Spare a thought for the residents of Louisiana, on whom Hurricane Ida is currently barreling down like a Talib goatherd in his new complimentary Humvee. To be honest, the last big hurricane - Katrina, sixteen years ago this very day - somewhat soured me on New Orleans. Here's what I wrote in the Telegraph at the time:
New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of 'Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?' But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.
Katrina exposed New Orleans as a deeply dysfunctional city - and I gather from the news reports that, after bazillions in post-Katrina aid, things might go just as shambolically this time round.
But how can you not love a city that gave us Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, Dr John..?
If it's tempting to see the welfarist lethargy as the flip side of Big Easy bluesy cool, we should nevertheless resist it. For one thing, you can't help noticing that the city's musical output has been pretty meager since LBJ's Great Society got to work on the joint. It's spent fifty years coasting on the reputation built up in the previous half-century. Jazz thrived when New Orleans thrived, when it wasn't just a "party town in the middle of a welfare swamp", a great place to enjoy a margarita with a transsexual hooker but you wouldn't want to live there.
So I thought we'd close the weekend with a musical celebration of the city. But what to choose? "Battle Of New Orleans"? Nah, that's a war song. "City Of New Orleans"? That's a train song. "Walking to New Orleans"? No, that's poor old Fats Domino, and, as he no doubt reflected during the Katrina week he went missing, he'd have been better off walking from New Orleans. So, instead, I plucked a couple of songs with contrasting moods: "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?", a lazily meandering ballad, and "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans", one of those pure jolts from the dawn of jazz:
"Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" has such a perfect titular rhyme it takes you a while to notice that nobody who actually lives in N'Awlins would rhyme it with "what it MEANS". Even Cole Porter got closer in "Now You Has Jazz", letting Bing Crosby toss it to Louis Armstrong's trumpet with:
Take a blue horn
New Orleans-born.
I'm not saying it's as egregiously mistitled as "Meet Me in St Louis, Louis", but it's interesting to me that the song that's most endeared itself to local talent – Armstrong, Domino, Harry Connick Jr, Dr John, and Wynton and Ellis Marsalis have all recorded it – is the one that pronounces the name like a Welsh tourist. It's the tune they love – as blearily contented as a Sunday on the porch, and with a lyric that's charmingly unabashed:
Miss them moss covered vines
The tall sugar pines
Where mockin' birds used to sing
And I'd like to see
That lazy Mississippi
Hurryin' into spring...
This was the first recording, in October 1946, by native son Louis Armstrong:
Notwithstanding Satchmo's fine recording, for many other fans of the song their first acquaintance came in the 1947 film New Orleans, where it was introduced by – get this – Billie Holiday, Woody Herman, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, and Dorothy Patrick.
And before you say, "Wow! I must get the DVD", save your money. It's that last name – Miss Patrick's – that's the one that counts. New Orleans took a ton of hot jazz and dumped it in a plot colder than those famous Big Easy crypts. It was, in essence, a layman's history of jazz with Kid Ory, Meade Lux Lewis, Barney Bigard and others on hand to lend some instant street cred, and four screenwriters who drained them of all of it within the first twenty minutes. It was the usual plot, the one Hollywood fell in love with in the very first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, the one about the young singer forced to choose between jazz and serious music. In this case, the singer was Dorothy Patrick, with Irene Rich as her high-society mom. But any film that leaves something as lasting as "Do You Know What It Means?" is not to be disdained:
It was written by Louis Alter and Eddie De Lange. Alter was a composer from Haverhill, Massachusetts who had a couple of hit songs – "You Turned The Tables On Me" (with its intriguing concept of the "stingable bee") and (for the young Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey) "Dolores" – but he seemed to get more of a kick out of his quasi-serious orchestral works: "American Serenade", "Manhattan Serenade", "Manhattan Masquerade", "Manhattan Moonlight", "Manhattan Nocturne", "Side Street in Gotham", you get the idea. In other words, he wasn't the chap you'd turn to for a sleepy southern melody.
