Artist Profiles  

Part One: Americans Old and New

One of the central American metaphors is that of the melting pot, but in the northern Midwest winters are long and melting does not happen easily. Along the banks of the northern Mississippi, one still finds the music of wave after wave of immigrants, people who came thousands, hundreds, or just a few years ago. Each group has been affected by its surroundings and its neighbors, but each has also retained a cultural cohesiveness that is much rarer as one moves south. 

CHIPPEWA NATION

Chippewa Nation is part of a renaissance of Native American music taking place throughout the United States and Canada. A group of eight Ojibwe men from the Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations in northern Minnesota, it performs in the contemporary powwow drumming style, mixing Ojibwe rhythms and songs that have been passed on orally from generation to generation with songs and styles adapted from other Native American groups. Chippewa Nation (Chippewa is an alternate spelling of Ojibwe that is now largely out of favor, but still widely familiar) was formed some four years ago by Pete White and Randy Kingbird, and its members are all in their twenties and thirties. They travel to powwows throughout the northern midwest, performing in the central "drum arbor" while colorfully-garbed dancers circle, stamping and twirling. 
The members of Chippewa Nation are not professional musicians. Their music is a spiritual expression of their heritage and their day-to-day interactions with each other and with the natural world. Along with the dance songs and the quiet, courting songs performed in River of Song, the members sing many pieces that are considered too sacred to be captured on film or recorded. The Ojibwe of the Leech Lake region came to the area more than 300 years ago, and they have been able to retain many aspects of their traditional way of life. For many years, these traditions were suppressed by the dominant Anglo culture, but since the 1960s they have been seeing a dramatic resurgence. The powwow movement is particularly strong, ranging from competition powwows modeled on western rodeos to smaller, more traditional events like the annual powwow in the small community of Inger, where River of Song filmed. Here, Chippewa Nation is in its element, and, every time it takes its turn in the drum arbor, people flock to the dance ground.

THE SKÅL CLUB SPELMANSLAG

A Scandinavian massed fiddle orchestra, the Skål Club Spelmanslag includes some dozen fiddlers, as well as a double bass, a guitar and two accordions. They specialize in traditional Swedish and Norwegian dance tunes, some passed on in Minnesota Scandinavian traditions and others learned from recordings and musicians from the old countries. 
The group was formed some six years ago by Paul Wilson, a folksinger and fiddler based in the Brainerd area. "I was thinking, as the generations get farther removed from their immigrant past, it might be better if we try to band together all the people who are interested in our Scandinavian heritage," he says. "We call it Skål Club, because 'skål' is a Swedish word that means 'to your health,' -- you usually have a little drink after saying it, but it could just be coffee or whatever. Then, 'spelmanslag' is a Swedish and a Norwegian word that means 'player's group,' but it has come to mean 'fiddler's group.'   
The Skål Club is a nonprofessional social group that meets at members' houses to jam and enjoy each other's music, but over the years it has become popular enough that its concerts have raised funds to take the whole group to Scandinavia, where they have traded music with similar ensembles. Along with the waltzes, schottisches, and spingans, the group also keeps alive the comic vaudeville "Scandihoovian" tradition of the Midwest, Wilson singing funny songs in exaggerated dialect that poke gentle fun at his ancestors' immigrant past, accompanied by accordion, guitar, and sometimes an eerie musical saw.

SOUL ASYLUM

The most successful band to emerge from the fertile Twin Cities rock scene of the Eighties, Soul Asylum started out as a hard-edged speed band called Loud Fast Rules. "We spent our formative years practicing in our bass player's mom's garage," guitarist Dan Murphy says. "We were there for two or three years. And you know, we didn't have any big aspirations or anything, it was just a hell of a lot of fun. We'd just get together and piss off the neighbors."
As Soul Asylum, the band retained some of its early edge, but added a new melodiousness that took it to the top of the alternative rock scene. Singer/songwriter Dave Pirner wrote complex, intelligent songs that he likes to place in a continuum reaching back to balladeers like Woody Guthrie. Despite its national success, Soul Asylum has remained proudly based in the Twin Cities, rehearsing in a looming warehouse on the Mississippi's east bank.

