ongoing struggle for the soul of New Orleans
in the wake of Katrina. He transformed Neil Young's "Southern Man," for
example, by altering the lyric, "Tall white mansions and little shacks,
Southern man, when will you pay them back?" to "Tall white mansions and
flooded shacks" and by changing the tone of Young's rhetorical question
into a demand for some actual answers.
When he sang "City of New Orleans," the Steve Goodman song made
famous by Arlo Guthrie, Boutte transformed the country-folk melody into
a hand-clapping Dixieland parade march. He turned the key lines, "Good
morning, America, how are you? Don't you know me? I'm your native son,"
from a friendly hello into a desperate demand for recognition, as if he
and his fellow hometowners were being forgotten along with the flood.
The greatest song ever written about an American flood is Randy
Newman's "Louisiana 1927," and it has been sung constantly since Katrina
washed ashore. But no one has ever sung it quite like Boutte did that
afternoon. Where Newman had sung it as a detached newspaper reader,
Boutte sang it as an involuntary participant ankle deep in water. After
singing the original lyrics straight through once, Boutte began to
change them for his own purposes, just as Springsteen had done with "How
Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live."
Newman's lyrics about "six feet of water in the streets of
Evangeline" became "12 feet of water in the streets of the Lower Ninth."
Newman's lyrics about "President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
with a fat man with a notebook in his hand" became "President Bush came
down in an aeroplane with 12 fat men with martinis in their hands. The
president said, 'Fat men, ain't it a shame what the river has done to
this poor Creole's land?'"
Finally, Boutte's high tenor rose to a feverish pitch and he
cried, "Louisiana, they're trying to wash us away," as if calling out to
everyone in the tent who had lived in the state last August. One by one
members of the audience spontaneously stood up from their folding
chairs, raised their arms above their head and sang along, "They're
trying to wash us away." They had earned the right to sing this song in
the first person. They had the right to hope that singing it together
might yet thwart that threat.
