Larry Hamilton (1951-2011). Photo by Rick Olivier.

Larry Hamilton, a singer/songwriter who might be best known for a self-titled 1997 NYNO CD produced by Allen Toussaint, died December 28, 2011. Born in Galveston, Texas, March 23, 1951, he moved to New Orleans as a youth. At the age of seven, he began taking piano lessons with Ray Charles as his major influence. In 1965, he joined the Gladiators as vocalist often going on the road with the likes of B.B. King and Z.Z Hill.

In 1971, Hamilton cut his first single, “Gossip”, on Pelican Records produced by Wardell Quezergue. Around this time, his friend King Floyd was hot with “Groove Me,” and Floyd’s then-manager Elijah Walker signed Hamilton to a writer’s contract. In return, Hamilton wrote the minor hits “Feel Like Dynamite” and “Let Us Be” for King Floyd. He also wrote songs for Irma Thomas, Jean Knight and Johnny Adams.

Hamilton recorded a few songs at the Sea-Saint Recording Studio, but when he didn’t want to sign the contract he was offered, his voice was removed from the tracks and replaced with Johnny Adams’ vocals. Those tracks, a cover of Smokey Robinson’s “My Daughter’s Having a Baby” and his own “Stay with Me and Stay in Love,” appeared on Adams’ 1978 album, After All the Good is Gone.

Songwriting royalties didn’t quite pay all the bills, so Hamilton supplemented his income selling cars and clothing. The Larry Hamilton CD was part of an ambitious kick off to the NYNO label and garnered favorable reviews. NYNO’s existence was short-lived, so Hamilton took matters into his own hands and released Love Is? on his own label. Hamilton was a regular at the annual WWOZ Piano Night, but in recent years he began singing gospel. Hamilton is survived by a wife, Juanita, four children, and four grandchildren.

Michael Aaron in front of Rock 'n' Roll Collectibles on Decatur St.

Some guitarists like myself don’t have that fluid, natural style that some are born with, no matter how hard they practice. Michael Aaron was born with it. The first time I saw Michael was in the mid to late-‘90s at the Dragon’s Den. My band had a weekly show there with Jerri Cain Rossi opening, Soup Chain in the middle and Attack Family last. It was one of the first performances I had seen of Soup’s band. What caught my attention was the “guitarist,” Michael, who was hunched over what he called the panuella, playing an electric textural style that blew my mind. The sound was not like what you would learn at guitar lessons. It was Michael’s sound, a sound that was fluid and natural, often less structured than some would like. After the show, we met and started playing and partying together, much of it happening in his record store on Decatur Street.

Many people may know him as the guy who owned Rock ‘n’ Roll Collectibles on lower Decatur. On any given day, there would be four or five people hanging out, and there was talk of everything, especially records. If you wanted to listen to something, you could dig it out and ask Michael to put it on. Sometimes you’d have to wait, though, until he was done listening to something else. Once I had to power through an Italian version of “Jesus Christ Superstar” in order to listen to Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets.”

When I think of Michael, I prefer to think of him in what I consider the lower Decatur glory days. His Bushmills on the rocks was always ready at the Hideout, the Abbey, Turtle Bay, Molly’s, or the bar that he had been frequenting lately. Even after the store closed down, it was a bad idea to walk down lower Decatur with Michael. It would take him hours, having to stop and shoot the shit with people every 10 steps. He passed away late in December of heart issues, and I see his greatest legacy not as a musician, not as a record store owner, but as a man that made people happy with his warm, quick-witted, and loving way.

Coco Robicheaux. Photo by Jef Jaisun.

Debbie Davis stood just inside the doorway of Three Muses, singing “When I’m 64.” It was Friday night on Frenchmen Street, the day after Thanksgiving, and she held the festive crowd’s attention. “I saw the ambulance go by but I didn’t think anything of it,” she says. “Someone came into the club and told me Coco Robicheaux had just been taken in an ambulance from the Apple Barrel. His heart had stopped, and they couldn’t revive him.”

Davis told her audience what had happened. A pall came over the room, a sense of sudden, irreversible loss that overwhelmed the normally carefree Frenchmen Street revelers.

Davis said she was surprised at how much the news upset her. “I wasn’t really close, but I got to know him after the flood,” she says. “Those of us who got back first got the gigs, and he was there right away.”

