Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 15) and-roll was no accident. Ray Charles and Little Richard both made their best early recordings in New Orleans, accompanied by New Orleans musicians. On Ray Charles’s “Mess Around,” in fact, you can hear Ray play a piano figure that Jelly Roll Morton played years before on his “New Orleans Blues.” Fats Domino, of course, was one of the archetypal rock-and-rollers, and all of his recordings (most of which were arranged and orchestrated by the Crescent City’s Dave Bartholomew) are suffused with the New Orleans spirit. But probably no one had a more profound influence than pianist and singer Henry Roeland Byrd, also known as Professor Longhair, a pianist who exported the Spanish tinge spoken of by Jelly Roll Morton, a kind of left-hand rhumba beat, and placed boogie-woogie and blues figures on top of it in the right hand. His songs, like “Tipitina” and “Go to the Mardi Gras,” are perennial classics, and all you have to do is hear a few notes to know who you are listening The Lady Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club second lines at the 1982 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. to. He can be seen in action in Les Blank’s great New Orleans documentary film Always for Pleasure, and at greater length alongside fellow Crescent City pianists Allen Toussaint and Tuts Washington in Stevenson Palfi’s documentary Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together. But how could you leave out Percy Mayfield, Lloyd Price, James Booker, Ernie “Mother-In-Law” K-Doe, Lee Dorsey, Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, the Meters and the Neville Brothers and Dr. John and so many more unknown outside of New Orleans except by dyed-in-the-wool music freaks, people like Smiley Lewis and Big Boy Myles and Eddie Bo and Sugar Boy Crawford, who did the original version of “Iko-Iko” (he called it “Jock-a-Mo”), later made famous by another New Orleans group, the Dixie Cups. And then there’s the blind singer-guitarist Snooks Eaglin, a oneman encyclopedia of New Orleans music who may still be seen in action at clubs and bars and the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. A DISCOVERING MARDI GRAS INDIANS t a friend’s New York City loft in the late 70s, hanging out and playing ping-pong, I heard a sound coming out of his speakers that I didn’t recognize. Often background music stays in its place, providing a sort of carrier frequency on top of which conversation and other activity rides. But something about this music was not immediately identifiable and classifiable, and it was reaching up through the surface of everything else that was going on as if to say, “Get out of the way — coming through.” The LP, when my friend located the cover for me, was like nothing else I'd ever seen, either. A line of men — black, on close inspection — were dressed in brightly colored costumes, one blue, one yellow, one pink, consisting of feathers and, on even closer inspection, small patches with colored pictures on them that turned out to have been composed of tiny colored beads sewn onto canvas panels, mosaic-style, to make images of eagles, Indians, battle scenes. The bright plumes made each man about twice as large as he was in actuality, feathers 15
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