by John Metcalf
They break into Oh Didn’t He Ramble.
As they swing out into the street, the Second Line swells, jostling, skipping to the beat, singing, dancing a shuffling, pelvic-thrusting dance, women with their skirts raised. Children race with and through the Second Line. Some of the boys study the especially fancy dance steps of the Grand Marshal as he marks time wheeling the band and the procession round corners, dancing the steps that are the exhibition of his authority, his signature style.
When the band rests, a favoured boy is allowed to carry a bandsman’s instrument.
Rob imagined the child Armstrong carrying the cornet for one of the famous men of the day, Freddie Keppard, say, or Bunk Johnson, though both had been dance-band leaders rather than marching men.
Over the clip-clopping mules, the click and spritz of the spray on the fence, the surrounding conversation, crockery, Rob could hear the forthright tones of Freddie Keppard’s cornet, remembered with immediacy from an obscure record lent by Charlie Denton, and Kepard’s rough voice:
Let me be your Salty Dog
Or I won’t be your man at all
Honey let me be you Salty dog…
He watched the play of sun and shadow, the arcs of spray fading into the Garden’s myrtle and banana-tree leaves in a rainbow mist.
Jackson Square was beginning to fill with people setting up small tables to sell jewellery, cookies, to display tarot cards. One of the tarot-card readers was a man wearing an embroidered vest over his bare chest, thick clumps of armpit hair, a lavender chiffon scarf at his throat, every finger bedizened with clunky turquoise rings. As he turned, the cards pattering his spiel, the woman’s husband took photo after photo.
Psychics in Sikh-like turbans sat behind crystal balls; fortune-tellers hung the fronts and sides of their tables with zodiacal charts and diagrammatic representations of the human skull phrenologically divided by heavy black lines, reminding Rob of diagrams of cows similarly divided to illustrate the various joints of beef; artists daubed; jugglers juggled; tap dancers danced; I-Ching initiates in straw coolie hats cast yarrow stalks.
A girl in a leotardish-thing, bare feet, tambourine, red hair tangling down her back, squinty in one eye, said:
“A traditional tribal dance?”
She looked vaguely insane.
They smiled at her and strolled on.
What tradition? thought Rob, What tribe?
As they wandered out of the Square, they were accosted by an urchin of nine or ten. He was one of a quartet. The other three little boys drummed on the surface of a three-legged stool, a bongo drum, and a large can with a label still on it picturing a huge strawberry.
“Betcha I can tell ya where ya got them shoes!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Betcha dollar.”
“O.K. You’re on.”
The little boy started to dance. He’d strapped onto the bottoms of his sneakers the halves of a tin can hammered flat and clackety-click-clack, with stamps, scrapes, slides, and slurs, singing to the accompaniment of his three drummers:
Betcha I can tell ya
Where ya
Got them shoe, shooes,
Betcha dollar,
Betcha dollar
Where ya
Got them shoe, shooes.
Got your shoes on ya feet
Got your feet on the street,
Betcha, betcha, betcha
An’ the street’s in Noo
Awlins, Loo—
Eeez-ee-ANNA
They wandered on, Rob stopping to scrawl in his notebook.
MANICURE & MARTINI
$5.00
A shoeshine man performing upon the shoes of those seated, throne-like, above him, juggling tins and brushes high into the air, clacking the wooden brush-backs clack-clock-clack, pirouetting, dancing back in again, stooping to spray, burnishing slip-strap-strop with a cloth strip.
THE CONSECRATED CHURCH OF CHRIST
Sordid serial bars on Bourbon Street, strip joints, meat markets; they could not find Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room.
MARIE LAVEAU’S VOODOO RENDEZVOUS
gris-gris, fetish dolls, mojos, love potions, amulets, John the Conqueroo.
RITUALS BY ARRANGEMENT
(small groups)
“Well, I don’t know,” said Tim. “If you want to peer into the future, cockerel’s blood’s probably as accurate as a Stanford Binet.”
