“The Green Room is smokin’ and the Plaza’s burnin’ down, Throw my baby out the window, let those joints burn down, All because it’s Carnival time, It’s Carnival time, Oh well it’s Carnival time, Everybody’s havin’ fun.” —Al Johnson and Joe Ruffino Even in the heavy company of seasonal favorites like Professor Longhair’s “Go To [...]
He started out playing bass for Buddy Holly on that fatal final tour; spent the ’60s fighting the Nashville establishment for a sound of his own and finally persevered and recorded the flashpoint of the Outlaw country movement, 1973’s Honky-Tonk Heroes. Only Waylon Jennings’ untimely death in 2002 could silence a distinctive voice that simultaneously [...]
Headed up by a trio of self-described “recovering record collectors,” the Numero Group prides itself on throwing the spotlight on the unknown, from Belize’s curious stew of jazzy soul to the rockin’ hillbilly gospel of Fern Jones. To Numero, the music and the mystique are of a piece, and just as Jones proved to be [...]
It’s been over a decade since honky-tonk visionary Wayne “The Train” Hancock began criss-crossing the country in a seemingly endless loop of one-nighters, spreading his jazz-infused hillbilly gospel far and wide, all the while picking up plenty of first-hand inspiration for the musical travelogue that serves as his recorded career. Writing almost solely about the [...]
One day in 1955, 15-year old Doug Ardoin sat down behind a make-shift drum kit, twisted the harmonica rack that he’d fashioned from a coat-hanger around his neck, plugged in his electric guitar and proceeded to blast away, one-man-band style. Ardoin’s stage may have been the outdoor kitchen of his mother’s house in Eunice, but [...]
Earl Stanley sits in the living room of his Metairie home, flanked by two splashy movie posters starring the East Side Kids and Cesar Romero. On the coffee table in front of him is a photo album more than half a foot thick, populated by musical compatriots at least as fascinating as any black and [...]
There are huge chunks of New Orleans’ musical past that seem destined to remain shrouded in mystery, yet none has proven more strangely elusive than its once-fertile, now-forgotten hillbilly music scene. Nearly every clue of the culture has vanished in such a way that it’s almost as if it never existed, which is perhaps one [...]
