The time was 1987 -1993.
My memoir recounts the highlights from stories Al Rose told me in New Orleans, and how I helped legendary jazz and blues singer, Blue Lu Barker.
I had a full practice of Structural Integration (aka Rolfing®) in Maryland. My husband, Steve Hancoff was at heart a jazz musician, his instrument of choice was the steel string guitar. He was invited to perform at the Saint Louis Riverboat Jazz Festival and the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri. Most of the musicians played both festivals, riding the night train from St. Louis to Sedalia. While on the train, the musicians would play music for themselves. According to Al, this train was the place to be if you loved Jazz.
Steve had just finished his first professional recording. He was enthusiastically giving out copies to all of his friends in the train car. Finally, there was only one person left without one: a white-haired Southern gentleman dressed in a three-piece white suit with a straw boater and a cane. Steve gave him a copy saying, “I don’t know who you are, but here’s one for you too.” The gentleman accepted the recording saying, “Why thank you, young man. I’ll listen to it.” Steve later found out that this Southern gentleman was Al Rose, a judge at the Sedalia festival. During the festival, Al told Steve that he had listened to the recording saying to Steve, “Kid, you got it!” Al invited Steve to come to New Orleans to study with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Steve told Al that he would have make sure his wife was OK with this plan. Al told me later he was betting that I would be against it and would not let my husband go to New Orleans.
After the festival, I picked Steve up at National airport at the gate and as we were rolling his suitcases down the hall, Steve told me of Al’s invitation. I stopped dead and I said to him “You got invited to study with Preservation Hall? And you came HOME? Are you crazy? What if they change their minds? Look, we are at the airport, let’s get you a ticket on next plane to New Orleans! You wouldn’t even have to unpack. Steve replied that he wanted to take a shower. And then said that tickets would be less expensive in two weeks. I relented but I made him promise me he would go to New Orleans in two weeks. When Al heard about this, he said he had to meet me.
We accepted Al’s invitation to stay with him and his wife, Diana, at their home in New Orleans.
Diana had been a “whiz kid”. She was on a radio show where very bright kids were asked very hard questions. She was graceful under pressure and was very kind.
Their home was filled with of glass cases of museum quality collections. One case was full of statues of the RCA Victor dogs Nipper and Chipper listening to the gramophone. Another was full of New Orleans Mardi Gras dance cards and krewe memorabilia, a diamond studded elephant and other glorious, jeweled creations. Invitations to the krewe social club balls are so prestigious Al’s told us not even his connections could get us in. There were pieces of New Orleans history all over his home.
According to Al there were seven families who were the high society of New Orleans. His family was one of three in the next tier down. One of his ancestors was with the La Salle expedition. His grandfather owned a big circus. “Not Barnum and Bailey” is how Al put it. His grandfather had invented cotton candy. His grandfather took him on tour with the circus.
Although Al was an only child, he had over one hundred first cousins. In the morning, they were all required to pay social calls on each other. This mostly consisted of knocking on the door and leaving your calling card. You never needed to worry about actually talking to anyone since all of his cousins were out doing the same thing. Social life was quite demanding. Everyone wore different kinds of clothing for the different times of the day. Dinners were formal dress.
Al told me the following vignette so I would have some idea of how rich his family was: He was in his room, changing into the proper attire for the afternoon. When he took off his shirt and put it on the chair back, it slipped onto the floor. As he was leaning over to pick the shirt up and put it back on the chair, his mother came in and saw him. What she said to him was: “Put that shirt back! How dare you take work away from people who need it?”
Al’s family was Catholic. When he was fourteen years old, he refused to go through with his confirmation. After this, whenever his mother saw him in the house, she would throw herself down on her knees and start to pray. This was rather annoying for Al, and he decided to leave home. Al had already seen the country touring with his grandfather’s circus. He decided he would go to New York. He liked Coney Island. He set up and did caricatures on the boardwalk. He had learned how to draw caricatures from his artist friends on Jackson Square. He was still doing caricatures for college students at their graduations when I was in New Orleans.
When he first got to New York, he had the problem of where to live, as he was underage. He solved this by going to the great hotels on Central Park. He would go to the front desk and tell them he was coming in ahead of his family to arrange for rooms. His family would be arriving in the next few days and would need two of the hotel’s finest suites for two weeks. Al would pay cash in advance for both suites, then he would go off and enjoy all of the amenities and the room service, tipping the staff with one-hundred-dollar bills. Just when the hotel staff would start to wonder where the rest of his family was, Al would leave, go over to the next hotel, and do the same thing all over again. He said that the hotels did not complain. In a year’s time, during the depression and with the help of a Quaker family who said he was their adopted son, he was able to buy a brownstone kitty-corner from Eleanor Roosevelt’s on Washington Square.
