Allen Toussaint wasn’t just giving people what they wanted when he played “Yes We Can Can” at Austin’s Auditorium Shores during South By Southwest this year. The Godfather of New Orleans R&B knew that the song’s exhortation — “Now is the time for all good men to get together…and try to find peace within without stepping on one another” — would be heard in light of his hometown’s struggle to resurrect itself after Hurricane Katrina.
Toussaint also must’ve known that some would hear the admonition upon which the song’s chorus hinges, “If we want to get together we can work it out,” as a word of judgment upon those who could have done more to hasten relief efforts in New Orleans but didn’t — indeed, as a funk-fueled word of judgment upon those who could’ve done more to prevent the damage from being so catastrophic, particularly for the city’s poor and working-class residents.
New Orleans Social Club, an aggregation of Crescent City luminaries who shared the stage with Toussaint at SXSW, convey similar messages on their new album, Sing Me Back Home. Over the course of a glorious hour of music, they do just what their record’s title advertises: Led by musical director George Porter Jr. (fellow Meter Leo Nocentelli plays guitar), they revisit a home, lost in the flood, in sore need help of rebuilding.
The album’s first five tracks offer a blueprint for how to get the job done. Sounding an aptly prophetic note, the record opens with a chunky funk revival of the Impressions’ 1968 hit “This Is My Country”. “We survived a hard blow and I want you to know that you must face us at last,” Cyril Neville warns, before asking: “And I know you’ll give consideration/Shall we perish unjust or live equal as a nation?” Underscoring issues of class more than those of race the way the Impressions’ original did, Neville shouts, “This is my country and I want it back!”
A fatback take of CCR’s “Fortunate Son” follows, rendering the issue of haves and have-nots explicit. “I ain’t no millionaire’s son/I want to go home, y’all,” rages Neville’s nephew Ivan. Egging him on during the vamp, the players interpolate the undertow from the Meters’ “Africa” as the singers slip “New Orleans,” another sort of “mother land,” into the title catchphrase: “Take me back to…”
Next comes a double dose of uplift — first in the form of Irma Thomas and Marcia Ball’s strolling inducement for people to keep their heads up, then via Dr. John’s roiling, declamatory reading of “Walkin’ To New Orleans”. Capping this opening handful of tracks is “Hey Troy, Your Mama’s Calling”, a Mardi Gras strut led by Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. It might be an instrumental, but “Hey Troy” all but screams “Yes We Can Can”.
The rest of Sing Me Back Home echoes these themes, whether it’s Willie Tee’s exilic lament “First Taste Of The Hurt”, the Subdudes’ juking entreaty to “Make A Better World”, or the Sixth Ward All-Star Brass Band’s “Where Y’at?” The last of these, an ebullient medley of second-line standbys, evinces liturgical sweep, from the invocation “Jesus On The Mainline” to the Jordan-bound benediction “When The Saints Go Marching In”.
The gospel-style call-and-response between tracks is inspired throughout, but nowhere as much as in the album’s wondrous middle passage. A revival of the Meters’ “Loving You Is On My Mind” gets this segment going (the “you” here referring to New Orleans), followed by words of reassurance, by way of West Side Story, from Henry Butler. “There’s a place for us…Hold my hand and we’re halfway there,” Butler promises. He leaves it to the Mighty Chariots Of Fire to drive the rest of the way home, but also to remind us, a la the great Dorothy Love, that “99 ½ Won’t Do”.
