Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 28)

THE ENDURING PERFORMANCE OF gained over a decade of photographing such rituals, knowing where to position himself, poised for the moment before it came. Many of the churches Smith “documented” were in neighborhoods wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm, there were roughly 100 Spiritual Churches laced out through working-class neighborhoods. In a conversation with this writer in 2006, Rev. Thomas Watson, the son of a bishop in the Spiritual Churches, and now the pastor of the unaffiliatead Watson Teaching Ministry on St. Charles and Napoleon avenues, remarked that most of the small vernacular churches in downtown wards “were simply wiped out.” In the absence of any systematic accounting, no one knows how many are left. By the 1980s, however, Full Gospel churches were drawing many adherents who in earlier generations would have joined the vernacular churches. The drummers, jazz ensembles and holy dancing in sacred spaces begun in the 1920s cut against the grain of mainstream black Protestant churches back then. Sixty years later, the bigger churches were emulating those smaller ones on the margins, with bands accompanying the mass choirs and pastors encouraging “in the spirit” moments. Post-Katrina, as the population of the city has shrunk by 30 percent, Smith’s account in Spirit World, with the small chapels now destroyed, has a more resonant historical meaning. People captured by the spirit in the pictures speak to us as if from another zone, a kind of Afro-Caribbean Paradiso had Dante traversed time and space, toting a camera, leaving Virgil to tap his feet and look at his watch from some cul-de-sac in netherworlds of Florence. Spirit World was republished in 1992 by Pelican Publishing Company; although that issue is still available, the quality of the photographs is poor. Smith’s second major book, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music was published in 1990, and has been out of print for several years (five copies available on Alibris started at $75.) A Joyful Noise was a collaboration with Alan Govenar, a folklorist from Texas, and includes photographs of musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals and further scenes from the Spiritual Churches. Govenar’s lucid essays drawn from interviews put a solid spotlight on the wider terrain of the “cultural wetlands” as Smith called his subject terrain. This book, too, is marred by weak quality of the photographic reproductions — a similar problem with Pelican’s edition of Mardi Gras Indians. The sad truth about FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, MIKE SMITH USED HIS LENS AS A WINDING MIRROR ON THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURE AND MUSIC OF NEW ORLEANS. Bo Dollis, Big Chief, Wild Magnolias, Mardi Gras Day, 1989 28 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09

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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