When Al was sixteen, he decided to further his education and his art. He decided to go to college. Just that year, the very first intelligence test came out, and a great many people around the country took the test. Al scored number one, the highest in the entire country. They called him IQ-1. He remained IQ-1 for his whole life. No one ever scored higher than him on the IQ test. The top ten scorers on the test were invited to lunch at the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt looked at Al and said, “Don’t I know you?” She remembered her young fifteen-year-old neighbor in his three-piece suits.
It was arranged for each of the top ten to meet three people of their choice and ask them a question. Al asked Albert Einstein: If he was such a smart scientist, why did he believe in God? Einstein’s answer was, “I don’t know.” (An answer which gave Al no satisfaction.) I had trouble hearing the second name because we were in a taxi and the street noise got too loud, but he did tell me. I thought I would ask him again for the missing name later on. The third person was Diego Rivera. I don’t know the question Al asked, but apparently the answer was to his liking because he went to Mexico City to study art with Diego Rivera, who was his teacher and mentor in graduate school.
While in Mexico, Al was Leon Trotsky’s bodyguard. I joked:” Nice job.” He replied, “Trotsky would still be alive if I hadn’t graduated from college.” He was in sixteen shoot-outs defending Trotsky. Al took a bullet which broke a tooth. The bullet came in from behind him from the left and hit the inside back of his right eyetooth. He showed me it had been repaired with gold that made him look a bit like a pirate. He also had a gunshot wound in his shoulder, and another in his calf.
After graduating from college, Al fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was not on either of the main sides, but with a very small third side: The Anarchists. Al told me about a gun battle, where he was pinned down on a roof in Barcelona for three days, and how he got away through the countryside at night with his friend to live to fight again.
After the Spanish civil war, he went to Miami and was captain of a fishing boat out of Key West. This was so incongruous that I said with some puzzlement: “A fishing boat?” He then confessed that he was really running people on the Quaker Underground Railroad which goes from Miami up to the big northern cities where refugees could disappear. Al’s refugees were from communist Europe, and Al said he would take anyone on his boat except for clergy. He had a rule against clergy. Al told me that the Quaker Underground Railroad was still being used today, mostly by people who could not qualify for political asylum but would die if they stayed in their home countries. The Quakers bring them in, and then periodically amnesty is declared, and they can come forward and finally become American citizens. He was connected through his Quaker “family” in New York.
He moved back to New Orleans and became involved in New Orleans Jazz. He used a cylinder recording device that did wax recordings. These devices were pre-vinyl. Al took his cylinder and went to Africa to see if the idea that African drum rhythms and call and response were the start of Jazz. He became convinced that they were not. Al produced the first jazz concerts, and he took New Orleans Dixieland Jazz “on the road” to the rest of the world; Japan, Australia, all over. “They played for the Queen ” was how Al put it. Al made sure all his musicians were well paid. This was unheard of in those days. Al did not take a big cut like most band organizers did. His musicians loved him.
Al continued his interest in the early recording industry. He was partners with John Hammond in a recording company, which became Columbia Records. In the early days they made 78s. The musicians thought that those records would never catch on – because who would ever want to listen to music played the same way twice. In fact, Al told me he decided to get out of the music business when they went to 33 1/3. Al thought that no one would want to listen to music that long. This was said with a wry smile at how wrong he had been.
Al had a definite and vigorously defended opinion of what Jazz was. I didn’t know a thing about his crusade to define Jazz. So, when he asked me a few days after he met me if I liked Jazz, my first thought was that this was a question well beyond my depth of experience. I decided to answer his question from a personal point of view instead of an educated one. I told him that my answer depended on how he defined Jazz. I said that I liked Dixieland Jazz very much, but I did not enjoy the intellectual kind of music played by musicians like Miles Davis. He clarified my position by saying that I liked Jazz that had a rhythm and a melody. I agreed and he seemed to be very happy with me. Little did I know he was adamant on this subject, and I had unwittingly echoed his own considered opinion. After I unwittingly passed his test, he began to tell me all kinds of stories revealing the deep background of the kind of Jazz that had been created in New Orleans. He knew a tremendous amount. It was at the center of the life he had lived.