BABES IN TOYLAND

Minneapolis has been a hotbed of alternative rock for two decades, but for sheer, abrasive energy, few groups can compare to the trio of young women known as Babes in Toyland, whose punk onslaught has spawned admirers and imitators around the world. One of the pioneering groups of the "riot grrrl" movement (Courtney Love started out in an early version of the band), Babes was founded by guitarist/singer/songwriter Kat Bjeland, who had moved out to the Twin Cities from the Pacific Northwest, and drummer Lori Barbero. 
Barbero took up drums at Bjeland's urging and is entirely self-taught, and she provides the group's rhythmic heart, an incredible mass of flailing arms and legs that propels the band with irresistable energy and roots it in deep rhythms that she likes to describe as "tribal." Bjeland, meanwhile, grinds out sheets of wailing guitar noise, over which she sings in a voice that ranges from a pained, ominous whisper to a banshee howl. Maureen Herman, who has since left the group, was the bassist at the time of filming, and her solid sound held the middle together.
After some ten years, Babes in Toyland is still among the most uncompromising and dynamic of the riot grrrl bands. Loud, discordant and rebellious, but also generating a warmth that keeps the fans coming back year after year, it has enjoyed international success and several major-label albums, but remains firmly rooted in its native soil. 

JOHN KOERNER

"Spider" John Koerner hit the folk-blues scene in 1963, together with his partners, Dave Ray and Tony Glover. Koerner, Ray and Glover (as the band was called) stormed out of the midwest and set the country on its ear with their rambunctious, freewheeling take on the blues tradition. Thirty-five years later, Koerner remains one of the most quirky and original performers on the American scene. After a brief retirement from music, he came back as a traditional folksinger, performing old chestnuts like "Shenandoah" and "Careless Love," but reshaping them into unique, personal statements that remain true to the tradition and yet have a funky, rhythmic drive that is Koerner's alone.
"In a sense, what I do is similar to something like Cajun music," Koerner says. "You've got a traditional thing, but it's not for just sitting around quietly, listening. I learn most of my stuff in the bars, and you've got to punch it out in the bars, and that picks people up and livens them up. I'm trying to not put them to sleep; I'm trying to have them feel the power of these songs." 
River of Song filmed Koerner at his local hangout, Palmer's, where he tends bar between musical outings. He was accompanied by the cream of the Twin Cities' sidemen, musicians who have known one another for decades and came to the attention of a national audience with the success of public radio's Prairie Home Companion. This "Twin Cities Folk Summit" brings together Koerner's old partners Tony Glover on harmonica and Willie Murphy on bass and keyboards with western swing guitar virtuoso Dakota Dave Hull and violin and mandolin master Peter Ostroushko.

HMONG QEEJ PLAYERS

The Twin Cities has the second largest population of Southeast Asian immigrants in the United States (after Los Angeles). The tribal, hill-dwelling Hmong came here after being forced out of their homes in Laos, and their vibrant community exemplifies the continuing contributions of new peoples to the American cultural mix. While attempting to assimilate to modern-day America, they have retained cultural and musical traditions that reach back before the dawn of recorded history. Their instruments are a unique assemblage, from the simple leaf, on which masters will play complex, soaring melodies, to a variety of flutes and the qeej, a sort of reed mouth organ. As Hmong is a tonal language, the melodies are also a sort of language, and an adept musician can play a whole lyric without ever saying a word.
A number of elders spend their days at the Hmong Cultural Center, a small storefront in a grey, unimpressive shopping mall, passing on his lore to the young members of the Hmong-American community. He leads classes of teeny qeej players, honking and wheezing on their instruments while executing carefully choreographed dance steps. Some of the older students have built on the tradition of dance and music, playing qeej solos while spinning on the floor in moves adapted from inner-city break dancers. 

