Professor Longhair The “Real King of Rock & Roll”
Okay, children, sit up and pay attention. It’s music history time.
There are many who claim the title of the “King of Rock & Roll.” Carl Perkins, Elvis, Little Richard, but for those who really know the score, the “Real King of Rock & Roll” was Henry Roeland Byrd, more universally known as “Professor Longhair.”
Born December 19, 1918 in Bogalusa, Louisiana. You can hear the Fess’s piano influence in such piano players as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Doctor John, James Booker, Ann Rabson (Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women) and, of course, Marcia Ball who you’ve seen here previously. When Paul McCartney had his 40th birthday party aboard the Queen Mary his musical entertainment for the evening was provided by Professor Longhair. When asked to do a documentary about the Fess and play with him Allen Toussaint, noted songwriter (Java, Southern Nights among many) and no mean ivory tickler in his own right said, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that…when the Fess plays the only thing I can do is listen.”
Albert Goldman, Elvis’s biographer, said that “Professor Longhair gave Elvis Presley his blue suede shoes voice and the arrangements gave producer Sam Phillips the sound.”
It was one of Fess’s songs that gave the world-famous music club located on the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas Streets its name…Tipitina’s.
I spent many nights there completely entranced by his music and always tried to stand as close to the stage as possible to watch his hands in action. A good friend of mine, Curtis Arsenault, aka Coco Robicheaux, who lived upstairs from me, was one of the doormen at Tip’s and would often let me slip in for free. On the night of January 29th, 1980, my girlfriend at the time and I were driving past the club. I said that Curtis was on the door and asked if she’d like to stop in and catch a set. “No,” she said, “I’m exhausted. Let’s just go home and go to bed.” That night after his gig Henry Roeland Byrd went home and on the morning of January 30th died in his sleep. He was given a New Orleans Jazz Funeral in February on what turned out to be the coldest day of 1980.
My friend Curtis told me he was going to do a bronze bust of the Fess in his honor. Curtis was a good artist and cartoonist, but I had no idea that he was capable of doing a bronze sculpture. He did as you can see below.
There is a small park kitty-corner to Tip’s and the original plan was to rename the park after the Fess and mount the bust there, but doo-doo transpires, as they say, and it never happened, so for the next two years the Fess served as the door stop of Curtis’s apartment. Happily it now sits just inside the entrance of Tipitina’s.
Here, then, is the Fess, himself, playing his song, Tipitina…..
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Filed under Music, New Orleans
Health Care
When I used to tell people that I was thinking of retiring to Guatemala they’d inevitably ask: “What if you get sick down there?”
My standard answer was, “you either get better or you die.”‘
That’s really not a smart-assed answer, either. When you think about it, it’s only been within my lifetime (approaching 68) that we’ve had antibiotics. Penicillin and the like. Before I was born if you cut yourself there was a real, though remote, possibility that your wound could get infected and you might actually die. I was in my early teens when the heart-lung machine was invented paving the way to open-heart bypass surgery.
You either get better or you die.
We here in the United States have been brainwashed into the idea that we have the best health care in the world even though statistics prove that isn’t really so. Sure, if you live in a large metropolitan area as I do you have access to good care. I only live five blocks from a large medical center and when I had my heart attack last July I was receiving treatment within minutes (at the cost of $58,000.00 for a two and a half day stay) and there’s no doubt it saved my life. But I also ask people what they think would happen to them if they were on vacation here in the land of the world’s best health care and they decided they wanted to visit say, Mr. Rushmore. They’re driving along the road to their destination and their heart goes YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! What happens then? They’re dead! Period! Write the obit.
I’m not being morbid here. We each owe our creator a death. It’s the real cost of living. Each and every one of us is on that slippery slope and there’s no negotiating our way out of it. It’s going to happen. Of course there are some good jokes about the inevitable. “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather…not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car.” I’ve often said, “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go. I just don’t want to be on a plane when it’s someone else’s time to go and he drags me along with him. And how do they arrange it so that 200 people whose turn it is to go all get on the same plane together?
From what I’ve seen in Panama health care is decent and certainly reasonably priced. One of the medications I have to take daily is Plavix. Here in the States the cheapest price I’ve been able to find for it comes to $144/month. In Chitre, Panama I was able to walk into a pharmacy and buy it, without a prescription, for $80!
When I was staying with my friend Frank in Panama City he had to visit his doctor. We went to a nice modern clinic on the Via Argentina in El Cangrejo. As nice as any clinic available here in Fort Lauderdale. His bill was $3.19. That’s right, three dollars and nineteen cents and they chased him out the door to give him his penny change, too.
Just to prove I’m not joking I took this picture in Chitre:
General consultation with a doctor…$3.00. Try that in the States.
Filed under Uncategorized
Shiver Me Timbers
Here’s a two for one deal. Music and tall ships…Just watch, listen and enjoy
The accompanying music (the Tom Waits version) is one of the songs I want played at my funeral when my ashes are scattered on the Gulf Stream.
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Filed under boats
Wooden Ship/Men of Steel Part 2
STOP!!!
If this is your first visit to my blog do not click on this video until you have checked out the first Wooden Ship/Men of Steel posted yesterday.
Filed under boats
New Orleans Jazz Funeral
I have been wondering what I should post for my next music video. There are so many of my favorite New Orleans musicians I want you to see.