He was from New Orleans, and was connected to everyone in music, especially the musicians from the Black community. He wrote several books; New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album, details who played which instrument with whom, and on what record, as well as some of the musicians’ personal histories. Several books were devoted to the topic of Jazz. There was also a scholarly book about Storyville, New Orleans’ red-light district which was published by the LSU university press. Al was also a close friend of Baltimore’s great piano player, Eubie Blake and wrote his biography. Al’s last book was a biography of Lulu White, New Orleans’ most famous madam, which was published in French.
Al kept one of everything brand new – records, pictures, autographs, memorabilia, and documents. He put these in boxes and eventually donated his collection to Tulane University. Al’s collection is what the Tulane Jazz Archives are. If we wanted to hear a recording from the Tulane archives, we had to fill out the proper paperwork in triplicate. If Al were with us, the archivist was so helpful: “Yes sir! I’ll just put that recording on right now. What else can we do for you today?” If we were with Al and went into a club to hear some music, the music would stop and the whole place would get quiet. The spotlight would shine on our table, and Al Rose had to stand up and take a bow. He was acknowledged with enthusiastic applause. This happened everywhere we went. Al was somebody in the world of New Orleans Jazz and now that I am older, I can see that he was really somebody in the world of music.
We rented a small apartment at 504 Governor Nicholls Street in the Quarter. It was a block from the French Market and one door off Decatur. It had two very small rooms, one on top of the other, with a metal spiral staircase between them. We were told that apartments with metal spiral stairs had once been slave quarters. The ground floor was below the level of the courtyard, and when it rained, the downstairs filled with water. You could see beams of light streaming through the space between the boards in the walls on a sunny day. There was a small gas heater, a little kitchen tucked into the corner with a tiny sink, a small refrigerator, a two-burner stove top with a very small oven – but we weren’t planning on doing much cooking with all that great New Orleans food just outside the door! We got a few pieces of second-hand furniture and a mattress for the sleeping loft and Steve settled into the apartment while I commuted from Maryland to New Orleans hoping I would be able to build up a practice in Structural Integration in New Orleans so we could both live there.
Al introduced us to the Tulane University professors, who loved old-time folk music. There were parties about once a week. Doc Watson’s protégé Svare’ played guitar with Steve. We sang, smoked cigars of Turkish tobacco, and drank beer into the night.
At the time, the mayor of New Orleans was in some political trouble. He had given a huge construction contract worth a lot of money to an old friend. However, his friend’s company was too small to do the job, and nothing got done. The scandal was in the newspapers all around the country. Steve expressed his shock about the mayor to one of the Tulane professors thinking to have a like-minded discussion on the subject of influence pedaling. The professor replied, “Son, around here we consider that a hazard of the profession.”
We got to meet the the historical society people and the museum folks, and so many other groups of people that Al knew. I spent a lot of my time listening to Johnny Donnels tell his stories. Johnny was a photographer who took black and white photographs in the quarter. He had a shop on the corner of Bourbon and Royal he called “Starving Artists.” No one was in the shop to wait on the customers. Johnny had rigged up a secret camera and intercom system so he could see and hear people. He liked to hear what people said about his photographs when they thought no one was around. Upstairs was a thirty-foot wall overflowing with photos of him with famous celebrities and at least four presidents. There were hundreds of pictures, one pinned up on top of the other. But to me, the really impressive wall was the one that was six-feet wide. It was thickly layered with business cards from all of the police departments he had worked with from all over the country. Johnny was America’s only expert in drawing Black people. He was called upon to draw pictures of suspects from crime victims’ descriptions. He would crawl into the oxygen tent with the victims to make the drawings.
I was hoping Johnny would become interested in Structural Integration, but he just joked about it with me. One day he was telling me about his days in the Navy. He had developed appendicitis and had to have an operation. Afterwards he developed so much scar tissue that it strangled his bowel. The doctors had to go in and cut the scar tissue out or he would have died. However, more scar tissue formed, and he had to have another surgery. This cycle happened 28 times. He confided to me that he could feel the scar tissue building up again, only this time he wasn’t going to have the surgery. When I realized that without the surgery he would probably die, I said to him, “Well, if you are willing to die, are you willing to get Rolfed?” He laughed and he said that he would try it. He really liked Structural Integration. I was able to ease his abdominal scarring. Somehow working on the scars stopped their proliferating and terrible surgery cycles. He lived another twenty years after I worked on him without another surgery. I got in touch with him again in 2007. He was delighted to hear from me, and he was happy to hear I was doing well and teaching the things I had discovered. When he passed away in 2009, I bought a copy of his book of stories from his wife. The following is his last story.