SOUNDS OF BLACKNESS

From its origins as a student group at Macalester College to the top of the gospel charts, the 30-member ensemble known as Sounds of Blackness has explored the breadth and continuity of the African-American experience. "My goal was to establish a legitimate black music ensemble that performed the entire spectrum of African-American music in it's proper context," says founder and leader Gary Hines. "I wanted to do everything from West African music to field hollers, work songs, spirituals, blues, jazz, gospel, reggae, ragtime, r&b, hip-hop, jazz, rock 'n' roll -- the full spectrum. Because it's all a family of music that emanated from an experience: You can't understand the 'Glory Hallelujah' of the gospel without knowing about the pain of the blues. And that's the meaning of the name: Each style of the music is a unique sound of blackness, and collectively they are the Sounds of Blackness." 
Hines has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. After years as a popular group in the local community, known for its annual shows on Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, the group teamed up with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, producers of everyone from Prince to Janet Jackson, and immediately hit both the gospel and r&b charts. Since then, every album has made the charts and the Sounds have toured all over the U.S., as well as to Europe and Japan. Along with their tight choral arrangements and smoking rhythm section, the members bring a message of African-American pride and self-reliance, doing their best to give something back to the community that originally produced their music.

KARL HARTWICH & THE COUNTRY DUTCHMEN

The "Dutchman" style of polka is beer-drinking, good-time dance music, developed by German immigrants in rural Minnesota and Wisconsin (the name is derived from “Deutsch,” or German). Sometimes called "oompah," it is distinguished by the thumping bass sound of the tuba, and by its use of a distinctive member of the "free reed" family of instruments, the German concertina. Karl Hartwich is a concertina player and singer who leads one of the most popular current bands, the Country Dutchmen, based in the area around La Crosse. With the recent boom in polka music, he has been touring all over the central United States, from Wisconsin and Illinois down to the Southwest, filling dance floors wherever he goes.
Hartwich was a child prodigy on concertina, playing at dances between sets by his mentor, Syl Liebl, a legend in Dutchman music, and he has some of the nimblest fingers in the field. River of Song filmed both Hartwich and Liebl at a polka festival at the Hilltop Lounge, a dancehall high on the bluffs above the Mississippi River. As the dancers, many of whom spend the whole summer traveling from festival to festival, twirl and circle the floor, Hartwich leads his band through a rollicking selection of traditional and original polkas, with the occasional waltz or Dixieland jazz number thrown in for variety.

MANNY LOPEZ QUINTET

Davenport, a regular stopping place of the riverboats that brought jazz up the Mississippi and birthplace of the legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, remains a mecca for enthusiasts of the music that has come to be known as Dixieland. Manny Lopez, the son of Mexican immigrants, grew up playing trumpet in local mariachi bands, but was inspired by Herb Alpert to stretch outside the traditional repertoire. Over the years, he has become a leading figure on the Quad City jazz scene, leading his five-piece band through regular sets in a local restaurant. 
For the last decade, Manny has often been joined by his son Manuel III, better known as Dude, who plays drums and sings with the laconic ease of a latter-day Sinatra. River of Song filmed the Lopez band as part of its coverage of the annual Bix Weekend, which includes a huge road race and a jazz festival. The quintet played an outdoor set along the route of the race, and Manny even started the runners off by playing the call to post, twisting even the ordinarily prosaic bugle call into a swinging jazz phrase.

LA OTRA MITAD

La Otra Mitad is a straight-ahead barroom dance band in the Mexican "norteño" style, which blends polkas, waltzes, brassy horn charts and bright accordion riffs with Mexican song forms like the corrido and ranchera, as well as such modern additions as Columbian cumbia and even the occasional burst of rap. The band was formed by Mexican-American youths whose parents came to the Quad Cities area around Davenport, Iowa, and Moline, Illinois, in the 1930s and 1940s to work on the area's farms, the railroad, and in the Moline meat-packing plants. 
Workers by day, the members of La Otra Mitad get together on weekends to provide entertainment for the large local Mexican-America community, and also pride themselves on their ability to adapt to other audiences, playing Italian, Jewish, or rock 'n' roll music for parties and family celebrations throughout the region. They are the true bar-band tradition, musicians who play not because they are self-involved artists, but because they like to see people dancing and having a good time.