I lived in New Orleans for nearly 10 years and I LOVED it there. At one time I thought I’d never leave. I loved the cuisine. There’s a line in a song by the New Orleans Jazz Poetry group that sums that up with “the whole day slid down my throat like gravy. My fingers still smell like food.”
I loved the music. I loved the people and I loved the culture of New Orleans. It is, or was before Katrina, a unique place in the world. But Katrina changed everything. It will never be the same again. It will, I’m afraid, be just a parody of its former self, and that is so sad. I know I will never return. It would break my heart.
So much of what is shown in movies is cliche and one of those is the Jazz Funeral. But those are real. I only attended one while I lived in New Orleans. It was for Professor Longhair in 1980 on a bright February day…the coldest day of the year as it happened. Hundreds of his fans turned out to see him off. Most of them brought cameras. I did not. I went to honor the man, the musician and to honestly pay my respects to a man who gave me so many special nights at Tipitina’s. I couldn’t take pictures. In my mind it would been disrespectful.
Jazz funerals are special events for special people. Primarily for members of the local musical family, but not always. People who have played a special role in the community at large are often honored with a Jazz Funeral. These are not mournful events. They are paying tribute to the LIFE of the person, not his/her loss.
There are many Jazz Funeral videos on youtube but this one, I think is special. It was for James Kerwin, New Birth Brass Band tuba player. Some people might find the handling of the casket shocking and perhaps, even, disturbing, but it is spontaneous and done with love, not disrespect.
Love it, or hate it, this is a powerful video.
I am weak, but Thou art strong;
Jesus, keep me from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Precious Jesus, hear my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Precious Jesus, hear my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more;
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom shore, to Thy shore.
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Precious Jesus, hear my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
Filed under New Orleans
The Rio Dulce (Guatemala) Gorge
Those who know me personally and those who have followed this blog know that I took my pretty little boat, Nancy Dawson, on a single-handed trip from Fort Lauderdale to Mexico, Belize and the Rio Dulce in Guatemala back in 1992. Damn that seems so long ago when I see it written down, but it was only just yesterday in my memory.
The Rio Dulce was one of the three prettiest places I’ve ever been to and it’s hard to describe it to anyone. Photos simply don’t capture the splendor at all. They lack motion and depth perception. I don’t have many photos of my trip. Unbeknownst to me, my camera wasn’t working when I ran several rolls of film through it, so I have to depend on other people’s work.
In trying to describe what the Rio is like I tell people:
“You check into the dirt-bag little town of Livingston to check into Guatemala. It may have changed some since I was there, but all I wanted to do was get my paperwork out of the way and continue on. When you’re done with Customs, Immigration and the Port Captain you hoist anchor and head up the river for about a mile and then the river makes a 90 degree turn to the left and your mouth falls open with the beauty that surrounds you. The gorge of the river rise 300 feet straight up on either side and are filled with teak, mahogany and palms. I saw toucans flitting amongst the trees and wild orchids and hanging vines. Indians fishing in dugout canoes and after the rain waterfalls cascade down to the river.”
Of the many videos on youtube I found this the best and thanks to johnmelw for sharing it with us.
Wooden Ship/Men of Steel
When I was a youngster I was, like many boys, enamoured with the sea and devoured the books of Alan Villiers like Falmouth for Orders, By way of Cape Horn, The Set of the Sails; The Story of a Cape Horn, and Sons of Sinbad. Stories of wooden ships and men of steel.
Villiers, born in Melbourne, Australia, first went to sea at 15 and sailed all the world’s oceans on board traditionally rigged (square riggers now known as tall ships). And he was a wonderful author, too, calling up the howling winds of Cape Horn.
As good a story teller as Villiers was, though, there was another author intimately acquainted with full-rigged ships who was one of the greatest wordsmiths of the English language who ever lived; Joseph Conrad, a Pole writing not in his native tongue, of course, nor even in his second language which was French. But he could put one word after another unlike anyone before or since.
Writing about the ascendancy of steam over sail and how the demise of the sailing craft was something to be mourned, Conrad had this to say…
“No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an active man in a ship’s engine room, but I remember moments when even to my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing ship’s machinery seemed to reach up to the very stars.
For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than spun silk. For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the Infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs, and gossamer? (The Mirror of the Sea)
Listen as Villiers too, makes similar statements about the craft and business of commercial sail.
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Filed under boats
Marcia Ball-How You Carry On
I grew up in Orleans, Massachusetts out on the elbow of Cape Cod. But I was also blessed to have lived in NEW Orleans for nearly 10 years. I got to see some of the best musicians to ever tickle the ivories: Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, James Booker, Doctor John, Tuts Washington and Brooklyn Robert who was tragically and senselessly killed for his leather jacket on Saint Charles Avenue. But one of my alltime favorites has to be Marcia Ball. I used to go see her at Tipitina’s every time she came to play. I was so enthralled, and dedicated to seeing her play that when a friend of mine who had moved from New Orleans to the outer banks of North Carolina came to visit and couldn’t get ahold of me on the phone he looked in the local entertainment newspaper and when he saw that Marcia was playing he knew where to find me.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be posting so often in a single day, but I just couldn’t help myself when I ran across this on youtube…
One More Good Adventure 