REAL FOOD
DONE REAL GOOD
A sign that got them started again on lunch, on dishes they wanted to taste, on restaurants. Rob wanted gumbo again; he’d never tasted okra before and had been an instant convert. Tim urged boudin. They’d talked about food interminably. Oysters at Felix’s or the Acme, crawfish étouffée, shrimp rémoulade, turtle soup. They would definitely dine at Galatoire’s and Commander’s Palace. Though chicken Rosmarino at Irene’s, garlic and rosemary, also lured; they’d smelled the aroma in the street.
A malodorous strip joint, its morning doors propped open, mop and bucket. A servitor with a stiff-bristled yard brush was driving spattered vomit towards the gutter. From the joint’s dark and cavernous interior a stench of bleach.
One of its signs prompted Rob to recall for Tim an anecdote he’d read in a travel book about the South, an anecdote concerning the heir of an old and wealthy New Orleans family who fell in love with a stripper. The heir assured his parents that the girl was not at all as they imagined and urged them to come to the club to meet her. They sat and talked and it was immediately obvious that the girl was well-educated and ladylike. More, she was charming. She quite won them over. After they’d been chatting for some time, the girl got up and said, “Excuse me for a minute, y’all, I’ve got to go show ’em my monkey.”
Rob, eyed suspiciously by the yard-brush man, copied the sign into his notebook. He remembered that carrying a concealed weapon was perfectly legal in New Orleans.
WASH THE GIRL OF YOUR CHOICE
He was disappointed they would not be seeing the Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, with its above-ground tombs and extravagant, decaying family vaults, but the concierge had warned vehemently about the thugs and hoodlums from the nearby projects, the robberies, savage beatings, murders.
ST. PAUL SPIRITUAL CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST
Overall, he was beginning to feel that the city was split by poverty, overwhelmed by tourism, was becoming a freak show, the remaining local population reduced by service to servitude. But he continued to take pleasure in small things, the smell on the morning air of plums and strawberries in punnets and slatted crates delivered and waiting on the sidewalk to be taken in by corner stores.
The look of okra.
Of crawfish.
And courtyards.
He’d always liked courtyards, the idea of courtyards, a life lived inwards, elegant oases hidden behind high walls and blank, locked gates, but here and there as they walked, water sounds, a glimpse, the rill and ribble of a fountain, the smell of wet stone and ferns.
*
There was a line-up on St. Peter Street outside Preservation Hall. Tim and Rob coasted up and stood behind two German students who were talking to, and, Rob assumed, trying to chat up the two girls ahead of them.
The house band was George Lewis’ with Lewis on clarinet, Jim Robinson on trombone, Kid Howard on trumpet, Manuel Sayles on banjo, Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau on bass, Isaac “Snookum” Russell on piano, and Joe Watkins on drums. Largely the same personnel Rob had heard on records.
The Times-Picayune had advertised And Guests!
“George Lewis,” said one of the German students, “is not actually George Lewis. His birth name is Joseph Louis François Zenon.”
“So why does he call himself George Lewis?”
“That I do not know. Though he is descended from Senegalese slaves.”
; “Though?” said Rob to Tim.
“Oh,” said the girl. “Really?”
“Oh, yes,” said the student.
“Oh,” said the girl.
Rob had drunk most of a bottle of wine at dinner and was finding the conversation of this German chap tortuous.
“The Pavageau Family tomb,” he was saying, “is in Cemetery Number Two. It is beside the tomb of Marie Laveau, the dangerous Voodoo Queen. Alcide Pavageau is her nephew. Some writers say, writers of repute, that Alcide Pavageau can claim descent from the kings of France, through the Hernandez line. The Valois kings, that is, not, of course, the Bourbons. His grandmother being Theresa-Olympia Hernandez.”
“The Hernandez line?” said the girl.
“Quite so.”
“You’re joking!” she said. “Kings of France?”
