PLAIN FOLK

by Les Pearson
Poetry and Song Foretold the Louisiana Flood!

Fats Domino is alive! But where is Dr. John and the Lower 911? Have Bo Dollis and the The Wild Magnolias escaped with their Mardi Gras tribal costumes and treasured instruments?

These acts sizzled on Winnipeg Folk Festival’s stage this summer. They brought the Big Easy’s sights, sounds, and music to our northern ears, eyes, and hearts.

Has anyone heard from John Mooney, protégé of Ed “Son” House? Did he survive the drowning of New Orleans?

This summer in Winnipeg, Mooney told me that the best part of his job as a Delta blues singer was that he got “…to travel a lot and meet a lot of people.” At that time, he quipped that the bad points were that he got “…to travel a lot and meet a lot of people.” John, I hope you were on the road, far from home, when the levee broke. Now, maybe even the bad points of travel are all good.

New Orleans is to folk music what Nashville is to country and western. At the mouth of the Mississippi, hunkered down below sea level, New Orleans has been home to great musicians, delta blues, Cajun hospitality, and tragic irony.

There is irony in the visit ten members and friends of our Folk Music Club paid to New Orleans last April. Now, as they watch CNN, these ladies marvel at flood waters where Bourbon and Canal Streets flowed with jazz and blues. The tragic irony is that their memory of Nawlins may be the sole survivor of this year’s epic flood.

There is even greater irony in the lyrics of Randy Newman’s classic hit, Louisiana 1927. It’s a song Aaron Neville and his brothers made famous. It appears on Neville Brothers Greatest Hits (A & M Records, 1998) and tells the story of the last time a Mississippi delta levee broke. The result was “…Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.”

Listen to the prophetic words of John M. Barry. In 1997 he wrote an amazing book predicting today’s disaster. In Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, he states his prescience that a century of trying to re-channel the Mississippi away from its natural outflow was doomed to fail.

Even earlier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, Evangeline, describes a delta flood that affected Cajun history. The poem is an eerie echo of today’s disaster: “…the tides of the sea arise in the month of September,/Flooding some silver stream, till it spreads to a lake in a meadow,/So death flooded life….”

Newman’s song has this haunting refrain: “They’re tryin’ to wash us away….” The 1927 flood saw a massive displacement of African-Americans from the delta to Detroit and Chicago. The Mississippi flows south. The tragic irony repeating itself is that poor people flow north to higher ground.

In 1927, Kansas City and Chicago blues grew from transplanted delta musicians. What will this flood bring?