The final chapter in the legend of Coco Robicheaux is the impact his loss has had on the closely-knit downtown community. His garrulous spirit led him to converse with anyone he came into contact with. As a result he leaves a much deeper mark on New Orleans than the music he left behind might suggest.

“He was a social conduit,” says Davis. “Everyone you met knew Coco as well so you always had a starting point for a conversation. He was the Kevin Bacon of Frenchmen Street—Six Degrees of Coco Robicheaux.”

It seemed like almost every time I walked down Frenchmen Street, I saw Coco Robicheaux. He liked to sit on the bench in front of the Apple Barrel, smoking a cigar and talking to passersby, or inside the bar drinking tequila. He would converse with great detail on any subject that might come up, or start in on one of his own shaggy-dog-story life experiences. He presided over a number of eccentric and unique marriage ceremonies, and even performed some hands-on faith healing exercises that his patients swore by.

Photo by Marie-Dominique Verdier.

I guess I must have seen him play at 15 different bars around the Marigny-Bywater area. Like so many New Orleans musicians of legend, he spent a lot more of his creative energy on live performance than studio work. He wanted to see the looks on the faces of the audiences. The last time I spoke to him at length, he talked about how much he enjoyed playing for prison inmates and how he wrote a song called “Sittin’ On Death Row”. Though he worked the clubs, he was the apotheosis of the New Orleans street musician—a man with a guitar and a tale to tell. Like all good storytellers, he was not afraid of adding embellishments, exaggerations or alternative interpretations of the events he described, a habit that led some to question his veracity. But even those who were skeptical of Coco’s rambles through history liked him. His friendliness and loving, giving spirit was irresistible.

Such skepticism has led some to question details of his biography, but like any American legend, the spirit he leaves behind is more important than the details. American legends are frontier characters, explorers on an uncertain journey of discovery, and Coco had that restless mystery about him.

Born Curtis Arceneaux into a Cajun/Choctaw Indian family, he gave out a number of different accounts of his biography over the years, introducing a lot of different elements without truly contradicting himself. He moved around so much, in fact, he might well have been excused for offering some confusing scenarios. Though his family was from Ascension Parish, he says he was born outside of Merced, California while his parents were vacationing. He told of a childhood working in the cane fields with migrant workers from Haiti who taught him to make reed flutes. He spent time in France traveling with his father, who was in the Air Force. He assisted his great grandmother, a hoodoo woman, in her ceremonies, an influence that runs through his music. Cousins Van and Grace Broussard were in the music business, and Curtis followed suit, playing trombone and singing in soul bands. He was playing guitar on Bourbon Street in the early ‘60s and tells of recording an album’s worth of material at Cosimo Matassa’s studio that mysteriously disappeared. After wandering out west as a migrant worker, he landed in San Francisco in time for the Summer of Love, but by ’69 he left the West Coast under something of a cloud, claiming someone had committed “terrible crimes” using his name.

From that point on he identified himself as Coco Robicheaux, a childhood nickname taken from a Louisiana folk tale about naughty children. If you did something bad, a kid’s parents likened you to the wicked Coco Robicheaux, who fell victim to the wolf monster Loup Garou. His name is a legend of its own, then, the identity of everybody’s bad self. It’s unlikely that Dr. John was referencing Curtis Arceneaux when he called out “Coco Robicheaux” during “Walk On Gilded Splinters”, but it’s possible they could have crossed paths before Mac went into involuntary exile from New Orleans himself in the mid-1960s. Calling yourself “Coco Robicheaux” is hoisting a heavy load of karmic baggage any way you look at it, but by the time he returned to New Orleans once and for all in 1992 after another legendary stay in Key West, Coco had completed his transformation into a hoodoo spiritualist. The 1994 classic Spiritland featured dense swamp rundowns like the title track, “Walking With the Spirit” and “St. John’s Eve,” which incorporated field recordings from Bogue Falaya. Frenchmen Street denizens populated the album credits, which included Irene Sage, Lenny McDaniel, Allison Miner, Nancy Buchan, Smokey Greenwell, Hart McNee, Kenny Holladay, Tommy Malone, Sonny Schneidau and Coco’s perennial sidekick Michael Sklar.