Johnny had just gotten himself a new camera. It was very expensive, and it was a really good one. He was eager to try it out. He got on his bicycle early in the morning and he “quartered the quarter.” This was something that he did nearly every day. He always found something new to take pictures of he had not noticed before. Being tired and hungry, he decided to stop for lunch at a place he had never tried before. He ordered an Oyster Po’ boy. A good Oyster Po’ boy sandwich was not easy to prepare, and it would make a fair measure as to whether or not this restaurant was any good.
His waitress had two strikes against her. Not only was she fat and ugly, but she was also slovenly and lazy too. His Oyster Po’ Boy was not good, and he found himself for the first time in his life contemplating not leaving a tip. He had never not left a tip because he knew that waitresses did not get paid enough. They depended on their tip money to make ends meet.
He waited until she had turned her back towards him, taking an order from two unsuspecting customers at the next table and he slipped out the front door. He was two blocks away congratulating himself on a clean get away when he heard someone running up the street behind him. “Oh Mister?” He turned around. It was her! She said, “Mister, you forgot your camera.”
Of course, we were introduced to the musicians. We found out that there were only about thirty of them in the whole quarter. Those same thirty guys played all the music in all of the clubs in the quarter. They played Rock and Roll, Country and Western, and Zydeco on different days of the week. There was always Jazz at the Meridian Hotel on Thursday night. You could run into them on the streets between 1:00 and 2:00 AM. They were easily identifiable by their tuxes. They would gather at a late-night cafe that served inexpensive and really good red beans and rice. The health department kept closing the cafe down every few weeks, but it always found another place to open, and somehow the musicians always found it. If you were lucky, the musicians would feel like playing a little music before they went home.
We were introduced to the man who started Preservation Hall: Allan Jaffe. Al said Allan owned half of New Orleans. Another of Al’s friends, Jules Kahn, owned the other half. Jules was the landlord for the little apartment on Governor Nicholls that we had rented. Allan Jaffe was born into one of the seven high society families in New Orleans. Allan told me that the houses of all of the wealthy families were called compounds. They were all built in similar tradition with the walls flush to the sidewalks and courtyards on the inside. The family would live on one side of the courtyard and the people who took care of them lived on the other side. All the children from both sides of the courtyard played together. There were secret routes the children could use to go from compound to compound all over the city without ever once going out on the streets. The fathers of the children Allan played with were fairly well off and had some leisure time in the evenings. Allan said that the music started with the arrival in New Orleans of a Mexican Brass band on a world tour. They were so popular they were held over… for two years! When they finally went home, they gave their instruments to their devoted fans who were the people who took care of the wealthy families. They played music in the evenings. This was the music which accompanied Allan’s childhood.
Allan’s parents died young in an accident, and he inherited just about the time he graduated from college. After college, he came home to New Orleans, and one day when he was walking down the street, he heard that wonderful music from his childhood. There were two older musicians on the street corner playing in the rain with their instrument cases open. Allan stopped to listened to a few pieces and realized that he knew these guys! “Say, aren’t you Jimmy’s father? And aren’t you Tommy’s father?” Yes, in fact they were. Then Allan looked at them and said, “What are you doing playing out in the rain? You see that building over there? I own that. At least you can go and play inside, out of the rain.” That building to this day is Preservation Hall, and that is how the Preservation Hall Band started.
The only way to learn how to play New Orleans ensemble Jazz is to sit in with the musicians who know how to play it. Ensemble Jazz is different than what we hear from bands today – where each of the band members take their turn playing their variation on the main melody and after the drummer, they all join in for the last chorus. Ensemble jazz is like watching a river for the fish jumping. Sometimes more than one fish will jump. Musicians took their solos when they felt it was right. Sometimes more than one musician would play. If this happened, they shared the stage together. Allan set up Preservation Hall so that the younger guys could sit in and learn to play from direct experience. Preserving the music of his childhood was his dream.
There are three Preservation Hall bands. One is always playing the Hall, one is on the road, and one is resting because they are all eighty years old. Allan also gave all the musicians houses to live in. They loved him, and he was humbly very happy to be allowed to play his tuba with them. He was going to feature Steve at the Hall, but Allan contracted liver cancer and died just five weeks after telling me this story. It was an unexpected loss of what promised to be a good friend as well as a major loss for Preservation Hall. Allan’s wife moved back to Memphis. Preservation Hall endures.
