The Burgundy Street Blues
Editor's Column from LCV Summer 2007

New Orleans is a city as much imagined as real, a city where people literally give meaning to the place itself, thus one characterized more than most metropoli by the power and prevalence of place names, especially, as John Chase enumerated in his idiosyncratic study Frenchman Desire Good Children, by the names of its streets. Thus it seems more like fate than coincidence that the first house I owned in the city of New Orleans was on Burgundy Street in the Creole faubourg of Marigny, appropriately enough just off the corner of Music Street. And since place informs and colors our lives, it was in kind and intentional homage to this abode that two decades ago my good friend Michael White played George Lewis' classic The Burgundy Street Blues as the anthem of my wedding reception in Sal Anselmo's then newly-renovated reception rooms on the second floor of the venerable Napoleon House.

The Ebb and Flow of Memory

The echoes of those distant memories came flooding back at the recent Tennessee Williams Literary Festival where Bruce Raeburn, the director of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University, interviewed New Orleans' native son and jazz musician Tom Sancton, the author of the recently-published book Songs of Our Fathers. Interspersed through the interview, Tom, backed by a half-dozen of New Orleans' inexhaustible font of traditional jazzmen, played illustrative jazz classics, the first of which was the aforesaid Burgundy Street Blues. For Tom, I imagine this had even greater emotional and existential resonance than even for me, because as a fascinated and intrepid teenager, he had been taught the piece by its author, George Lewis himself, including the unconventional fingering that enabled Lewis, and now Tom, to squeeze exceptional sweetness from his clarinet, a tradition and craft in the essential New Orleans fashion, taught and passed along from one man, one musician, to another.

This is a strange and entwining time in New Orleans, and for Tom Sancton a foretaste of homecoming as he is about to return to live in New Orleans after a couple of decades' sojourn in Paris, where he was a senior writer for Time magazine, and soon is to be a visiting professor for a year at Tulane. I imagine it is a strange time, too, for Michael White, for Michael lost his entire material collection of instruments, books, recordings, and sheet music to the relentless and unsentimental waters of Katrina, and for him the memory of such artifacts of our collective culture as the Burgundy Street Blues are memorialized in his fingers and embodied in his very person.

Seeing What You Don't See

Both the tenuousness and the vitality of our culture is emblemized by these human-borne traditions. It is precisely why we and the now rare tourist are deceived and lulled by the undamaged appearance of our architecture in the historic districts on high ground along the river and ridges; it is why a full appreciation of the damage wrought against the very flesh and fabric of our cultural identity, and also against our collective psychic, spiritual and emotional health, is so little apprehended and understood, even by we who have endured it, let alone on the rest of a nation reliant on a distant and clueless media for insight into our condition. How do we tally the loss?

For the hardest thing to see is the thing that is no longer there. Ernest Gaines articulated this paradox and conjured the different ways of seeing that pervade our lives in his novel A Gathering of Old Men where one of the resisting elders tried to explain to a baffled if benign sheriff what motivated their revolt against the way things were. "You don't see what we don't see," he cryptically offered, at once encapsulating and confounding.

They don't see what we don't see. They don't hear what we don't hear. Half of us are gone and the other half eying the calendar and auguring the winds. More than any city on this continent, ours is a participatory and shared culture, one embodied in the people of the place, in the daily ritual of cuisine, in the idiosyncrasies of the individual melded with the collective participation in the whole, just as George Lewis' unconventional fingering is passed along like a genetic marker until it becomes generationally replicated and twined into the cultural DNA of a people. We are an entire metropolis of people playing and swaying everywhere on the corner of Music and hearing the Burgundy Street Blues, even if the instruments and sheet music are drowned. Half of us are here and half of us are gone. Can you hear what we don't hear?

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief