When Edgar Degas came to New Orleans in the early 1870s, he was more than a visitor looking to see the Mardi Gras. He was family.
Category: Art and Entertainment
A Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas
If there were a Valhalla for the gods of 70s rock, A Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas would have been a contender.
The concert venue called itself “A Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas” on its posters, and it was just that. From the photos that remain, it doesn’t look much different from the other 19th century red brick warehouses that line the Mississippi upriver from the Central Business District, but it would witness pivotal moments in rock history.
Is Gram Parsons buried in New Orleans?
Not quite, but close.
But didn’t his friends cremate him in Joshua Tree? As in California?
Yeah. We’ll get to that…
Charles Bukowski, The Outsider, and Loujon Press
There’s a heart marked in the concrete outside the R Bar at Royal and Kerlerec streets that people say was put there by Charles Bukowski. Inside the heart is the name he often went by (“Hank”) and the year 1955. Is it true? Continue reading
The Rockin’est Laundromat in America
Hotel receptionists and travel guidebooks still occasionally warn travelers away from Rampart Street and the neighborhood beyond. To be completely fair, the crumbling string of dismal concrete parking garages built along Rampart Street are so ugly that they are truly terrifying. If you are courageous to risk your eyes on this ugliness, you may wonder why there’s a tour group clustered outside a laundromat in one of the few older structures left on Rampart. Step inside, and the photos of rock ‘n roll’s founding fathers on the walls may be your first clue.
Double Dealing with Sherwood Anderson: The French Quarter Renaissance
Stories of creative types who come to New Orleans to transform, melt down, or disappear are a dime a dozen, but few embody the New Orleans writer archetype quite so well as Sherwood Anderson. This Midwestern son is the quintessential New Orleans transplant. Before New Orleans, he was a National Guardsman, an ad man, a paint salesman, and a happily married father. Then came, in the parlance of their time, the crack-up.
Jayne Mansfield’s notorious crash, 50 years later (New Orleans, LA)
Somewhere in the night between June 28 and 29, 1967, the car driving Jayne Mansfield, her lawyer, and her children between Biloxi, Mississippi, and New Orleans slid under a tractor trailer on Highway 90 near Slidell and the Rigolets. Jayne, her lawyer, and the driver were killed instantly. Her children were treated at New Orleans’s Charity Hospital and survived with relatively minor injuries. Gruesome rumors arose that Jayne had been decapitated due to blonde hair in crash scene photos. However, Jayne’s embalmer at the Bultman Funeral Home (corner of St. Charles and Louisiana avenues, New Orleans, now a Fresh Market grocery store) confirmed that she had not been. The hair in the photos was her wig. Jayne is pictured in the attached photo from the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive with astronaut Wally Schirra.
First Jazz Recording, Feb. 26, 1917
Ninety-nine years ago today, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was the first to put the sounds of jazz to vinyl. The quintet brought a well-rehearsed version of the New Orleans sound to New York and, from there, dispersed it to the world. They weren’t the first jazz performers (though at least one member sometimes claimed they were), nor were they the best at jazz improvisation or phrasing, but their recording opened doors for the musicians who were. Still alive and fine at 99, the rumors of jazz’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Listen for yourself to the first jazz that most outside of New Orleans, Chicago, or New York ever heard.
LEARN MORE
- “Listen to the 1st jazz recordings ever, which were made 99 years ago today.” Chelsea Brasted. The Times-Picayune / NOLA.com. Feb. 26, 2016.
- “Original Dixieland Jazz Band.” Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns (website). PBS.org.
Anachronistic Tendencies 