This Is My Life

This is my city.

This is my life.

This is where I make my livelihood.

The things that have happened to me here have seemed like things that I had only been called to witness once I had endured certain rites of passage. At such a point that I had been ready for them; having paid the price.

They were a long time coming.

I was as scared as I have ever been in my life when I first came here; fearing that I would be chewed up and spit out by world class musicians who would scoff at my entire life's achievements, and tell me to go back to wherever I came from and practice, practice, practice, and then maybe try again, in another 5 years or so.

When I was in 6th grade, we had a Social Studies book which was divided into about 28 chapters, each one profiling a different US city.

It probably started with Atlanta, and ran through Washington, D.C.

There were stock photos and each chapter was divided into categories like "Climate," "Population," "Industry, "history," etc.

This was 1971.

It was a pretty big and heavy book; of coffee table dimensions.

But, we worked our way through it, in alphabetical order.

It gave me a chance to dream about other places.

Detroit was situated along the banks of the Detroit River, and was known for automobiles, type of thing. There were colored people in the photos.

There were no colored people in my home town. I certainly had never seen one in real life.

We all were required, at the end of the year, to do kind of a book report, choosing one of the cities, in order to give our classmates an expanded view of it.

My book was kind of creased in the middle, with the binding kind of split there, and would probably fall open if you were to drop it on its spine to a chapter right in the middle, after the one on Minneapolis, (textiles, dairy, Lutherans) and right before New York (Wall Street, the statue of liberty, the great museum of art) which was the chapter on New Orleans.

I kept returning to it. It didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book. Sometimes I would just take the book out and flip to the New Orleans chapter and look at it; again.

The New Orleans Saints had just come into the National Football League, and they sucked. I thought they were lousy football players and that Archie Manning probably couldn't throw a football 20 yards. Such was the mind of an 11 year old.

And, their half time band was a marching band with what I didn't know yet were sousaphones and horns and, so far from the Beatles and electric guitars that I was beside myself; rolling my eyes.

But I kept going back and staring at the photos of creole people holding pots of boiling crawfish and smiling.

I wasn't sure I liked it.

But, I kept staring over and over again at it.

And, as the mishaps in my life mounted, I kept being drawn closer and closer. Beginning with a decision to move to Florida, and then winding up a busker in St. Augustine, which was kind of like the minor league farm system for New Orleans, with many of the musicians there making the trek for Mardi Gras, before returning, because "It's awful hard to make a living there, you have to be awfully good; you might get to play somewhere on a Tuesday night for a couple hours, but you can't live off that..."

Until I was finally in Mobile, Alabama, an 8 hour freight train ride away.

I envisioned it to be something very dangerous and where a person had to be at the top of his game and very competitive and street wise and all that; but also where you could piss in the street.

I heard the stories about how, if you were white in New Orleans, you had to walk in pairs or in threes, or the blacks would attack you; just because...

 

But, sixth grade was the best school year of my life.

Every day, after lunch, we would take out the phonograph record player and put on 45's and sing along with songs like "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," "Spiders and Snakes" (Jim Stafford) and "Harmony," (the B side of Yellow Brick Road).

That was a magical time, and when I learned that I could sing.

 And, I think I chose some other city to do my report on, feeling like I had no business trying to explain New Orleans to anyone, based upon what I had read over and over out of the book.

 

But, looking at this live shot of the French Quarter about 2 blocks from where I used to play; it all seems like a dream.