A follow-up album, Louisiana Medicine Man, plowed much of the same musical turf with some of the same musicians. The title track got considerable airplay and appeared on the benefit album for the Musicians Clinic, Get You A Healin’. Louisiana Medicine Man got the award for Best Blues Album at the 1998 Best of the Beat Awards. Hoodoo Party (2002) further codified Coco’s swamp mystic identity with tracks such as “Burn My Bones,” “Li’l Black Hen,” “Thrift Store Suit” and the title track. In the last few years, Coco put out several albums with overlapping material. Yeah, U Rite! attempts to expand his style, most successfully with the witty “Ten Commandments of the Blues.” For some reason he decided to remix most of the tracks for another version of the same record, Like I Said, Yeah, U Rite, which dropped a couple of tracks and included what would become the title tune of his final album, the covers-heavy Revelator.

For those who didn’t know him, Coco will probably be best remembered for sacrificing a chicken while on air at WWOZ on the HBO series Treme, and for his astonishingly well-attended second line on December 12. What began as a small crowd assembled in front of the Apple Barrel swelled to a throng of thousands parading down Royal Street through the French Quarter, following a brass band led by James Andrews and Uncle Lionel Batiste. The crowd sang and chanted as they marched, shouting, “Coco. Coco. Coco.”

If you didn’t know Robicheaux, well, there’s no amount of storytelling that can make up the difference. Like New Orleans itself, if you haven’t been there, you’ll never really know what people are talking about.

Coco’s second line was sandwiched in between two musical tributes to Frenchmen Street heroes which featured many of the same musicians. On Sunday night there was a benefit for Kenny Holladay’s family at Check Point Charlie. Monday after the second line revelers gathered at House of Blues for a free concert. Before he played, John Mooney said, “He got both feet in Spiritland now!” Lynn Drury went to the House of Blues just to be there, “out of love for him,” she says. “He was beautiful. He touched a lot of people. When I was coming up he was always a fixture, hanging out in the street, talking in front of the Apple Barrel. He connected everybody. He had time for everybody. I wasn’t invited to play, but when I showed up backstage, they said ‘You’re on next!’ It was a beautiful surprise. I hope we don’t have to wait until someone else dies to feel that spirit again. I learned something from that. I’m going to try to live up to that from now on. I felt I was in touch with something bigger than all of us.”

Anders Osborne was at both tributes, playing with Billy Iuso and with Andy J. Forest, who’d written a new song for Kenny Holladay and Coco:

Sometimes I imagine them both walking down the street
Nowhere left to go, no one left to meet
Blues in other rooms filter down from other dreams
Their spirits are on every corner down here in New Orleans

Billy Diamond, who was instrumental in the launch of Fats Domino’s career, passed away in Los Angeles, October 20 from natural causes. He was 95.

Diamond was born in New Orleans on October 5, 1916, and grew up on Louisiana Avenue. “Louis Armstrong actually gave me a trumpet in 1930, but I never learned to play it,” recalled Diamond in 1999. “I used to make guitars out of screen wire and basses out of old inner tubes tied to washtubs. That’s how I learned to play bass. Later I got a Kay bass and learned from Tom Copelin and Marvin Kimble. They were Dixieland players.”

Diamond served in the military during World War II. When the war ended, he made music his profession.

“My first band was Billy Diamond and the Mellow Riff Trio,” he said. “We worked a lot around the Ninth Ward. I was pretty good about selling the band.”

Diamond’s first break occurred in 1947 when the band became part of the “Dawn Patrol,” a WWEZ radio program sponsored by Jax beer. That same year, he formed a new band that, beside himself, consisted of Frank Parker, Harrison Verret and an untested piano player, Antoine Domino.

“I knew Fats from hanging out at a grocery store. He reminded me of Fats Waller and Fats Pichon. Those guys were big names and Antoine—that’s what everybody called him then—had just got married and gained weight. I started calling him ‘Fats’ and it stuck.”

“Dave [Bartholomew] heard about us at the Hideaway, and one night he brought Lew Chudd [owner of Imperial Records] down there. Obviously, they liked what they heard because they signed Fats.”
Bartholomew used his own band on Domino’s recordings, but Diamond’s Solid Senders backed Fats in concert. Diamond also served as road manager, and when Domino’s career began to skyrocket in the mid-1950s, he put the bass down and became Domino’s full-time road manager.

Diamond worked with Domino until 1962, when he opted for a career change. When in Los Angeles, Domino played at the 5/4 Ballroom. Diamond befriended the owner and was hired to manage the club. He did so until 1969, and then got into the record promotion business. However, Diamond never forgot his New Orleans roots and visited often, rekindling old friendships.