“No. I am not,” he said. “Though some say this claim is not so. There is disputation. But it is so that Alcide was often called ‘Prince Alcide.’ So this question is still to be resolved.”
“But,” said the girl, “isn’t he…well… black?”
“Aha!” said the student. “But so, in part, was the Russian aristocrat Pushkin!”
“Oh,” said the girl.
“Whose maternal grandmother was also a slave.”
“Well,” said Rob, “I’d say that about clinches it.”
“From Cameroon,” concluded the student before launching into an exploration into the meaning of the word “tailgate” in describing the trombone style of Jim Robinson, an exploration involving tails, carts, the tails of carts, parades, not “carts” but—
His friend interjected, “Floats!”
Ja, Ja, floats!”
“Sorry?” said the girl.
“The trombone—because of the long—” he mimed a slide extending “so not to discommode his band, over the tailgate of his float he extends.”
Rob said, “Fuck my Aunty Ann.”
The seating was wooden benches uncomfortable and uncomfortably close together. The band was sitting on wooden chairs on a low platform. In the rear of the front line, Watkins, behind a bass drum with the words Jazz Band painted on it, and “Slow Drag” Pavageau drooped onto the double bass. His hair was a frizzy white cap like a lawyer’s wig.
“He looks so old,” said Rob.
Leaning forward from the row behind, his breath hot on Rob’s ear, the German student said, “Born 1888.”
The band was dressed variously, a couple in white shirts, others with a suit waistcoat over a shirt. The room was humming with quiet conversation and expectation. The space was so small that the band did not need microphones.
George Lewis pointed into the front row and a tubby white man stepped onto the low platform. He bent and fiddled with a black box, then stood with a hand mike.
Pavageau hoisted the double bass upright.
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, good evening y’all. Welcome to the home of New Orleans jazz. I’m Johnny Moreau of Radio Station WDSU, where for years I’ve hosted…”
Points.
“…the Living Legend… the Soul of New Orleans… Mr. George Lewis!”
Who rose and then sat.
Applause tumultuous.
He tapped his foot three/four and the band launched into Savoy Blues. Savoy Blues was followed by Perdido Street and Too Tight.
To Rob’s ear the group sounded a little ragged, not as crisp as they’d sounded on record. Kid Howard was playing a lead punchy enough but lacking flair, lacking fire. Jim Robinson added slurs and rasps and sounded… Rob was reminded of the coarse Tiger Rag record they’d listened to in Jimbo’s bedroom.
Too Tight was followed by Sweet Lorraine and Just A Closer Walk with Thee.
A group in the audience called out “Ice Cream! Ice Cream!” and Jim Robinson raised and shook his trombone above his head in acknowledgement—“Born in 1892,” whispered the student hot behind Rob’s ear—and got to his feet and clowned into what had become his party piece.
Applause was long and fervent.
As applause died down, Johnny Moreau stepped up again and switched on his hand mike. The band settled instruments into rests, except for Manuel Sayles, who moved to stand behind George Lewis with his banjo.
“Ladies and gentlemen, over the years George Lewis has perfected his expression of the soul of the blues in his intricate solo performance of the now-world-famous Burgundy Street Blues. He has written the words to accompany this lyrical masterwork, which I will have the honour of reading as he improvises around them. He is accompanied by Manuel Sayles.”
Sayles started to strum.
This was the moment Rob had been dreading.
Lewis came in, limpid.
The notes wreathed, entwined, putting Rob in mind of art nouveau decoration, foliage and flowers.
Sayles’ strumming was simply percussive.
The silence in the room was devotional.
Johnny Moreau began to intone.
Blues were born in New Orleans
They’re in the heart of each one that you meet.
Yes, the Blues were born in New Orleans
they’re in the heart of each one that you meet.
Why, they make you laugh and sing, and you’ll cry
all the way down Burgundy Street.