Al introduced us to Danny Barker, who had played piano in New York with all the musicians from the 20s and 30s; from Jelly Roll Morton to Charlie Parker. Danny was sort of retired in New Orleans and played banjo in one of the Preservation Hall Jazz bands. Steve and he hit it off. Guitars and banjos are both fretted string instruments and often are grouped with the piano player in the rhythm section. Danny was kind to Steve and showed him a few things.
When one of the bands came to play near us in Fredrick, Maryland, we were both home and we got complimentary tickets to go see them. I made a huge batch of organic chocolate chip cookies, enough to give a couple of gallon sized zip lock bags full of cookies to each of the band members. After the show, which always finished with When the Saints Go Marching In, we went to thank the guys in the band for the tickets. Narvin Kimball was the banjo player for this band and was the last to leave the stage. We came up behind him while he was hurrying to put his banjo away and get off the stage. Steve said to him with a drawl,” Say, that was some really great music! Can you tell me what the name of that last piece you played was?” You could see Narvin’s back muscles stiffen up. He took a deep breath and turned around to face this clueless new fan with a priceless mix of disbelief and suppressed suffering on his face – and then he saw it was us! We had a good long laugh.
The band members were very appreciative of the cookies. Narvin was very partial to things organic, and he held up a bag of cookies and looked his question at me. I smiled at him and said, “Made with all organic ingredients – just for you, Narvin.” He gave me such a sweet smile.
Maybe those cookies were the reason Danny came up to me next time I was in New Orleans. He asked me what Structural Integration was. I told him it was for help for physical problems left over from accidents, injury, and surgery. He took that in and nodded once and went on his way. About a week later, he came up to me and asked me would I please work on his “lady wife.”
I knew we were tightly committed socially as it was the last few days of my visit, but I just had to say yes. I very much wanted to meet her. It was the mix of respect and love in his words “lady wife.” We rearranged our social schedule to get time to see her, borrowed Al’s old Honda and we drove off into the ninth ward.
Blue Lu Barker was also called the Billie Holiday of the Black community of New Orleans. She only did one or two recordings, one of which was the 1938 Decca Records recording of “Don’t You Feel My Leg”. We listened to her singing them at the Tulane Jazz Archives. She was revered as the most beloved musician of the Black community in the History of New Orleans.
It was a neighborhood in a low-lying area mostly of shotgun houses – so named because if you opened up front and back doors, you could shoot a shotgun through the hallway of the house without hitting anything because all the rooms were off to the sides. Danny and Blue Lu lived in the middle of the 9th Ward. When we found the house, a couple of Danny’s friends were hanging around outside waiting for us. One of them set his young boy to watch Al’s car “So when you come back out it won’t be stripped down to the frame.” Cars were rare in that New Orleans neighborhood. We had seen only one or two cars parked on the street for miles. Danny greeted us at his door wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a flower-print Hawaiian shirt in a color combination that was defiantly singular. The place was casual, not picked up or cleaned for company; Sunday newspapers were on the floor and there were a few beer bottles around. The ashtrays were full. There were quite a few of Danny’s friends in the living room.
I went into the bedroom and found Blue Lu in bed where she had been since having a surgery two and a half years earlier. She had developed a bowel perforation. The medical treatment was a temporary colostomy above the perforation. After the perforation healed, they reconnect the bowel. She was supposed to heal over and be more or less OK. Blue Lu’s surgery was complicated by an infection. She had a long six-month stay at the charity hospital. Two and a half years after she got out of the hospital, she still had not healed over the opening from where the colostomy bag had been. Blue Lu showed me her large oval shaped opening. It was about two inches wide and one inch tall. I was amazed that she was still alive with it open for so long. I complimented her on being very tough and strong with good healing ability to be alive with this problem. Then I rather anxiously asked her if she expected me to do anything about that big hole. She gave a laugh and said, “Oh my no, dear.” I said, “Good, because I don’t want to work anywhere near it!” Then I asked her what could I do for her? She showed me her left hand that had gotten so many IVs in the back of it, she could no longer close her hand to hold onto anything. She said that she couldn’t cook for her husband because she couldn’t grip the frying pan. She also showed me her foot, which somehow had gotten mangled during her six-month hospital stay so she couldn’t walk. I thought: Hands and feet? No problem! I can do that.