Diamond is survived by a wife and two daughters.

Kenny Holladay. Photo by Ross Hallen.

I was sitting on one of the benches on Jackson Square, playing with Mickey “Slewfoot” when Kenny Holladay ambled up with his gig bag and said hi to Mickey, all the while eyeing my 1930s wooden-body National.

“How you doing? That’s a nice guitar.”

“You want to check it out?”

Kenny’s reputation as one of the hottest slide guitar players in town had proceeded him. I’d seen him fronting the Big Mess Band on the Square. I was in awe of his talent.

Kenny fished a little mandolin pick out of his pocket, sat down and started messing with my axe. Mickey strummed along. After a few bars, a dollar fell into Mickey’s case. Then another and another. Kenny looked up.

“Well, uh, I guess maybe I should play my own guitar if we got people paying.” Kenny pulled a battered, silver Dobro out of a tattered leather case and started playing again.

“You know how to play a mambo, man?”

“Uh, no.” My first lesson had begun.

This was nearly 20 years ago, when Tuba Fats was still playing the Square. Before retro swing bands were a dime a dozen. Before Frenchmen Street was a big deal. Kenny Holladay helped make that neighborhood a music destination, gigging at Check Point Charlie and the old Dragon’s Den. He played with a lot of bands: Coco Robicheaux, Butch Trivette, Andre Williams—too many to list. He was a mentor to scores of young musicians. Generally content to play locally, Holladay only toured occasionally and with reluctance. He is shamefully under-recorded, but his music touched thousands, and not just in New Orleans.

Kenny grew up in California, where he was given his first guitar by his grandfather. According to a cousin, dyslexia prevented a traditional music education, so he “invented music from scratch.” (Discussing music theory with Kenny was a mind-bending experience.) Kenny had a love for modifying and tinkering with his guitars. It was also a necessity, as his use of heavy-gauge strings and high-tension tunings led to the demise of many an instrument.

During most of the ’80s he lived to Cambridge, Massachusetts, moving to New Orleans at the end of the decade. How and when Kenny developed his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure recordings, or his truly unique style (part piano, part pedal steel?) I do not know. Perhaps he started playing ridiculously fast slide guitar merely to keep up the circulation in his hands while playing in Harvard Square on cold winter nights. (As author/musician Elijah Wald put it, “a million notes a minute—but he always swore he knew what he was hitting and if you could tape it and slow it down it would all make sense.”)

Kenny was irreverent. Garish (if authentic) Hawaiian shirts. Breaking into Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” or Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots” in the middle of a blues set; literally crying, sobbing, moaning an entire blues song till his audience (and band) would laugh so hard they were in tears. But Kenny could play real slow, and he had soul. His versions of “Sleepwalk” and “Rainy Night in Georgia” were show stoppers; and check YouTube for his duet with Andy J. Forest on “As the Years Go Passing By” from their Hogshead Cheese album. Songs like this give you an insight into the man who was more concerned with the welfare of his wife and daughter and his friends than his status and his career.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the last few years, Kenny had kept a low profile, playing mostly at the tiny Apple Barrel, both with his own outfit and as lead guitarist with the Louisiana Hellbenders. He continued gigging throughout his struggle with cancer, which finally cut him down on the afternoon of Monday, October 31, 2011.

One day, long before I met Kenny, a commercial fisherman and musical hobbyist named Robbie Phillips discovered the diminutive guitarist playing outside the old Coop in Harvard Square; Phillips promptly quit his job and moved to town to play washtub bass with Kenny. In early September 2005, my head reeling, just a few days after evacuating my home in New Orleans, I was answering the phone in my parents’ house in Boston. The voice on the other end was deep, nicotine-inflected, with an alien, Southern Massachusetts accent. “My name is Robbie Phillips. They call me ‘Washtub.’ My friend Kenny told me to look you up.”

Still looking out for me. Bless you brother. Go in peace.

On January 12, there will be a benefit for Holladay’s family at d.b.a. starting at 6 p.m. and going into the night. There will be a second line for Holladay on January 14; watch OffBeat.com for details.

Wardell Quezergue. Photo by Greg Miles.

On the bright late summer morning of September 12 the crème fraiche façade of Corpus Christi-Epiphany Church gleamed optimistically amid this still-blighted Seventh Ward neighborhood along St. Bernard Avenue. Inside the packed church, many of the surviving players from the glory days of New Orleans R&B gathered to send off Wardell Quezergue, an arranger so gifted he was able to transform New Orleans music using only a pen and his signature instrument, a tuning fork.

