In his Nobel acceptance lecture, novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez asserted that the magical realism that characterized life in Macondo in One Hundred Years Of Solitude wasn’t that magical. “We have had to ask but little of imagination,” he said. “Our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, [...]

One of the high points of this year’s South By Southwest festival was the second live performance by the New Orleans Social Club. Last October, a number of New Orleans’ musicians-in-exile met in Austin to record Sing Me Back Home, an album of cover songs speaking to the post-Katrina experience. As great as it was [...]

I’m writing you from the foot heels of a destructive woman named Katrina. The relationship with any woman comes with the excitement of the initial experience and goes with the repercussions of the convergence of forces. Whether or not the relationship sustains or wanes, the event is usually life-changing. In this case, Katrina flooded my [...]

We all know well the trials that have beset New Orleans over these past few months. Most of us appreciate the immeasurable contributions that the city has made to America’s music. We’ve also tracked the survival of the city’s most famous artists: Fats Domino, rescued from his rooftop; Allen Toussaint, holed up in a hotel [...]

I was in Hawaii when my sister called in a panic to tell me that it looked like a hurricane was going to hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast in the next 36 hours, and we had to figure out what to do about daddy NOW. My father lives in a nursing home in Houma, Louisiana. [...]

Today, in Nashville, I have met up with musician friends of mine from the band Beatin Path who had been displaced from their homes in New Orleans. We are having rice and beans at Mike’s apartment, cooked by his wife, who has taken the kids to Wal-Mart to get clothes. After dinner, we stand on [...]

It is impossible to have any sustained interest in the music of North America without constantly tripping over seminal figures who came from, settled in, or drifted through the venerable port city of New Orleans. It has been as impossible this last month to turn on the television or read a newspaper or listen to [...]

Every day after hurricanes Katrina and Rita brings another hint that nothing will be the same in New Orleans. President George W. Bush said, “We’ll not just rebuild, we’ll build higher and better.” Experts talk about bringing the Orleans Parish School District into the 21st century, and of instituting revolutionary, community-based health care; they contemplate [...]

The last notes of “You Are My Sunshine” hang in the piney air like beads of dew on a spiderweb. Out of the corner of my eye I see my new pal Jenna wipe her cheek. Since our acquaintance is that day newly minted, I pretend not to notice her show of vulnerability, assuming people [...]

On Saturday morning the local Masonic Lodge’s breakfast tractor chugs through the Pecan Grove, pulling a flatbed trailer and a crew selling coffee and donuts. I’ve been waking up to that tractor every third weekend of September since the beginning of high school. Like a good folk song, the morning campground script at the Walnut [...]