LCV Winter 2013-14 - (Page 28)

Kermit Ruffins played a standing gig at Vaughan's Lounge in New Orleans' Bywater neighborhood every Thursday night for more than twenty years. He retired from the venue in 2013. hen I moved to New Orleans in 1997, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers ruled the weekly calendar, and I spent many a Thursday night hoofing it to Vaughan's Bar at a time when many considered the Bywater to be a backwater. The showstopper came when Kermit would put down his trumpet and sing "What is New Orleans?" The answer was a potentially endless list of fill-in-the-blanks... ... New Orleans is... ... red beans and rice on a Monday night... ... Little People's Place... Donna's Bar and Grille... ... the Lil' Rascals Brass Band... Though the questions "What is San Francisco?" or "What is Iowa City?" have surely been bandied about, I think it's fair to say that New Orleanians have cornered the market on self-obsession, or as the Ph.D. version of me would phrase it, there is much local discourse about the problem of authenticity. At the turn of the 21st century any New Orleanians worth their salt would count red beans and brass bands as authentic New Orleans-isms, and because of the city's deep history of distinctive traditions (with food and music at the top of anyone's list), the list itself appears timeless. But is it? Of course not. Beans are not indigenous to Louisiana, and red beans and rice did not become a signature dish until the turn of the twentieth century. Brass bands were a global W 28 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES * Winter 2013-14 phenomenon that didn't develop into a local style until the emergence of jazz, and no one thought they were worthy of documentation until after World War II. And as for Kermit's personalized list, let's hope that "New Orleans is..." more than Little People's Place, Donna's Bar and Grille, or the Lil' Rascals Brass Band, because they're all gone. So how would New Orleanians of the past have answered the question "What is New Orleans?" Focusing on music during in the colonial and antebellum periods, we might expect that the city was most associated with the famed slave dances at Congo Square, which laid the foundation for jazz. But while these dances were a spectacle that received their share of commentary, most people associated New Orleans with opera and ballroom dance. "New Orleans is... Lucia di Lammermoor?" Why yes, the opera had its U.S. debut at the Théâtre d'Orléans in 1840. Decades earlier, a pair of émigrés from Saint-Domingue had organized the first permanent opera company in the country and established New Orleans as an elite cultural center through celebrated tours to the Northeast. In 1827, when their troupe visited New York and gave the Northern debut of no less than thirty operas, the praise was unanimous. The New York American gushed, "This company is as good as those heard in the provinces of France and superior to those heard in the PHOTO BY DAVID RAE MORRIS For more information on Kermit Ruffins, visit  http://www.knowla.org/entry/1106/

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