And so, I did. It took me about two hours to do the work. It was long enough that the guys in the living room started playing some music to pass the time. When I was finished, I went out and saw that they looked worried. I think they were expecting me to spend a few minutes with her instead of the two hours it took. I gave them a smile and quickly assured them that she was just fine and that she was getting dressed and would be coming out soon. I sat down to wait. That is when it occurred to me that they were going to want to pay me. I didn’t want to take money and I knew they would not accept charity – and rightly so! Somehow it just did not feel right. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I was determined not to take money for helping Blue Lu. When she came out, walking down the hall, Danny immediately noticed the difference and said to her: “You can walk?” She smiled and nodded yes and when he looked at me and I said “Yes sir. She can use her foot.” Then she eased herself into an armchair using both of her hands and he said to me, “And she can use her hand?” I nodded yes. He stared at me for a long moment and then he said: “What’ll you have to eat?” I do believe I was adopted right then and there. He rushed into the kitchen with a friend, and they looked through the refrigerator rejecting several options until then found something they both agreed would be the perfect thing for me. They brought me a piece of chocolate birthday cake with very blue icing. It had to be a slice of Blue Lu’s birthday cake! Now I don’t usually eat chocolate, but I ate every crumb. Danny asked me what would I like to drink? That question took me a minute. I had to think about it. I do not like alcohol and rarely ever drink it. I considered asking for water because I was thirsty from working two hours in the heat. However, there was no way I was going to drink the New Orleans tap water!
I imagined them sending that little boy outside guarding the car off and him running down the street to buy me a bottle of water! That would never do. I looked around and spotted a half empty bottle of beer. So, I said, “I’ll have a beer, if you still have one?” Danny turned to his friend and said: “Told you she’d take a beer!” I thanked them and drank my beer. They still felt they had to give me something more so Blue Lu told me some New Orleans insider information — on which brand of canned black-eyed peas to buy. They gave me a can of Blue Runner Cream Style Black-Eyed Peas so I would remember. I still have the label from that can! I will always treasure it.
Then came the moment I had been dreading; Blue Lu took out a small change purse and quietly asked me how much money she was to give me. I crossed my mental fingers and tried to put my feelings into words. I asked her would she please, please accept this session as a gift for all she had given with her music? I held my breath, while she considered that for a long while. Finally, she graciously nodded her acceptance. When we got back, I told Al that I did not take any money for the session. He asked me how did I know to do that? That I had done exactly the right thing. Money never changes hands in the black community, it is considered an insult. I told him that it just did not feel right to me. He then told me I was the second white person to ever be invited into the ninth ward. He knew that because he had been the first.
What they did give us were amazing chickens marinated in sauce for three days. And best of all, Danny took Steve into clubs where the real black music of New Orleans was being played. Danny told Steve that if he went into one of the clubs on his own, he would be certain to get a knife stuck in his ribs. Steve told me about one of the times Danny took him into a club. Danny put Steve behind him, stuck his head in the door and said: “It’s me! Danny Barker! And I’ve brought a FRIEND.” Then he brought Steve through the door and put his arm around him, saying: “This here’s my friend!” Then he stared them all down, one by one. After that, he gave Steve a little shove towards the stage saying, “And the kid can play! – Get up there Steve and show them what you can do!” Steve went up to the stage, set up his amplifier and the band launched into “Sweet Georgia Brown”. Steve took his solo, which he did beautifully since he had recorded the piece and knew it well. The musicians nodded and smiled, and Steve sat in with the band for the evening.
Two weeks later I came back to New Orleans, and of course I went back to see Blue Lu. There were several more friends hanging out. The whole house was simply immaculate, with doilies on the tables and fresh flowers all around, with that wonderful smell of fresh wax polish. Blue Lu was waiting in the bedroom and said with a shy smile that her daughter had been over to clean. I took a look at her. That huge opening had healed over! You could have knocked me over with a feather. As I looked at the scar, I had the thought that the stresses of walking and moving had caused the tissues to grow over and seal it up. The scar had some diagonal striations in it and was reasonably thick and nice and dry. I could work on it! I gave her a basic first session to open her breathing up along with some attention to replacing the scrambled bowel loops and did a general cleanup of the scar and the surrounding area where the infection had left its scar tissue to become a part of the general surgical mess. Afterwards in the living room, Blue Lu gave me a truly precious gift: she sang for me! She apologized for her voice not being what it used to be. She wanted to show me what she said was the secret to her singing success which she said was “the phrasing”. Danny and Steve backed her up as she sang “Big Butter and Egg Man” and “Don’t You Feel My Leg.”