Quezergue’s funeral didn’t generate the massive public event that peers like Ernie K-Doe and Snooks Eaglin precipitated, but it was impossible to ignore the number of musicians who turned out to pay their respects.

“I can look out and see all the faces of the artists and musicians who are here today,” said Rev. Godwin Akpan, who celebrated the Mass, “and know that his life has not been in vain.”

Most of the musicians on hand had personal as well as professional ties to Quezergue. Deacon John delivered a tribute to Quezergue during the ceremony, tracing a relationship that goes back to childhood.

Wardell’s Finest

After Quezergue’s passing, OffBeat put together a six-hour playlist on Spotify of songs he recorded or produced, and people still told us about songs we missed. It would take an entire issue to write about all of his noteworthy tracks, but Dan Phillips from the blog Home of the Groove has selected some tracks that highlight facets of his work.

“The first time I met Wardell Quezergue was when I was a little boy,” he said, placing Quezergue alongside Allen Toussaint, Dave Bartholomew and Harold Battiste as the masterminds of New Orleans R&B. “My momma took me over to St. Mary’s Academy where my sisters played in the band. He was the band director. Later on I got to meet him professionally because Wardell wrote the string parts and did the piano playing on my very first recording session, ‘When I’m with You’ on the RIP label way back in 1962. He also did the arrangements on my last recording session, Deacon John’s Jump Blues and he can be seen conducting the orchestra at the live concert at the Orpheum. And also I’ve had the privilege of playing with Wardell on many of the recording sessions that he produced and arranged.

“Wardell was truly an inspiration and a tremendous asset to the music community,” Deacon John said. “He always tried to help somebody. He would never turn down a project. He gave his whole life to the promotion and promulgation of New Orleans culture. You can hear his signature on all of the recordings he produced and arranged. Wardell, he wouldn’t listen to the radio. He told me ‘I don’t want to listen to the radio because it’s going to mess up my mind. I don’t listen because it might make me think of that when I’m doing an arrangement, and I don’t want what I write to be like nothing else. I want to be influenced by what I hear in the real world.

“He was a prolific writer and arranger, one of the best minds this city has ever produced, and he came from such humble beginnings. He was born and raised in the Seventh Ward just like I was. Wardell was the Recording Secretary at the Negro Musicians Union when I first became a member in 1958. He was a lifelong member of the Musicians Union and he finally got to see me be President. I could talk about Wardell all night long but he was just a really nice guy. He never raised his voice and he knew how to get things done. Everybody in the house respected him.”

Mac Rebennack, who played in Wardell’s band the Royal Dukes of Rhythm long before he adopted the pseudonym of Dr. John, looked particularly solemn in a dark pinstripe suit as he left the church, stopping to greet his friend Smokey Johnson, who was seated in a wheelchair just outside the front door. Johnson was the drummer in Quezergue’s band when Mac played guitar with them.

Wardell Quezergue sheet music courtesy of Scott Billington.

“Me and Smokey and George French was his rhythm section right before I got shipped out of New Orleans,” said Rebennack. “We worked whatever gigs Wardell had and a lot of sessions with him. It was all cool. We backed Otis Redding when he came through and he had that first record he did, ‘These Arms of Mine.’ He was just starting out. Wardell didn’t even remember that. It cracks me up—somebody else said after all the people that the Royal Dukes of Rhythm backed up over a lot of years, it ain’t gonna be like he’s gonna remember one act out of a gajillion. He didn’t remember when I told him.”

Rebennack was filled with thoughts about Wardell, ranging from recording “Big Chief” with Professor Longhair (“Fess had never did a record where he did an overdub”) to a Joe Tex session the two did together that was never released, but which Rebennack recalled as one of the best things he ever did, to a track Wardell wrote for a session with Dave Bartholomew’s band.

“It was called ‘Concerto for Alto Sax’,” said Rebennack. “It was my favorite cut on that record. It just blew me away; Wardell just blew me away as an arranger. I played that record for two great arrangers, Slide Hampton and Joe Scott. Joe did all of the great stuff for Bobby Bland and Junior Parker at Duke and Peacock, and Slide Hampton did all that stuff with the great jazz bands. They both said he should be writing for Basie. They was right.”