GREG BROWN

Greg Brown is the preeminent singer/songwriter on the contemporary midwestern folk scene, and became a national figure in the 1980s as house songwriter for Prairie Home Companion. Brown's music is a surprising fusion of midwestern roots and a searching, quirky imagination that took him east to New York's Greenwich Village in 1969, west on the Beatnik-hippie trail, and on to Las Vegas, where he had a job ghost-writing pop songs. All the sounds he heard along the way combined with the church music and country fiddling he had heard growing up in southern Iowa, and the result is a hip, funkily rhythmic blend that somehow retains its rural innocence.
After his stint on Prairie Home Companion, Brown returned to Iowa City, and he has become the center of a small but vibrant music scene. In recent years, he has teamed up with a local blues-rocker, Bo Ramsey, who has added a new, raw edge to the music. River of Song found the two in Brown's living room, jamming and revisiting old times in southern Iowa. The walls were lined with bookshelves, a testament to Brown's literary bent, but the music was anything but self-consciously intellectual. Brown's songs are startling in their directness, acuity and wry humor. Whether remembering the feeling of walking down to the country store on a summer evening or exploring the dark underbelly of urban America, he creates a world populated with living, breathing characters, and frames their stories with rootsy guitar riffs and a gruff, jazz-inflected baritone. Raw and tender, unashamedly country and off-handedly cool, Brown is a mass of contradictions that somehow blend into something completely natural and heartfelt.

Part Two: Midwestern Crossroads

The land bordering the Mississippi as it runs through Missouri and Illinois is where the old river highways, the Missouri, Des Moines, Illinois and Ohio, join the mainstream of the river for the journey south to the main port of New Orleans, and its towns were defined by the river traffic. By this history, if not by geography, this region became for many people the center of the United States. In the nineteenth century, it was the divide between east and west, and traces of that division still hold good. West of the river, the prairies begin, the land of cowboy boots, cattle and myth. East is white America's version of the "old country," the towns that liked to consider themselves as centers of civilization on the border of the barbarous wilderness. In later years, when the national migration pattern became as much south to north as east to west, this area was once again an important point on the journey, and a place where some travelers would choose to remain.

JOHN HARTFORD

John Hartford has made a career of the Mississippi River. Though best known as the writer  of "Gentle On My Mind" and as one of the most innovative and quirky bandleaders and musicians in the country/bluegrass world, he has long maintained a parallel existence as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. Hartford grew up in St. Louis listening to stories and songs of the old steamboating days. His musical impulse came from seeing Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs's trendsetting bluegrass band, and from the old-time dances that were still being held in the area during his youth in the 1950s. He later moved to the West Coast, where he became a regular on the Smothers Brothers television show, and on to Nashville, where he put together a band featuring Vassar Clements and Norman Blake that became the cutting edge of a "new traditionalist" movement on the country scene.
Today, Hartford lives most of the year in Nashville, still writing songs and touring on the concert circuit. Every summer, though, he comes back to the river. "Working as a pilot is a labor of love," he says. "After a while, it becomes a metaphor for a whole lot of things, and I find for some mysterious reason that if I stay in touch with it, things seem to work out all right."
Along with his own compositions, Hartford is a voluminous repository of old river songs, calls, and stories. He can spend hours talking about the glory days of steamboating, or demonstrate the lead calls that the river's most famous chronicler took as his name, "Mark Twain" (or "two fathoms"). A virtuoso fiddler and banjo player, Hartford remains simultaneously an innovative voice on the country scene and a thrilling reminder of a vanished era.

BOB LEWIS FAMILY

Bluegrass is popular throughout the United States, and there is nowhere it is more enthusiastically appreciated than in the prairie country of northern Illinois and Missouri. This is the area that produced the music's current standar-bearer, Alison Kraus, and local fans still remember her debut as a child prodigy, setting the region's festivals on fire with her blazing fiddle breaks. At the Western Illinois Bluegrass Days, old and young players come together to trade licks, eat watermelon, watch an array of popular bands, and jam into the wee hours of the night.

