Today, I want to share with you two clips - a recording of New Orleans vocalist John Boutte and his band performing Annie Lenox’s “Why?” and a portion of an oral history taken with him in 2007. Boutte has been performing “Why?” since the first months after the Katrina catastrophe. And each time I hear it, I have to stop, and sit, and feel, and think. I highly recommend this version that you can purchase on itunes.
I am deeply grateful for the chance I had to interview Boutte for The Katrina Experience. Below is a clip of the interview that was posted in 2007.
Much love and peace to all reading this - especially those will healing.
On returning to New Orleans after the hurricane and levee failures:
I guess I was in denial. You know? It can't be that bad. But believe me. We got back to New Orleans on about the 16th of October. When we were coming back from Asheville the first time, we were coming through Mississippi, and I saw those pine trees broken like toothpicks. Across the Lake itself, there was not a wave in the lake. You know. It was hot hot hot. We had one bird that 24 mile section. Just looking for something to eat or whatever. Nothing out there. The stillness was like, I don't know, like I was about to go to a wake or a funeral. Then when I saw the city...
My first image was the water line. This black line, like someone took a big marker and wrote across the whole city with a paintbrush. A line. A nasty city dirty muddy shit that they just wrote on everybody's house everywhere. That's it. Cars upside down. Trees. Shit where it wasn't supposed to be. Things where they weren't supposed to be. It was just horrible. Everything was brown. There was not a speck of green in the city. Everything was brown. The whole city was brown. It was like a bad UPS commercial.
It was almost like Calcutta, because of the flies and the bugs and the filth and the stench. There was no place to go get anything to eat. The Red Cross was there, giving out water and food rations. The military--these young boys were carrying M-16s riding around the city. The flies. Flies everywhere. Crows. All the scavengers. Some of the animals that made it through, that were emaciated. It was like a third, or a fifth world country. And everyday all these assholes are on the TV promising what they were going to do, posing, and not doing shit. And they're still not doing shit.
I was afraid to leave the city again. I was afraid that if I'd ever leave I wouldn't be able to get back again. I went straight back to work. Somehow we worked it out. We were the first musicians back on the scene.
When we had a gig, it was like church. That was the kind of reaction. People love what we do. They come like a little kid who was afraid to get away from their mom. They always begged me not to [leave New Orleans for outside gigs]. But I got to go because I got to make money. Some things didn't change. That's the financial situation of musicians in New Orleans.
The first gig I did was at Café Brazil on Frenchmen. A club that I first started doing music at. This was in October. It was incredible. It was absolutely incredible. The electricity was still on and off. We were doing it almost acoustically. In this little club. And it was packed. People were amazed that somebody was doing music. It was packed. They were singing along. And musicians--the ones that I knew who were there--I just invited up on stage. We started doing a weekly thing there. Not for any money. I think somebody videoed some of that stuff. I've got some video of that somewhere around. Right after the storm. Very, very very intense.
It was like church. I got everybody--you know, it's hard to get people to participate, sometimes, to sing along, whatever. When I'd open up, the first thing I'd do is, I'd make everybody stand up and I'd say, now I want you all to do me a favor, I want everybody to scream as loud as you can. Whatever you wanted to do, just scream. It's very therapeutic. People would just get up and aaaaaahhhhhhhh! It was like this enormous roar. Get up and do it again. They'd scream again.
We'd start doing some of the old gospel tunes. New Orleans gospel tunes. It was incredible. Just a Little While to Stay Here, Down By the Riverside, Over the Gloryland, You Never Walk Alone.
What was the crowd like? The crowd was funky. Everybody was dirty, man. Nobody was dressed up. You never dressed up a lot in New Orleans anyway, but people were dirty. Nobody was like in suits, coats, ties. Nothing like that. It was kind of like a lack of a place to wash your behind. It was real funky, but it was real. It was really real. The people who have stayed throughout, they were special. They were people who had bonded together. Like never before. They really appreciated the fact that we were back and doing the music.
