It's All About the Music

Dateline: New Orleans, Louisiana

This was actually our second visit to New Orleans. The first was during our second winter in Florida about 18 months after Katrina had devastated the city as well as towns all along the gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama. We took this route home that year in order to volunteer our services for a short week helping to rebuild homes in Waveland, Mississippi. I mention this only as a tribute to the resilience of human beings in overcoming any disaster.

We took a Sunday afternoon off (actually they didn't work on Sundays) and went to New Orleans for the day. While we found enough music in the streets and inside Preservation Hall to make the trip worthwhile, the French Quarter was noticeably depressed and the number of tourists was very small.

This year it is very evident that the city has returned to its original character.

We were so fortunate to pick the week of the French Quarter Festival which highlights musicians from all over Louisiana and only from Louisiana. We went into town the first evening we arrived and even before the festival did not begin until the next day music was everywhere. We ate dinner at an outdoor café where a jazz band was playing, in the streets we were treated to a band of young street musicians as talented as any professional band we have heard. We had desert at the Music Legends Park, Café Beignet, where a jazz combo regaled us with rhythm and blues. Walking down Bourbon Street, music was emanating from every other door where you are welcome to stop and listen whether you go in and buy a drink or not.

The next day the music festival began during a horrific rain storm which lasted until late afternoon. We waited for the rain to stop then went into town for the evening shows. We found ourselves perfectly timed to get a great standing view of the stage for the New Orleans Nightingales revue. One after another, lady blues singers graced the stage with mind blowing talent. After that show we found a place to eat some shrimp and jambalaya, and another stroll down Bourbon Street. Friday was a beautiful day and we arrived at the Festival earlier in the afternoon and spent the day drifting from dixieland  to blues to Cajun to Zydeco. My ultimate conclusion: the music is alive and thriving in Nawlins.

The Garden at Laura's Plantation

We also found time to explore some of the other cultural and natural treasures of Louisiana.

We spent one morning at Laura's Plantation. This was a Creole plantation as opposed to an American one i.e. Tara. The Creole people are a combination of Europeans, Africans, and American Indians. Their primary language was French and they did not consider themselves Americans. The guide gave us an enlightening presentation demonstrating how the Creole culture was so different from American and also how the cotton plantation business was run.

Another morning we took a swamp boat trip into the Louisiana bayou. They took us deep into a romantic cypress swamp and passed a fishing village on the swamp in which one home was only accessible by water and another home was actually floating on pontoons. Nothing as spooky as in the Blues Brothers movie, but maybe that's because we were there in the daylight.