As the man himself was fond of saying, there ain’t but one Ernie K-Doe. And there ain’t but one K-Doe biography, Ben Sandmel’s “Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans,” which this week was one of two books to be named Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

Anyone who attended Jazz Fest or frequented his Mother-in-Law Lounge before K-Doe’s death in 2001 will remember him doing “Mother-in-Law” and “T’Ain’t It the Truth,”, reminding the crowd of his greatness at every turn. Sandmel, who coordinates the Music Heritage Stage at Jazz Fest and has contributed to OffBeat, spent years writing and researching the book, interviewing both K-Doe and his late wife Antoinette.

 

“He represented so much of New Orleans culture,” Sandmel says. “The larger than life K-Doe is part of it, and his importance as a figure of grass roots surrealism, a beloved figure in that sense. Putting his music on the side for a moment, he was a great motivational speaker. He totally believed in himself, like ‘I got some cockiness that people can borrow.’ He was always preaching that you should believe in yourself and not let people define you in some narrow way.”

But as Sandmel points out, the personality sometimes obscured how good K-Doe really was. “I think the part that sometimes gets looked over is that he was also a really good musician, a top-tier New Orleans R&B singer. His legacy of recordings in my opinion is up there with the best work of New Orleans R&B, up there with Fats and all those people who were recording in the late ‘40s through the mid ‘60s. If he had just been a character, that wouldn’t have been the contents of a book. Or if he had been a guy who had a hit record. It was the combination of those two things and his whole career and life with its great ups and its horrible downs, how he never gave up.”

Even death wasn’t enough to keep K-Doe down. “Here Come the Girls,” a previously-obscure track he’d cut with Allen Toussaint in 1970, became a belated hit when it was on a British TV commercial in 2007 (Toussaint has performed the song ever since). And the notorious K-Doe statue began making personal appearances when the man himself wasn’t around; it graced our cover in 2006. This image is one of many that can now be found in Sandmel’s book.

Purchase Ben Sandmel’s “Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans”