Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 26)

THE ENDURING PERFORMANCE OF Club) reflected on his own life station. “Religion and behavior were orderly, controlled affairs,” he would write. “One never screamed impulsively in church, rolled on the floor like a convulsive, spoke in tongues, was visited by the Holy Spirit, or communicated with ancestors through the spirit world. I had never experienced the holy dance, prophecy, healing and had never before heard jazz played in church.” As he got to know leaders of the sect in which many bishops were women, Smith was capturing the surface of a culture with a largely hidden history; there was little published scholarship on the Spiritual Churches in the late 1970s. Smith landed a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to move deeper with his work. One of the bishops “introduced me to the gathering, saying I wished to photograph and tape their services for the government!” But explaining an N.E.A. grant to those church folk got him in trouble. “They couldn’t imagine why the federal government would support my efforts to document their services, unless I was a tax man, or with the F.B.I. or Army.” And so Mike Smith, a son of Metairie with his B.A. in English literature from Tulane, explained how the W.P.A. had supported photographers back in the Depression as an important means of documenting the cultural traditions of ordinary Americans. No way, Jose. Those church folk looked askance at photography that was for anything but a family album. “Gradually, it dawned on me how they must feel about the government giving me money — their tax money — to photograph!” This is an issue many documentarians, anthropologists, folklorists and journalists confront in trying to gain the trust Spenser Coudray’s Funeral, 1983 26 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09 of people on the margins. It is not just a question of the educated professional entering a community suspicious of the privileged; the vexing issue is, how much of their story should they give away? Can you trust the person who would take the story out into the world? And then (sorry, this is America) does that “story” have a value for which they should be compensated? Many of the aging musicians interviewed in the 1960s by William Russell and Richard B. Allen for the fledgling Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane were paid nominal honoraria for their time, their memories, their stories; this body of material has been priceless for jazz historians ever since then. Smith faced similar conflicts in his early dealings with the Mardi Gras Indians, and on one occasion nearly lost his camera to a disgruntled leader of one of those carnival gangs. Smith gave photographs to many of the people he photographed as one means of defusing tensions and gaining trust. His essay in Spirit World only hints at what it took for a white man of Smith’s basic modesty to testify before those black congregants, explaining why their spirit world was of great interest to him. He doesn’t go into depth on his family background in the book; but his career carried a fundamental rebellion from the assumptions of the social station from which he was steadily cutting distance. The scrim of academic language he fell back upon masked the joy streams roiling in his soul. “Our beings had gradually intermingled in a strange, interactive dance of

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

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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