Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 57)

traditional New Orleans form it is alive and well. I don’t know if you’d say it’s thriving but it’s certainly played and enjoyed all around the world. I’ve known people, musicians from Latin America, musicians from Italy, Canada. I haven’t met anybody actually from Africa who plays this music but undoubtedly there are people, and in China as well, there are some Chinese bands. Raeburn: That goes back to the function of the music, which is to bring people together. That’s what New Orleans jazz has always been about. Audience: Due to segregation and with your relationships with these black musicians, were you ostracized by the white community? Sancton: I wouldn’t say we were ostracized but I should say my dad was from his youth, a political radical. He grew up in New Orleans and early on developed a strong belief in racial equality. He was actually as a writer, I’d say almost a pamphleteer, was really an activist in the early Civil Rights Movement. So there was definitely a belief on his part, which I inherited from him, a sense that that was the way things ought to be. That white people and black people should get together on the basis of our common humanity. That was what was so extraordinary about the experience that I had and that these boys had. It’s really what Song for My Fathers is about. If there’s a theme or an author’s message, it’s not just about the music. It’s about people reaching out over barriers and coming together on the basis of their common humanity. So we did this, I did it with my family, these boys did it. This not something I talked about a lot in school, because I when I did it wasn’t really understood that well. I wasn’t ostracized, but it was something that was really apart from my regular day to day experiences as a white middle class school kid. Because it was not an experience that would have been I think understood by most people in my community at that time. Of course, things have changed, probably not as much as they should have, but they’ve changed a lot since then. But it’s hard to remember, particularly for younger people to remember, what things were like in the Jim Crow days. I remember going to school in segregated street cars. Everything was segregated. There were no black students in my school. So I was well aware that it was a very unusual thing to have this human contact, this social contact with this community, and I look back on it as a great privilege. We weren’t really ostracized. But some the people were arrested several times out in the country for following black funerals and I think on a couple of occasions the police came in and tried to close down the Hall when they had white musicians sitting in with the black bands in the early ’60s. So there were issues that came from the fact of segregation, definitely. Another tune? One song. OK. [Musical postlude] LCV Bruce Raeburn, PhD, is curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University. Tom Sancton graduated from Harvard University in 1972 and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He worked at Time magazine for 22 years, most recently as the Paris Bureau Chief, and coauthored the bestseller Death of a Princess in 1998. He has also appeared as a clarinetist at major jazz festivals and has recorded more than a dozen albums. CHERYL GERBER above: Tom Sancton joins his father at a Preservation Hall performance, ca. 1962. Fans of traditional New Orleans jazz continue to flock to Preservation Hall nearly five decades after its founding. CHERYL GERBER GRAUMAN MARKS Summer 2008/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 57

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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