One group of old-timers, players in their 60s and 70s, travel from festival to festival through the summer, then relocate to the Mexican border region for the winter, parking their RVs together and keeping alive an old-time country music tradition that mixes gospel and c&w standards with songs that hark back to the Victorian parlor tradition.
The Lewis Family, by contrast, includes players who are barely into their teens. Bob Lewis set out to raise a family band, and he has met with startling success. His son, Lil' Bob, is a virtuoso on fiddle and bass, and his daughter Joy was recently given a new mandolin by the Gibson company in recognition of her brilliant instrumental skills. With the rest of the family singing, playing, clog dancing, and even tossing in some cornball comedy routines, the Lewises are favorites throughout the midwestern circuit. The family still travels together in a bus, and a toddling third generation promises to keep the family tradition alive for a long time into the future.

THE ST. CHARLES HIGH SCHOOL BAND

When it comes to non-professional musicians performing regularly for large crowds, no musical style even approaches the popularity of marching bands. Village bands have been a center of social gatherings in the Midwest since at least mid-18th century. They played everything from light classical music to waltzes and other dance tunes. It was John Phillip Sousa, "The March King," who first put a uniquely American stamp on brass music, making the first commercially successful band recordings in 1890.

School bands, playing during football games, have become a ubiquitous tradition throughout the United States, and many professional musicians got their start taking "band" for high school credit. The St. Charles High School Band is typical of contemporary marching bands, playing everything from band standards to modern show tunes, and "Louie, Louie."  The musicians start practicing in the spring, and work through the summer to be ready when football season hits. Then they take the field, marching in intricate formations while playing precise, brassy arrangements.

Though the Midwest hosts many hot band competitions, that is not where the St. Charles players feel most comfortable. "We're not really a competition band as much as we are just an audience band," says one teenage player. "You stick us in front of our home audience, we perform twenty times better because we've got them all yelling for us and all cheering for us. At competitions, they're just out there judging you the whole time. It's not as fun."

FONTELLA BASS and MARTHA BASS

Fontella Bass grew up on the gospel highway, then made a side trip to the top of the soul charts before coming home to the church. By the time she was in her teens, she was touring across the Midwest and the Southwest, playing piano for her grandmother and her mother, Martha Bass, a member of the groundbreaking Ward Singers. She broke out in her late teens, joining Little Milton's band as a pianist. One day, when Milton was off the bandstand, she took a vocal solo, and her career was launched. Soon she was up in Chicago, at Chess Records, cutting "Rescue Me," one of the defining hits of the soul revolution.
Bass married jazzman Lester Bowie, living first in Chicago and then in Paris, France, and singing both r&b and jazz. In the end, though, she came back to St. Louis and the church. She, her mother, and her brother David made several successful gospel albums, and she became choir director at her local church. River of Song filmed Bass with her mother, now 75, singing together over Fontella's strong gospel piano chording just as they used to do in the old days. The older woman's rough power and the younger's soaring soul shout combine in a duet that exemplifies the majesty and power of gospel music. 
"All music is about feeling," Fontella says. "And in gospel you have to feel the Lord. Now, if I do blues I send out the blues message. I have had plenty of things touch down in my life that can give me the blues, but I get happy when I do the blues. And jazz, I'm feeling just mellow and I want to send that kind of feeling out. But in gospel I want the people who are listening to me to know the Lord. I have to feel Him myself and the only way I can feel him is to terminate a lot of the other things in my life, and present that gospel out."

