The Storm Still Rages

New Orleans native Paul Sanchez and his band Cowboy Mouth were recording new album Voodoo Shoppe in Atlanta when Katrina hit. As Sanchez sits on the front porch of a Creole cottage in the French Quarter on a beautiful spring day, a mule-drawn carriage ambles by lazily and friends stop along the street to chat. It’s hard to believe that only two blocks away devastation stretches for miles without end, but the tears Sanchez cannot hold back as he speaks of his hometown tell the story. Like so many other newly homeless New Orleans musicians, he lost everything in the flooding following Katrina, including the Gentilly home he and his wife Sally built, his music equipment and all his band’s back catalog and merchandise.

“We were in shock,” he recalls. “My wife and I were online at a site she jokingly called yourhouseisunderwater.com and you could see a satellite picture of your house. We just got a new roof put on which was supposed to be hurricane proof. It was perfectly intact but the rest of the house was underwater. We sat there every day for three weeks looking at the house. I was down to all my possessions in a suitcase. We came back in December. It was weird; you see people going through the ruins of their house and you say, ‘don’t go through it, it’s useless.’ But when you’re there, it’s your house, so we stumbled through it and started going through all this wet stuff we couldn’t keep and then we realized you just have to say goodbye to your stuff. My house sat in sewage for three weeks, and every inch of the place, where you laughed and ate and made love, it’s covered with shit and you never want to see it ever again.”

Sanchez tried to figure out another place to live but realized he couldn’t survive away from the culture that’s nurtured him over a lifetime. “It’s really cool to be home,” he says. “The people are really beautiful and they make me very hopeful about the future. The politicians are useless; it’s the same old business. Let’s clean up the city; let’s get the rubble and the dead cars out of here. The people are the reason to be here—for moments like riding my bike with John Boutté to the second-line parade in his neighborhood. He took us to Claiborne and Orleans, a spot where he used to play ball—we came to this playground and there were literally hundreds of cars that had been ruined and abandoned after the storm. People were dancing everywhere and all of a sudden one of the kids in the crowd jumps on one of the cars and starts leaping from car to car. It was amazing. It was a statement, but not a violent statement; It was an expression of frustration, of dancing on the abandoned city. The whole day had been beautiful, white people and black people dancing together, celebrating New Orleans in that very unique way, doing a second-line. Dancing on the abandoned vehicles. Dancing past the destroyed homes. That’s New Orleans, that’s the jazz funeral right before your eyes.”

Sanchez’s friend John Boutté is a great vocalist, one of the many outstanding musicians well known to New Orleanians but not the general public. Boutté has forced attention on himself since 8/29, however, through the sheer emotional impact of his performances, first on the Sing Me Back Home project, with his astonishing rendition of Annie Lennox’s “Why?” but most dramatically with his historic set at this year’s Jazz and Heritage Festival. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a hair-raising update of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” urging them to “scream like you’re in the Convention Center… scream like you’re in the Superdome!” Then, in a climax that will stand as one of the great moments in Jazz Fest lore, he rewrote the lyrics to Randy Newman’s epic “Louisiana 1927,” a move that would’ve sounded foolish if it wasn’t so powerfully appropriate. This time the clouds came in from the Gulf, and when Boutté transformed Newman’s line into a reference to the deadly flood that followed the collapse of the Industrial Canal by singing “six feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine,” the screams of recognition from the crowd nearly drowned him out. By the next verse it was “12 feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine” and people were out of their chairs, lamenting and moaning like worshipers at an ecstatic church service. “President Bush say, ‘Great job, great job what the levees have done’,” Boutté sang. “Don’t let them wash us away.”

Since the disaster of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans has been more celebrated than ever for its rich musical heritage and unique culture, elements that have bravely soldiered on even as the city’s economy has continued dying. Only a fraction of the city’s small businesses remain open, and every day the dire economic realities cause more to close their doors for good. However, more than a third of the city’s population has returned, and most of those who’ve stayed are determined to make the best of it. They’re living without basic services like public transportation, schools and hospitals, even electricity and water in some sections, but they value the unique experience of the New Orleans lifestyle so much that they’re willing to put up with horrible conditions to stay there.

The flood’s devastation blanketed all sectors of the population with misery but saved its harshest degradations for the inner-city poor who lost everything and are dispersed across the country in a continuation of the Diaspora that began 200 years ago when their ancestors were brought to America as slaves. The musical culture that’s been nurtured in those communities and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter and neighbor to neighbor lies at the heart of New Orleans’ music and is gone, perhaps forever, lost among the miles of blasted, rotting houses, some still containing remains of the dead.