Dr. John: Knee deep in New Orleans

Sunday News
Published: January 29, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

There is music and singing again in New Orleans. In parts of the city that weren't destroyed, cafes are opening, musicians are playing, and people are celebrating life in the face of destruction. Many are preparing to mount Mardi Gras festivities, refusing to let a storm halt nearly 300 years of tradition.

If there is any silver lining in the Hurricane Katrina cloud, it is that people have been turned on to New Orleans music more than ever through benefit albums, concerts, radio appearances and refugee players busking in their new hometowns. While not personally affected by Katrina, Dr. John has emerged as one of the major performers people have turned to for catharsis, celebration and lament. Dr. John, who along with his band will appear Feb. 2 at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, began as a young guitar slinger under his given name, Mac Rebbenack.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, he played for Professor Longhair, Allan Toussaint and Joe Tex. In 1968, he created a mysterious voodoo-inspired persona, Dr. John The Night Tripper. The moniker allowed him complete musical freedom, license to ply the waters of soul, psychedelic rock, blues, R&B, funk, jazz and pop, often at the same time. His debut album, "Gris Gris," was an underground freak-out classic. Albums over the next four years solidified Dr. John's reputation as the premier interpreter of New Orleans' musical past and the hand bringing its future.

Though he never sold an impressive amount of records and is often written off as a novelty, his reputation as a dramatic performer and Southern musical chameleon has never been in doubt. Living much of the last 30 years in California, Dr. John regularly returned to his beloved hometown for extended stays, each time finding new vigor and inspiration. In the months since Hurricane Katrina, Dr. John's career has taken a new turn. His latest recording, "Sippiana Hericane," is knee-deep in the context of history, with the ghosts of tragedies past as both inspiration and touchstone. If anyone can be seen as the messenger of New Orleans' broken heart, it is Dr. John.

Every American tragedy, from flood to Dust Bowl, mining disaster to shipwreck, is solidified in the collective memory through song. It is in this rich tradition that Dr. John and his band, the Lower 911 named after the section of the now-famous Ninth Ward where they formed perform the songs and meditations on the new recording. The centerpiece of the album, a four-part suite based on the old spiritual "Wade in the Water," is a performance that looks back much farther than August of last year.

In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River flooded a portion of the southern river basin the size of New England. The system of levees and dikes, spillways and backwaters, in constant expansion since the late 1700s, were put to their greatest test and failed. Well over 1 million acres in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee were inundated. More than 600,000 people, greater than the entire population of New Orleans in August 2005, were left homeless.

As with Katrina, the hardest hit were poor and black; many fled north, never to return. The tragedy found its way into the acoustic blues of the time, reaching its zenith in the Mississippi Delta with Charlie Patton's two-part recording, "High Water Everywhere"; Big Bill Broonzy's "Southern Flood Blues"; Son House's "Levee Camp Blues"; and Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues." Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" was recorded even as the waters were still receding in May 1927.

Memories of the disaster combined with the difficulties of Jim Crow in the South and with common biblical imagery in pop music. And while he is singing about recent events on "Sippiana Hericane," Dr. John and his band channel those songs of old with convincing soul. The album is short (barely more than an EP, really) and in places sounds like the rushed production it is, but the results are some of the best music Dr. John has recorded in 20 years.

The beauty of it all is that he didn't even have to record "Sippiana." Any ordinary performance by Dr. John is a celebration of the past, present and future of New Orleans, its music, its people, and the gifts it has given everyone.