After this session, she went out DANCING! Everyone in town found out about it. After this session, the Black community began calling me “The White Witch”. The first time I heard it, I was walking down the street, going to the secondhand furniture store to buy a third iron legged chair so our friend, David Thomas Roberts, a modern composer of ragtime, could sit with us in our flood prone apartment. A couple of black guys were hanging out at the front of their store. One was sweeping the walk and the other sitting on the steps of the porch. As I walked by, I heard one of them say to the other: “It’s her! It’s The White Witch!” The other one said, “Are you sure? She looks kind of young to me.” The first one said, “It’s her. I seen her before.” I looked around, eager to see the White Witch, but I was the only person on the street. Then I got it. I was the White Witch. I pointed my finger at myself and looked at him. Who me? “Yes, you!” he said. I laughed with them and went on to the secondhand store to buy the chair, quietly bemused and much honored, however, I did hope someone would ask me what I had done that had helped Blue Lu. I wanted Black New Orleans to have its own practitioner of Structural Integration to help all the rest of those in trouble.
Very soon after this, we had a big music event happen. Someone in the Black community had been going through their attic to clean it out before they sold their house. They had come across an old trunk that had some classical music manuscripts in it. Anything old and especially anything to do with music and Black people ended up with Al Rose. So, they brought him the trunk. It was a very important, singular, and rare find. A man named Basile Bares, a Creole of color, who had been a contemporary of Debussy and educated in Paris, had written some classical music in the 1880s before Ragtime and Jazz were born. No one had ever found classical music written by a person of color. Finding his music was a historic first.
Al said that all of the myths about Black people being different from white people had long since been put to rest – all but one: It was still being said by white people that Black people really understood Jazz, but they simply didn’t understand classical music. The existence of this trunk with classical music written by a Black man proved that notion wrong at long last.
Al explained the context of this historic find and Basil Bares education in Paris in this way: In that era, all of the wealthy families of New Orleans had the tradition of the “practice wife”. Young men were expected to be sexually accomplished, while young women of the same class were expected to be sexually ignorant. So how was this to be accomplished? Especially considering that if a young man acquired his experience with a young lady his own class, her life would be ruined, and her brothers would bring a shotgun and go after the young man? They solved this problem the following way: The family of the young man would find a suitable young woman of preferably mixed blood and offer her a legal binding contract for her to become his “practice wife”. Since the only sort professions open to young women of mixed blood were prostitution or the very hard work of a laundress, the offer was not such a bad choice. Al had two original practice wife contracts that he showed to me. The contracts specified that the young woman would live in a nice house. Every year, she was entitled to a certain amount of rice and flour and other amounts basic provisions. A specified number of bolts of cloth and other household necessities were listed. She would be respected as his wife even when he married a woman of his own class had a family. If the practice wife was a slave, at the time of her husband’s death, she would be freed. Any children that were born of the union were to be born free, to be well cared for, and educated to the standards of the wealthy family. Since schools in New Orleans would not be a good place for a mixed-blood person, they were sent to be educated in Paris. There always have been free and wealthy black families in New Orleans who sent their children to Paris for an education. Al said all the best New Orleans families all had parallel families in the Black community. “You might be sitting at the lunch counter having an Oyster Po’ boy sandwich when you look up to see that the guy sitting across from you looks exactly like you except for the color of his skin. He probably is exactly like you. All of the Black community of New Orleans knows who is related to whom, while the white community is trying its best to forget.
