Devil Sent the Rain (16 page)

In true New Orleans fashion, these profoundly important, historically resonant recordings proffer a kind of serious fun—both intellectual and aesthetic, set against the precipice of time and mortality and history—that you won't find any other place.

From
Bookforum,
February/March 2006

This was the last piece I wrote for the
Oxford American
; it appeared in their 2006 Music Issue. For the first few years of the Music Issue, starting in 1997, the contents had been driven by the writers' ideas about which musicians interested them; the CD that accompanied each issue was the reflection of that traffic jam of idiosyncrasy. But little by little the magazine's content became dictated by the music the editors wanted to see on the CD; a list of musicians would be drawn up, and then writers got to take their choice. The Music Issue may have been just as much fun to read after that change, but it wasn't as much fun to write for, and I went on to other things.

In 2006, though, the year after Katrina, the lead-off tune was pianist Joe Liggins's earthshaking 1950 track “Going Back to New Orleans,” and when editor Marc Smirnoff called to see if I would write a piece about Liggins, I couldn't say no. Here's the result.

Going Back to New Orleans

I
always assumed that Joe Liggins was from New Orleans. His 1950 recording “Going Back to New Orleans” is one of the all-time best musical tributes to the Crescent City, full of insider references to its French and Spanish heritage, its food and special locales.

The tune itself was written by the little-remembered drummer Ellis Walsh, who also cowrote the Louis Jordan classic “Saturday Night Fish Fry” (likewise full of New Orleans references); Liggins's arrangement really summons a New Orleans feeling, making the most of the tune's slightly ominous minor-key cast, and containing an interlude in which a wailing tenor and soprano sax (or clarinet—it's hard to tell) strive to outdo one another. And it appeared on Specialty Records, which, although based out of Los Angeles, had recorded some of the seminal New Orleans R&B sessions by Guitar Slim, Lloyd Price, Big Boy Myles, Roy Montrell, and others, not to mention Little Richard's best early sides.

And, too, there was a big direct line between N.O. and L.A. stretching back to the early days of jazz. The Original Creole Orchestra, with the legendary cornetist Freddie Keppard, had toured California as early as 1911. Jelly Roll Morton spent a couple of years based there before World War One, and trombonist Kid Ory did the same just afterward, making a couple of the earliest recordings of New Orleans jazz there in 1922. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a famous magnet for Crescent City players, including Mac Rebennack (a.k.a. Dr. John), Earl Palmer, Plas Johnson, Chuck Badie, and too many others to list.

But Liggins, it turned out, wasn't from New Orleans. He was from Guthrie, Oklahoma, born in 1915, and a member of the great forgotten generation of jump blues performers that included his brother Jimmy, Amos Milburn, Roy Milton, Charles Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hadda Brooks, and Camille Howard. They came along in the post–World War Two bubble, after the jazz-centered big band era but before rock and roll blew off the roof. Many of them were not Southerners but came, like Liggins, from the Southwest, particularly Texas and Oklahoma.

Joe Liggins was himself a product of the big band era, and he was trained in that arena. His tastes seemed to run to bands like those of Buddy Johnson and Lucky Millinder and the Savoy Sultans, blues-and-ballad-based dance music, without a lot of the kind of personality that might distract the audience from the business at hand—a dance partner, a drink, whatever. He moved to San Diego in 1932, then Los Angeles in 1939, and began working with local dance bands on the West Coast.

After World War Two, many bands started to scale back in size; by 1950 even Count Basie was working with a septet rather than a full big band. Liggins really hit his groove in this context, crafting smooth, tightly scripted, functional jukebox small-band dance music for black audiences. The war had greatly accelerated the migration of African-Americans from rural areas to big cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The war work in factories on the West Coast was a big magnet, and the war itself gave a sense of optimism to the African-American community at large, a sense that the country would pull together against the common enemy and that afterward a lot of the outdated discrimination might begin to fall away as we all recognized ourselves as Americans first. The disillusionment was coming, but it hadn't hit yet. Above all, people seemed to want normalcy and common ground.

This black urban audience was served by countless little independent record labels that sprang up after the war to provide music that the major labels weren't really on top of, mostly for the burgeoning jukebox market. Some of those labels became as famous as Atlantic and Chess; others stayed as obscure as Bel-Tone and Sittin' In With. Los Angeles was a center for many of them. These small labels recorded a lot of groundbreaking material—Ray Charles's gospel-blues fusion (Swing Time and, later, Atlantic), Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's bebop (Guild, Musicraft, Dial, Savoy), Muddy Waters's electric blues (Aristocrat and, later, Chess); they were in a position to take chances on things that hadn't yet proved their commercial viability.

