Still mourning the unexpected deaths of Snooks Eaglin and Antoinette K-Doe, the New Orleans music community suffered yet another bitter blow on March 17 with the sudden passing of Eddie Bo. A dynamic singer, producer and songwriter, Bo was one of the last living links to the New Orleans “Junkers” piano style, a tradition that [...]
As one half of the most successful duo in country music history—the Louvin Brothers—Charlie Louvin began performing on the Grand Ole Opry in 1955; and, along side his brother Ira, quickly became a country music superstar. It had been a long, winding and often rocky road from their origins in musically fertile Sand Mountain, Alabama, [...]
Few musical genres have suffered as much bastardization, misinterpretation and just plain abuse as the blues. Once reserved almost exclusively for the juke joint—that back o’ town bastion of crap-shooting, corn liquor and their inevitable outcomes; knives, straight razors and the occasional revolver—it is now more commonly heard in over-priced bars festooned with ferns and [...]
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” I stammered to the tall, robust-looking gentleman I was waiting on at La Crepe Nanou Restaurant, “but I didn’t know any of you guys were still alive.”
The fact that I was face-to-face with one of my biggest musical heroes yet completely unaware of his above ground [...]
World famous jazz musicians “Cannonball” Adderley and Weather Report counted him as one of their favorites. The Geto Boys and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs sampled his songs. He’s Willie Tee, and when he passed away suddenly on September 12 of complications from colon cancer, New Orleans lost one of its most creative and talented musicians [...]
New Orleanians know longtime resident John Sinclair more as a multi-tasking guardian of the arts than a counter-culture warrior. The wide swath he cut after moving to Louisiana in the early ’90s (he now splits his time between Amsterdam and Oxford, Mississippi), included simultaneous stints as WWOZ disc jockey, poet, performer, archivist, MC and author [...]
Mac Rebennack was born in 1941. Dr. John was born in 1967. What happened in between would color his whole musical career.
“In New Orleans, everything—food, music, religion, even the way people talk and act—has deep, deep roots; and, like the tangled veins of cypress roots that meander this way and that in the swamp, everything [...]
When swamp pop singer Joe Barry finally lost his battle to numerous health problems and passed away in August 2004 he’d lived so many different lives it was hard to tell where one started and the other left off.
His 1961 smash “I’m A Fool to Care” rocketed him to a decade of stardom studded with [...]