Eddie De Lange, born on Long Island, was an unusual combination of lyricist and bandleader. His songs seem to seesaw between limp pretexts that struggle to make it through the first eight bars – "I Wish That I Were Twins" – and moments of rare depth: "Just As Though You Were Here" is a miniature masterpiece (it was another early Sinatra hit that he returned to for a bleak saloon recording thirty years later). I was at Radio City three decades or so back when De Lange was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, and Dick Clark gave a wonderfully evocative intro to "Moonglow" as its gorgeous melodic swell just filled the hall. It's a fantastic melody, though it's hard to sing well (see k d lang's version). But, to the best of my recollection of that night, nobody sang "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" It's one of those songs that just hung around sufficiently to get a little bigger year by year.
Or perhaps it's that its drowsy lethargy suits the city more year by year than it did three-quarters of a century back. So, by way of contrast, here's a very different kind of song. "Do You Know What It Means?" has become the preferred local anthem for black jazz musicians, notwithstanding that it's by two white guys from the north-east. This one, on the other hand, is fading in popularity and regarded as a piece of Tin Pan Alley boilerplate, even though it is, in fact, the real deal:
Way Down Yonder In New Orleans
In the land of the dreamy scenes
There's a Garden of Eden
You know what I mean...
Whoops, there's that rhyme again: N'Awlins rendered as New OrLEANS. And this time the structure requires the lyric to rhyme it over and over. The sign-off rings a little differently these days:
We got heaven right here on earth
With those beautiful queens...
I'll say.
The authors are Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, whose catalogue includes one of the most valuable copyrights in history – "After You've Gone", one of those songs that's been recorded by everybody and his uncle, from Al Jolson to Loudon Wainwright III. But here's the thing: Layton & Creamer were black, and they had huge success in the American music biz a century ago, at a time when the contemporary grievance industry would have us believe such a thing wasn't possible. This is the very first recording, by the superstar vocal group of the early gramophone age, the Peerless Quartet:
"Way Down Yonder" was written in 1922 and bursts with a peculiarly American energy. When I was a small boy, my dad had a couple of records of "Yonder" and they were responsible for getting me intrigued about the art of songwriting. Here's the bit that caught my ear:
Creole babies with flashin' eyes
Softly whisper their tender sighs
Stop!
Oh, won't you give your lady fair
A little smile?
Stop!
You bet your life you'll linger there
A little while...
I had no idea what a creole baby with flashin' eyes was, but I was very struck by the way, on the word "stop", the tune stops, too. Both times. It's a little device that helped me understand that a really good song isn't just words on top of notes, but words and notes tied together indivisibly. Years later, when I fished out the sheet music and pored over the 13th bar, I noticed other things. The printed key is F, and that big fat "stop" is an E flat, which is another reason it sounds so arresting. That one bar of Layton and Creamer is a better example of black music than the collected works of every gangsta rapper. The tune is just twenty-eight bars, and sounds like one of those wild jazzy Negro instrumentals of the period that should have been impossible to put words to. But the words fit perfectly, and the whole couldn't have been written anywhere else on the planet except America:
If you put aside that rock'n'roll novelty version by Freddie Cannon, "Down Yonder"'s drive and exuberance is more representative of New Orleans in its heyday than "Do You Know What It Means?" But every city should have a great ballad and a great rhythm number, and in their different ways these songs do their city proud.
Henry Creamer died in 1930, and Turner Layton moved to England, where he had a second career as a British nightclub act playing through the London Blitz. Layton died in 1978, and I wonder if any of his Brit pals ever passed on a story the great Benny Green once told me. He was, if memory serves, at a BBC recording session, and the girl singer knew the song so she wasn't reading from the sheet:
Way down yonder in New Orleans
In the land of the dreamy scenes
There's a garden of Eden
You know what I meanThree old ladies with flashin' eyes
Softly whisper their tender sighs...
"Stop!" yelled the producer. "It's not 'Three old ladies', it's 'Creole babies'..."
"What's that then?" said the singer, who, living in East Ham or some such, was unacquainted with the phenomenon.
The producer explained what a Creole baby was and they did a retake:
Creole baby with flashin' eyes...
"Stop!" yelled the producer again. "Plural! It's plural!"
"What do you mean?" asked the singer. "What's plural?"
"Plural babies," shouted the producer.
She tried it again:
Way down yonder in New Orleans
In the land of the dreamy scenes
There's a garden of Eden
You know what I meanPlural babies with flashin' eyes...
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