But most of what they recorded was workmanlike and predictable, formulaic dance-and-romance music that could be pumped out to service the needs of smaller, often local audiences with easily defined tastes, and make a small profit repeatedly rather than capture a large market. The point of many of those recordings was never to challenge or expand conventions but rather to find a certain angle and work it, to be, at best, a personality within an intelligible ecosystem, the record-industry equivalent of B-movies or potato chips. The audience didn't necessarily want surprises, unless they were easy to assimilate.

Liggins recorded his first big hit, “The Honeydripper,” in 1945 for one of these labels, Los Angeles's Exclusive Records, run by New Orleans–born transplant Leon René, an entrepreneur and composer of songs as varied as “When It's Sleepy Time Down South,” “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” and “Rockin' Robin.” “The Honeydripper” was in many ways an archetypal jump blues record, with its insistent shuffle beat, heavy on the tenor saxophone, and with a chorus of band members singing the jive lyrics in good-natured unison (“He's a killer . . . a solid old cat . . .”). It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was reportedly heavily bootlegged by the Mob for their jukeboxes.

Liggins's music could be upbeat, or romantic, or suavely bluesy, but it never contained much irony. And it was very, very simple, even at its slickest. The formula made for some of the biggest R&B hits of the late 1940s, including not just “The Honeydripper,” but “Pink Champagne” (“that stole my love from me”) with its easy bounce and belly-rub tempo, and “Rag Mop,” which harked back to older “game” records such as “I'se A-Muggin' ” by Stuff Smith and His Onyx Club Boys, and pointed also to later ones like Shirley Ellis's “The Name Game.” In the early 1950s there probably wasn't a jukebox in a black neighborhood bar in America that didn't have at least one of those Liggins discs on it.

It was never one of my favorite genres. I always felt as if something was missing from the mix, a sense of some resistance in the scheme of things. In blues, for example, the singer was almost always restless and pushing against an oppressive situation, whether social, economic, or romantic. In early rock the subtext was always miscegenation—the breaking of racial barriers and taboos, black music often for white audiences. With the bebop of Parker and Gillespie the resistance was encoded in the music itself, a steeplechase reflecting the complexity of postwar social change. Jump blues didn't have that sense of resistance in it; it was, generally speaking, satisfied with its own assumptions.

“Going Back to New Orleans” is a big exception. Liggins's arrangements tended to be tight, smooth, functional, little-big-band arrangements. But something got loose with the N.O. record. First of all, it is set mostly in a minor key, which imparts a mysterious atmosphere at odds with Liggins's standard jolly boogie-woogie optimism. The intro smacks into the listener with bold rhythmic displacements influenced, I would guess, by what Dizzy Gillespie's big band was doing on songs like “Ow!” and “Jumpin' with Symphony Sid.” Liggins slides into gear singing Walsh's excellent site-specific lyrics.

The middle section goes briefly into a major key, but it is played over a rhumba beat as Liggins sings about having been to Cuba and South America and France but how he likes the women in New Orleans better; the rhumba is a knowing reference to the Latin flavor that always inflects New Orleans music, what Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish Tinge.

And then, after the tune slides back into minor for eight more bars and Liggins declares New Orleans his home, the tenor saxophone, probably played by Maxwell Davis, begins a solo. It starts with eight bars of more or less regulation R&B tenor, but in the second eight bars, the tenor is joined by the clarinet, or soprano sax, probably played by Little Willie Jackson, and suddenly things are in a different neighborhood; the heat gets ratcheted way up and the record starts to sweat heavily. The bridge comes in the next eight bars, with the tenor playing alone again, and then the clarinet joins him again for the final eight and they pull and wail against each other until Liggins's rolling, insouciant piano comes in to smooth things out for a little before a reprise of the vocal. After a restatement of the beginning's jagged rhythmic intro, we are set back down in the day-to-day.

After all those relentlessly simple records, all that bubble-gum R&B, what happened to Joe Liggins for those three minutes?

Going back home, always a big theme in American music, took on a new resonance in the postwar years, especially after a few of those years had gone by. Usually the direction proposed was from north to south, with the singer tired of the big city and longing for family and the simple life he or she once knew. The theme was especially big in country music, with songs like “The Fields Have Turned Brown” and “Detroit City.” It was perhaps slightly less prominent in blues, since down home, despite the fact that the weather suited your clothes, was a place where you could get lynched pretty easily. Still, there are plenty of blues about country people being taken advantage of in the city and hoping, like Muddy Waters, to get lucky and make “Train Fare Home.” Years later, Bob Dylan turned the convention on its head in “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,” in which the singer declares he has had enough and is going back to New York City.