Quezergue’s greatest moment with Dr. John may well have been the Grammy-winning Goin’ Back to New Orleans album, which opens with a jaw-dropping arrangement of Rebennack’s “Litanie Des Saints” inspired by Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Bamboula.”

“Wardell was like so special and so inspirational,” he said. “He was so spiritual in every direction; he was just an amazing cat. That’s the only record I ever had that was selling a whole lot of records in Africa and all around the Caribbean and all kind of places because it was a spiritual song. It was a spiritual piece and every time everything was done, it’s like it started from there.

Photo by Greg Miles.

“Everything I did with Wardell was a learning experience, from the stuff he did with the Neville Brothers, anybody we worked with, Earl King—it was always something special, something unique, it was always different. You never knew what to expect out of Wardell’s head. He’d take his tuning fork and write a chart; you never knew what to expect comin’ outta that chart. Even when he couldn’t see, when he was losing his eyesight, Wardell would dictate parts straight up. It was an amazing thing. His mind was amazing. He wrote scores in his head. I never did like that jacket for him ‘the Creole Beethoven’ because to me he was way more of anything than anybody could put a word on.”

When Dr. Ike Padnos asked Dr. John to play his old guitar-based material at the Ponderosa Stomp, Rebennack only agreed to do it when Padnos promised him Quezergue would be the arranger.

“I don’t think Mac was too enthused at the beginning, but he was happy with it at the end,” said Padnos as he joined the second line after the funeral. “Wardell had this uncanny ability when he was at a rehearsal. He could have the biggest band and he could always spot that one wrong note and he always had this tactful ability to point that out to the musician in a way that they wouldn’t get embarrassed but they understood what they had to do to get it right. It was remarkable to watch him take a song and shape it: Get this down. Okay, trumpets come in. Okay trombones. Gotta play that louder! You could just hand him anything and he knew what to do with it. How do you take ‘Morgus the Magnificent’ or ‘Storm Warning’ and arrange it for a big band? Wardell could do it.”

The second line after the funeral was a fitting tribute to Quezergue’s influence, a collection of many of the city’s greatest brass band musicians, including members of the Treme Brass Band, Preservation Hall, the Baby Boyz Brass Band and others. Roger Lewis was on baritone saxophone, Carl LeBlanc played banjo, Kermit Ruffins, Charlie Miller and James Andrews joined the trumpeters, Matt Perrine added sousaphone and the Bonerama front line played trombones.

“Wardell changed the way New Orleans music sounds,” said Mark Mullins, who writes arrangements for Bonerama. “I learned at a young age that an arranger’s stamp on a song can make or break it. Wardell did these treatments to New Orleans classics that are like a lesson book in how to take a great song and make it even greater.”

Quezergue’s total commitment to his art inspired the greatest loyalty in his musical peers.

“Any time Wardell called me for anything, I was gonna be there,” said Dr. John. “I don’t care what it was.”

His last call from Wardell was for a session with Will Porter, the last recording Quezergue worked on before his death.

“Wardell approved the final mixes of our project on Sunday, August 25,” said Porter, whose words about Quezergue’s historical importance at the funeral had members of the crowd shouting encouragement. “He cried and told me it was his best work. The tracks feature Leo Nocentelli, two duets with Dr. John, Bettye LaVette, Jimmy Haslip of the Yellowjackets, Barbara Lewis and the re-formed Womack Brothers. Twelve of the tracks are Bunchy Johnson’s last work. Doug Belote plays on the rest.”

Though Porter’s album is his last recording, Quezergue finished dictating the score of a final project within hours of his death, a second Creole Mass. As the mourners dispersed, saying final goodbyes, the church bells rang 12 times.

“He wrote a Passion of Christ thing,” said Dr. John. “That was kinda his goodbye. I really think there were some weird connections to all of that.”

Benny Spellman, who accounted for the wonderful two-sided 1962 national hit “Lipstick Traces” b/w “Fortune Teller,” and supplied the baritone interjections on Ernie K-Doe’s number one hit “Mother- In-Law,” died June 3 at an assisted living facility in Pensacola, Florida, of respiratory failure. He was 79.

“Benny was a great entertainer,” confirms Irma Thomas, who recorded at Minit Records with Spellman and performed at several of the same venues with him. “Outgoing, gregarious, always upbeat—that was Benny. He was constantly in motion—he wasn’t the kind of guy to stand still on stage.

