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.