In any case, Liggins's narrator is going back home for a straightforward reason—to see his bay-bee. But that quickly gets mixed up with a desire to see the rest of the family—his cousins, his
parrain
, and Ma and Pa. The family stuff is also mixed up with all the other elements of New Orleans culture: music and a sense of place (he wants to “pat his feet on Rampart Street”), Mardi Gras, and, especially, food—crawfish, jambalaya, red beans, gumbo filé, and pralines (he even throws in dessert). In New Orleans, all these elements are of a piece, and Liggins's record is directly about all the sensual, tactile tension and gratification that most of his other records keep on a short leash. Maybe for Liggins, as for so many, New Orleans was a place where he could connect all the different parts of himself, for three minutes at least. His record has that sense of resistance overcome—in this case, maybe, his own resistance to letting the wilder part of himself out for a little air. Maybe for Joe Liggins, as for so many, past and present, the Crescent City provided an opportunity to change personas and dance. And in that minor-key agitation, maybe just a prescient hint of storms, social and meteorological, to come.

From the
Oxford American
Music Issue, Summer 2006

 

What follows are four pieces about New Orleans written in the five years following Katrina. As mentioned, the publication of
Why New Orleans Matters
turned me, for a while at least, into an instant talking head on all topics relating to New Orleans. It also brought e-mails and letters from people who loved what I wrote and people who hated what I wrote.

The first of these is an edited version of an online chat I conducted for the
Washington Post
in February 2006, and it gives a fair idea of the elements that made up my standard responses to the questions I encountered about the city's prospects. Mary and I had moved into my just-repaired apartment from temporary quarters at a friend's house on Kerlerec Street. Repairs on Mary's house would not be finished for another six months. The editing is only to comb out pointless repetitions that cropped up here and there.

The second, from May 2006, is something different: an exchange of letters about the future of New Orleans. The letter I received is typical of a certain narrow vein of response to my book. Such letters would invariably start out politely, even courtly, and would be written by someone with impeccable credentials as a lady or gentleman, always oozing with solicitude for the “underclass” while espousing a program for the future of the city that would effectively eliminate the “underclass” from New Orleans. The courtly manner was a perfume to disguise a familiar scent. My response to this particular letter sums up my feelings about the subtext of these communiqués. I had to do extensive plastic surgery on the reader's letter to disguise any trace of his or her identity; Harper lawyers have assured me that this was necessary.

After that summer of 2006, I became deeply involved in writing the novel that became
City of Refuge,
and except for “Charlie Chan in New Orleans!” I did very little discretionary writing between the fall of 2006 and the fall of 2008, when the novel was published. During that period, though, there were many developments in the city, on both the positive and negative sides of the ledger. Essentially, the city came back to life, haltingly at first, and then with a vengeance, culminating in the extraordinary first half of 2010, when we got (at last) a new mayor, the Saints won the Super Bowl, and
Treme
debuted on HBO. That was quite a time to be in the city.

On the down side, various cadres of influence had been at work trying as quietly as possible to engineer controversial changes in the city that became public knowledge only through the efforts of a handful of concerned citizens. “Other People's Houses” addresses one of these schemes: the effort to keep Charity Hospital closed and raze seventy acres of historic homes in the heart of the city to build a sprawling new hospital complex under the combined auspices of Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Charity Hospital was the city's main venue for treating poor and indigent populations, and was ready to reopen within weeks after Katrina; it was kept closed through the enormous influence of LSU. This isn't the place for a rundown of post-Katrina New Orleans politics, but it is worth saying that the opponents of the plan (I was, obviously, one) agreed on the need for a hospital but argued for rehabbing Charity and utilizing the more vertical space available in the already-existing downtown medical district, much of which was vacant and begging for development, instead of expropriating the homes of hundreds of people who had sunk the previous several years and much of their life savings into returning to their homes. Guess who won the fight. The piece appeared as an op-ed in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
.

Finally, an amuse-bouche that appeared in
The Huffington Post
in September 2010, discussing the five-year Katrina anniversary in light of the infamous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder if anyone will remember that disaster in ten years, aside from historians and the thousands of people who had their lives upended, businesses destroyed, and sense of continuity terminated. Seemed pretty important at the time. The BP spill was treated in the media as a regional disaster, but if “Incontinental Drift” has a point, it is that there is no such thing, anymore, as a regional disaster.