You know, on Toulouse and Burgundy
things may seem to you just a little bit wild
just a little bit wild
That’s on Toulouse and Burgundy
where, to you, things may seem,
just a little wild.
But each and every one is having their fun
like it should be done, even down to the smallest child.
There were four more plangent verses.
Tim’s face was drawn.
He said, “I hold you accountable for this.”
Rob turned his palms up and shrugged in apology.
The sides of Tim’s nose had turned pale, a sign usually of irritation or anger.
“This,” he said, “was even worse than Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit.”
Through the wild applause, the band was moving their chairs to one side of the stage.
Johnny Moreau said, “Ladies and gentlemen! We happen to have with us tonight in the audience honoured guests—if they could stand—
‘Sweet’ Emma Barret!
Kid Thomas!
Louis Nelson!
and
Billie and Dee-Dee Pierce!”
Dee-Dee Pierce seemed to be blind.
“And now, needing no introduction, the world-famous Peg-Leg Bates!”
“Oh, God!” said Rob, the words wrung from him. “Isn’t that the chap who was with the Louis Armstrong All Stars show in London? Did you see that? When was that? Christ! What a circus!”
“Forgive me,” said the student, “for not precisely knowing, but I believe it to have been 1955 or 1956.”
“He what?” said Tim.
“He’s got a wooden leg and he tap-dances.”
Which he did.
Interminably.
The platform was boomy.
He tap-danced to Everybody Loves My Baby, Summertime, and After You’ve Gone.
Then the band reassembled in a facing line.
They played Weary Blues, Careless Love, Trouble in Mind, then High Society featuring Lewis, again reproducing the famous Alphonse Picou clarinet solo.
“Paraphrased by Picou,” whispered the student, “from the original piccolo solo in the marching-band part of 1901.”
This was followed by a sugary I know What It Means to Miss New Orleans. Then, in what was obviously to be the evening’s finale, Joe Watkins started rolls on the snare drum, paradiddles, bass bombs, rim shots, as a parade preliminary to Oh Didn’t He Ramble.
> The band stood.
The audience clapped to the beat.
Pavageau slapped his bass
Jim Robinson essayed dance steps.
Manuel Sayles stepped out and sang.
Oh, didn’t he ramble… he rambled
Rambled all around… in and out of town
Kid Howard signalled with a sideways swerve of his horn that he was leading into the final chorus.
Oh, didn’t he ramble… he rambled
He rambled till the butcher cut him down.
*
The beaten-earth pathway soon petered out onto bare rock.
They had driven from New Orleans into Texas, up to Fort Worth, Witchita Falls, Amarillo, heading towards the Sangra de Cristo Mountains and Colorado Springs. Tim had said that he wanted to be able to say that he’d climbed in the Rockies.
They soon had to start picking their way upward, careful on surface-shattered stone. Granite and gneiss, Tim had informed him.
Rob had paid little attention to the endless miles, his mind stewing in impressions, pictures, anxieties, groping through this confusion towards some understanding of what he was being made to feel.
The squinty-eyed girl in Jackson Square, bare feet and tambourine, red hair tangling down her back.
“A tradition tribal dance?”
What tradition?
What tribe?
He thought of the George Lewis band and the ordinariness of the music, winced mentally at the crudeness of Jim Robinson, realized that he’d been giving assent to the idea of a music, that the tradition was played out, that the music was of its time and context, that it had ended when its context changed—the red lights of Storyville extinguished, the storied brothels with their piano “professors” bulldozed, replaced by now-decaying Projects. It had ended when it ended.
He pictured Johnny Moreau of WDSU on the platform stage of Preservation Hall, stooping to press buttons on the black case.
Gotcha! Employing a pair of Pye Black Boxes. Or as we in the trade say, Les Boîtes Noires. Do you want more technical…?
Chris Mawson would have found in that evening’s performance nothing of duende.
The evening had been… he rambled till the butcher cut him down… and the butcher had cut down in him, too, something shining.