“I really got to know Benny when we did rehearsals [for recording sessions] at Allen [Toussaint]’s house on Earhart Boulevard. Benny and I did a lot of backup singing on sessions for Allen. We got $18, $20 a session. We played a lot of the same places, especially Fraternity Row on Broadway. The fraternity would book a local band and all the bands knew our material. Normally on a job like that, there would be three local artists. Often it was me, Benny and somebody else.”

Born in Pensacola on December, 11, 1931, Spellman loved sports first, and he earned a football scholarship to Southern University at Baton Rouge. While there, he exercised another interest—singing. Spellman sat in with several local jazz and R&B groups and won several talent contests. After graduation, Spellman was drafted and spent two years in the army.

When his army hitch ended in 1959, he returned to Pensacola. By chance, he ran into Huey Smith and the Clowns, who had just wrecked their bus and were stranded. Spellman gave the group a lift to New Orleans, but rather than return to Florida immediately, he decided to stick around New Orleans awhile and got involved in the music scene. He soon became a regular at the Dew Drop Inn, often sitting in with the Dew Drop house band, Edgar Blanchard and the Gondoliers. In 1960, Spellman auditioned for the fledgling Minit label (the same audition that produced Aaron Neville, Lee Diamond, Jessie Hill and Willie Harper) and was signed by Joe Banashak and Larry McKinley, who headed up the label.

“Benny was by far the most popular rhythm and blues artist in New Orleans [at the time],” said the late Joe Banashak in 1984. “He was always working, even when nobody else could find a job. He had those teenagers mesmerized. He would shot boogers at them and they’d still eat him up. Benny would have two or three gigs a night and he’d go from gig to gig on the NOPSI bus.”

Spellman was also valuable around the studio.

“He was always willing to help out,” added Banashak. “He would sing backup vocals when he wasn’t scheduled for his own session. I remember breaking up a fight because he and K-Doe were arguing over who was responsible for making “Mother-In-Law” a hit. (Ironically, Spellman died 50 years to the week “Mother-In-Law” reached the top of the charts.) But most of the time things were pretty professional.”

Spellman was paired with Allen Toussaint, who was Minit’s house producer. His first first two singles stalled, but Spellman, Toussaint and Banashak’s perseverance paid off when “Fortune Teller” and “Lipstick Traces” rose to No. 80 on the national pop charts and number 28 in the R&B charts. Musicologists have theorized that Minit might have realized higher sales figures had the songs been issued separately, but over two decades later, Banashak still never had any second thoughts about pairing the two classics. Spellman followed his hit with “Every Now and Then,” which was very much styled after “Mother-In-Law,” but he didn’t have the same success.

When Minit folded in 1963, Spellman had a brief stint at Watch Records, where he recorded the memorable “Slow Down Baby (Don’t Drive So Fast).” When Toussaint got back from the army, he convinced Spellman to sign with ALON Records (owned by Banashak), where they had local success with “Word Game.” Atlantic leased the single, but it narrowly missed the national charts. Spellman continued to perform and record sporadically on a handful of local labels, but by 1968, the local R&B scene was on life support. Gigs were hard to find, so Spellman took a job working for the local Miller beer distributor. He remained semi-active as an entertainer, though, and performed annually at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Spellman returned to Pensacola in the 1980s during a period when his recordings were being reissued on both sides of the ocean. The following decade, he was back in New Orleans. Spellman often sat in with the Iguanas, who recorded a slowed-down, haunting version of “Fortune Teller” in 1993 and “Benny’s Cadillac,” a new song that tells the story of the wheels being stolen off of his car while it was parked outside the Maple Leaf.

Sadly, a stroke felled Spellman around 1996 and he was placed in an assisted living home. Spellman was elected to the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2009, an honor which he deeply appreciated. Benny Spellman is buried in his hometown of Pensacola.

John Berthelot, composer, arranger and founder of Great Southern Records passed away on Wednesday, February 23. Funeral services were private.

Born at Touro Infirmary, Berthelot began taking clarinet lessons in grade school and majored in music education at Loyola University in New Orleans. He became a member of the Contours, playing saxophone, and backing artists such as Smiley Lewis and Ernie K-Doe. After earning his masters degree in music composition, Berthelot published his Opus 1—Sonatina for French Horn and Piano.

