The Best Songs of the 2000s: #103

#103: "Cryin' in the Streets" (2005) - Buckwheat Zydeco
Let's stay on the streets of New Orleans a little longer, for though we still weep at the lives lost over the winds and floodwaters and we still shake our heads at all the homeless denizens, nearly double the number before Katrina, we see a jazz band march 'round the corner at Royal and step down Iberville, and as they approach closer, we hear them playing, and the music is elegiac, stately, yet joyful and hopeful, reflecting that ever-so-specifice Cajun mixture of Catholicism and African culture. It's grieving for the dead with head held high. It's a cheerful promise that tomorrow will be a better day, that those crying are doing so for--unbeknownst to them--our benefit, for we'll see their misery, and we'll sympathize or maybe even empathize, and we'll want to do our best to shine a light, to spotlight their suffering, so that, one day, though the rain may fall and the levees may break, there will be no one crying in the street.

Leading the band 'cross the Quarter is New Orleans's reigning Zydeco king, Stanley Dural, Jr., commonly known 'round these parts as Buckwheat. Buckwheat's been playing music professionally for more than forty years, and he got his start by helping back zydeco progenitor Clifton Chenier. Buckwheat's been performing with his own band--and they're fantastic--The Ils Sont Partis Band--for over thirty years, and they're responsible with the regional hit "My Toot Toot" some twenty-plus years ago.

Today, though, the band he leads is composed of all-star studio musicians: Michael Elizondo on bass, Jim Dickinson on piano, Jim Keltner on drums, and Ry Cooder (who formed the band and produced the sounds of this here parade) on slide guitar. The song of choice is a cover of Buckwheat's fellow George Perkins's 1970 regional hit (w/Perkins's backing band the Silver Stars) about socio-economic and racial injustice. Cooder tells the band to slow it down to funeral dirge tempo and to follow Buckwheat's accordion--and sweet tenor, which hasn't seemed to have aged a day since he began singing and which has never, ever sounded better or more soulfully exhuberant--all the way down the street. Much like the New Orleans jazz band that played at the graveside services to my late aunt Tommie Lynn Kirkland's funeral, they're respectful enough not to denigrate the occasion, but evangelical enough to play with enough emotion and verve to lift the spirits of the quick and the dead on this solemn event, trying to bring back the memories of what was once so wonderful.

New Orleans will come to full strength again, one day. I'm sure. Buckwheat Zydeco is, too. You can hear it in the song. It will rise. Like the waters--still, like dust, it'll rise.

The Best Songs of the 2000s: #104

#104: "No Vacancy" (2006) - The Subdudes


About this time every year, many of my friends and acquantainces and peers are either going or returning from vacation. About this time every year for about five years in a row, the missus and I would be not long returned from a senior class trip. Two of those years we went to New Orleans. The summer after our last senior class trip there, Foot Foot and I took our son Nicholas with us. The three of us had such a good time--and Foot Foot and I enjoyed our senior class trips there so much, too--that the missus and I decided to return to New Orleans every summer. That was in 2005, in June. In August of that year, Katrina hit. It hit our litte town pretty heavily, but the impact here was nothing compared to the devastation in New Orleans. We haven't been back.

We saw all the news reports, read all the articles and editorials, listened to all the griping from those who stayed and to all the griping from those who grew angry at all the griping from those who stayed. Blame passed back and forth, accusations of racism came from white and black/rich and poor, yet still people drowned, still people were left without means, without food, without a lifestyle. For varying reasons--lack of transportation, lack of funds, selfishness, greed, hubris--thousands of people stayed in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and many of these thousands died. The government (local, state, and federal) knew the levees wouldn't hold if a hurricane magnitude of Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, yet these thousands of people--for whatever reason--weren't evacuated. Some stayed willingly, would not have evacuated for any reason whatsoever (remember Camille, when people had hurricane parties--happened this time, too), but some...may they rest in peace.

Not all died, of course. Many who stayed survived, and many of those survivors were left jobless or homeless or both. With this increase in vagrancy came, of course, an increase in crime, in a city already known--yea, hailed--for its laissez faire attitude towards miscreants. Pundits and a few legislators even seriously considered leveling the city, calling it a wash, and starting over from scratch, building atop the rubble and the remains; and some even mentioned forgetting the city altogether, those few thousand remaining forced to leave and find work and home elsewhere.

Some did anyway. Many, though, scraped by best they could. The city's slowly recovering. As noted above, I haven't been back yet, though maybe in a couple of years, when my youngest is old enough to travel more than sixty miles without whining, Foot Foot and I will return. Maybe by then, the city will be as festive and gauche as it was the times I was there before. I hope so. Of all the cities I've visited, New Orleans has been my favorite.

The next two songs on my countdown are dedicated to The Big Easy. This first one was recorded by New Orleans' own Subdudes in May of 2005, three months before Katrina hit; it wasn't released (for obvious reasons) until January 2006. The song's a metaphor for leaving behind heartache and pain, but for me, "No Vacany" will always be inextricably linked to those left behind in the wake of Katrina. I can't hear the song and not think of the pictures and film/video footage of the effects the hurricane had upon the streets of New Orleans. It's supposed to be a hopeful song, but the singer's yearning tone, the somber instrumentation, and the empty spaces bluesman Keb Mo' leaves in the record leave me with images that aren't very hopeful. It makes me sad, a bit depressed, even though I know things will get better. There is (to paraphrase Ecclesiastes and Ben Harper) a reason to mourn.