Al distributed Basil’s music to several of the New Orleans musicians and arranged for a concert debut of this body of work to be at the Annual Convention of the Musicological Society at the Museum. Steve got the piece “Follies du Carnaval” to perform and I got a ticket to this historic event. Of course, I got all dressed up with my sliver Yemenite jewelry, wore a silk dress topped with a long flowing cape of black-on-black roses with a stand-up collar that almost went to the floor. I even put on some make-up. When I got to the auditorium, a quietly elegant, light skinned black man with hands that had never not been manicured was taking the tickets. He was wearing the most beautiful cashmere houndstooth checked jacket with a heavy silk twill shirt and the perfect tie to match. He took my invitation, and he looked up at me and said, in a voice that carried to the entire hall: “So. You’re the White Witch?” I remember giving him nod of my head and managed to get out a little squeaky “Yes sir”. What else was I to do? I felt almost faint with all of the unaccustomed attention focused on me as the room went dead quiet. He stood up and looked me up and down with that assessing look that men give women. Then he took my hand and spun me out to present me to his audience below in the chairs awaiting the performance. They were obviously the High Society of the New Orleans’ Black community. He commented with an impish grin, “And she’s kind of pretty, too.” He then waved me forward and I had to walk down at least 20 steps to the auditorium floor. I could hear the words White Witch being whispered throughout the crowd. I made it to my seat, my legs shaking from my first case of stage fright. My high heels were clattering so loudly on the stone steps I was sure everyone in the auditorium could hear them. I was very lucky and very glad that I didn’t trip and fall. I was afraid that the White Witch would end up in an embarrassing heap at the bottom of the stairs.
The concert was a grand success. I got over my stage fright. No one came to talk to me. Steve played his piece with perfection. I was able to concentrate on the music and enjoy the performances and the day.
After Blue Lu’s successful Structural Integration sessions, I was hoping that some of the people we knew would show up for some structural work. Unfortunately, the white community did not show up. In the Black community we would have had fabulous food and friends, great parties, and the music, but we could not have paid the rent. Not even for our little apartment on Governor Nicholls.
Blue Lu told me that she realized when I was working on her that she was “not done.” She went on to perform and recorded live some ten songs with Danny at the1998 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival where she sang for the first time in a generation.
Steve recorded his New Orleans Guitar solos at home in Maryland. I was the recording engineer and producer. I designed the cover and helped to edit the booklet that went in the CD. We recorded it using metal television tape put through a Beta machine in our living room after the last jet had taken off for the night. My friend Greg Lukens told me that it was the finest recording he had ever heard. It had fewer dropouts by far than any other recording. He only added two DB’s of base to one song on the whole album. It was the very first recording that had been digitally recorded, digitally edited, and digitally mastered. It was the first DDD recording in the world.
We went on to do some background research work for Al on his book about Lulu White, New Orleans’ Most Famous Madame. No one else would publish it because of its subject and the way it was written. It read like a very good novel, not a scholarly work like his previous book on Storyville. Al thought it was his best work and so did I. We decided that we were going to help Al publish his book by publishing it ourselves. After writing his book on Storyville, Al had gathered much more information on Lulu and her girls at Mahogany Hall. He also had the great good luck to live above a woman who had been Lulu’s personal maid. He spent many hours talking with her about Lulu and life in Mahogany Hall. He wrote a wonderful book from all of the material that came his way. He even had pictures of some of Lulu’s girls taken by the famous photographer E. J. Belloc. There were some very fine pictures of Lulu. I have a copy of one of Lulu with her dog.
The Mayor of New Orleans had married the second most famous Storyville madam in a grand society wedding. There were photographs of the event where we could identify many prominent family members from those pictures. We were looking for more people to identify. We looked in police academy yearbooks, and to our amusement the particular yearbooks we wanted had the pictures we were looking for razor-bladed out. Al said that was a common practice of the wealthy families, who did not want anyone to know their family history from the notorious Storyville years.
Steve and I helped Al put the book together. We worked on editing, page layout, and picture placement. We had decided it was to be a large, coffee table book with thick, soft paper and a fine, well sewn binding. I was two days from buying the paper stock for the first run of the book, and the French were ready to go to print at the same time.
We were taken down a very different path by a tragic death in our family. We were devastated and could not find the will to go forward with the book. We had to let the project go. We gave the French permission to go ahead and publish the book which they did.
We could not manage day to day life – never mind moving forward with publishing Al’s wonderful book on Lulu. We stopped going to New Orleans. We stopped doing anything fun and sunk into the infinite depths of our personal loss. I believe we did not even see a movie or laugh for over three years.
When we began to emerge from our mourning and look around, Al Rose was gone, Danny and Blue Lu Barker were gone. An era had passed. I am sad to have lost touch with these wonderful people I once knew in New Orleans.
I hope that one day someone will write a fine biography of Al Rose.
With Hurricane Katrina, the 9th Ward was flooded. So many people living there died in the storm. If Blue Lu and Danny had been in the 9th ward it is likely they would not have made it out. Much of the physical reality of the New Orleans I knew has changed. Katrina felt like a massive, mirrored resonance reflecting my own private loss. I was moved to write this memoir before time blurred my memories of these dear friends that I have lost as companions along the way.