After finishing his military service, Berthelot started his own record label, Great Southern. Artists recording for Great Southern included Spencer Bohren and the Pfister Sisters. Berthelot’s success eventually led to running the Jazz Fest record tent for nine years.

Berthelot’s compositions and arrangements of classical, jazz and popular music include his 1967 classical composition Essay for Orchestra recorded by the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra; his jazz composition “Cityscape: New Orleans” recorded by the Eastman Jazz Ensemble; and the swamp pop composition “I’m from the South.” The broad range of Berthelot’s interests as a composer, producer and label head are evident on last year’s CD Compositions, Arrangements and Productions of a New Orleans Musician.

Herman Ernest. Photo by Nunu Zomot.

[Updated] During the recording of Dr. John’s Tribal album, James Demaria videotaped Herman Ernest overdubbing rhythm tracks. “This is the updated version of New Orleans funk,” he explained, adding a pattern on a cowbell. “This separates the men from the sidemen.” He was partially talking trash for the camera, but he was also someone who’d know. Ernest, who passed away March 6 at age 50 after battling cancer, is best known for playing drums with Dr. John for 40 years. In that role and on sessions with the Neville Brothers and Kermit Ruffins, among others, he demonstrated himself to be the quintessential New Orleans drummer. When Labelle cut 1975’s Nightbirds with Allen Toussaint, Ernest suggested that they change the feel of “Lady Marmalade” from disco to funk, explaining, “The purpose of them coming down here was to get a New Orleans groove.”

Fans and friends wrote OffBeat.com to remember Ernest. Harold Brown, the original drummer for the funk group War, wrote, “When we had the Crescent City Drumming Camp, he was the one that the kids looked up to as there [sic] mentor and protector. Even though I was a drummer myself with major hits under my belt, he was a much better drummer than I was.” Jesse Moore remembered him as “a big bear of a funny, sweet man with a great laugh. He told me some of the best Booker stories I’ve ever heard.” Horn player Lou Marini wrote, “At the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Blues Brothers Band was getting ready to split. I spotted Herman outside and invited him in. He did five minutes in the doorway of the bus and just killed everyone.”

Ernest’s last gig was December 30, 2010, and shortly before that he did a session with Paul Sanchez for the Nine Lives album. “I went to Herman and asked how he was and he said it only hurt when he wasn’t playing music,” Sanchez wrote. “We tracked one more song and I let him go home with a hug and much love. Before he left the studio, sweating in pain, he sang those lines for me, “Yes, boys, it hurts. It hurts bad, but it could have been worse.”

Updated April 1, 2011

Our birth date for Ernest was incorrect. He was born August 12, 1951.

Sherman Washington. Photo courtesy of the Zion Harmonizers.

For 70 years, Sherman Washington, Jr. led the Zion Harmonizers, helping bring gospel music out of the churches and into the larger music community. Washington, who passed away on March 14 at the age of 85, joined the Zion Harmonizers shortly after they were organized in 1939 by the late Pastor Benjamin Maxon. Within two years, Washington had taken the group to the center of the city’s dynamic gospel music community.

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Founder and Producer Quint Davis worked with Washington to start the Gospel Tent. “You had Mahalia Jackson, who was sort of the Louis Armstrong of the gospel world,” he says. “What Sherman did was bring the entire gospel community and the whole range of styles to the attention of the world.

“I don’t think, going back into the ’70s, and ’80s, that there was any other festival that was featuring in a central role traditional gospel music out of the church,” Davis says. “We helped to produce the tent, but Sherman got the music.”

But for Washington, the music always served a higher purpose. Brazella Briscoe, his successor as President of the Zion Harmonizers, said his mentor had limitless energy when it came to spreading the good news through the music. “On his way into church or whatever function we attended, everything stopped and the people greeted him,” Briscoe says.

Washington would play four or five shows per week with the Zion Harmonizers and put on church functions every weekend, Briscoe said, all while holding down a day job with Boh Brothers Construction for 36 years. Washington, who was born in Thibodeaux on December 13, 1925, is survived by his wife Shirley Mae Washington, and his children Sherman Washington, Byron Washington, Myron Boyd, Avery Boyd, Denise Washington Jolly, JaNice Scott and Ardine Boyd. He also leaves behind 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

The Zion Harmonizers are celebrating their 72nd anniversary this year. “I decided not to cancel anything or postpone anything,” Briscoe says. “We’re going to go straight on through, and the people will be able to enjoy his life in some form or another.”