OLIVER SAIN

Oliver Sain encompasses in his memories the entire history of the blues. His grandfather was Dan Sane (sic), partner with Frank Stokes in Memphis's legendary Beale St. Sheiks, among the first blues stars of the 1920s. Raised around Greenville, Mississippi, he came north with Little Milton, and worked as Milton's bandleader through the glory days of St. Louis r&b. As other local stars got famous and moved away, he built a recording studio and set himself the task of keeping St. Louis r&b alive. 
Over the years, Sain has established himself as the heart of St. Louis r&b, supporting the old guard and nurturing young talent. His Oliver Sain Revue makes an annual appearance at the St. Louis Blues Festival, and throughout the year he can be found working in local clubs. Far from living in the past, he is always immersed in new projects, recording with old friends like piano legend Johnny Johnson or training up a new singer. His saxophone playing is as strong as ever, and, though he is likely to be modest about his vocal abilities, when he sinks his teeth into a blues lyric he shows a mastery that the genre's young hotshots may never attain.
	River of Song recorded Sain in the intimacy of his weekly gig at BB’s Blues, Jazz & Soup along the riverfront, and at a sold-out day-long Tribute to Oliver Sain--a benefit concert organized to help Sain pay medical expenses resulting from a major operation in 1997.

SUNSHINE DRUM GROUP and EUGENE REDMOND

East St. Louis is one of the fabled midwestern cities that, with its largely African-American population, nurtured some of the hottest players in jazz, blues, and r&b. One of the oldest blues songs tells how the singer "walked all the way from East St. Louis," and, in the 1950s, the city nurtured the rough-hewn showbands of Chuck Berry, Little Milton, and Ike and Tina Turner. Miles Davis grew up here, sneaking into local jazz clubs to hear the latest sounds. 
Today, East St. Louis seems at times like a city under siege, but African-American artists are still working hard to instill a sense of pride and history in the younger generation. Two of the guiding lights of the local scene are the drummer Sylvester "Sunshine" Lee and the poet Eugene Redmond. Both have been associated with the arts association headed by dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, and it was with Dunham that Lee started out studying the African drumming tradition. He has since trained several generations of African drummers, reminding black youngsters of their roots in the old continent.
Eugene Redmond is a widely published poet, a major figure in the cultural blossoming of the 1960s. While many of his peers headed for the coasts and their more visible literary scenes, Redmond has opted to remain here, on his home turf, and his poems are deeply rooted in his environment. He writes of what he sees in the streets of East St. Louis, of local heroes and heroines, and of the history that has shaped the city's African-American community. In a world that many community leaders have all but abandoned, he and Lee remain beacons of optimism and hope.

THE BOTTLE ROCKETS

Three high-school buddies grew up in Festus, Missouri, an industrial town downriver from St. Louis, listening to Buck Owens records and Aerosmith. Eventually, they put together a band, playing honky-tonk music. There was only one problem: "We have this natural inclination to get excited when we play, and we'll just turn around and turn the amps up," guitarist/singer Brian Henneman says. "We just can't help it. So we were louder than we should have been, more abrasive than we should have been, and we weren't doing anybody any favors." Rejected by their hometown crowd, the boys kept playing for themselves. "We eventually evolved into the Bottle Rockets and went into St. Louis, and nobody told us to turn down; I think everybody is deaf up there. We turned the amps up, and it turned into a whole new thing. There we were, rocking like Aerosmith, playing country songs basically, and that's the thing we have been mining ever since."
The Bottle Rockets came to national attention along with such other midwestern roots bands as Uncle Tupelo, Wilco and Son Volt, and made their reputation as one of the hardest-edged and most iconoclastic alternative country/rock bands around. Their lyrics are particularly strong, solid storytelling in the classic country tradition, but infused with wry, contemporary insights and underpinned with full-throttle electric power. Their songs cast a harsh and funny light on both small-town life and big city trends, and their recent major-label debut has garnered raves from both alternative rock and country fans.

STE. GENEVIEVE GUIGNOLÉE SINGERS

Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, lays claim to being the first permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi. Founded by French traders, it remained for centuries a French enclave in the midst of an increasingly Anglophone Midwest. Today, the last generation of native French speakers is disappearing, but old traditions still remain. The most visible is La Guignolée, a medieval tradition analagous to the English custom of wassailing. Every New Year's Eve, the descendants of St. Genevieve's French settlers don bizarre and archaic costumes and wander from bar to bar, singing a begging song that harks back to the Middle Ages.
"The song asks for a piece of meat -- forty feet long, if I remember right," says Duke Blechler, leader of the current Ste. Genevieve Guignolée singers. "And if the people didn’t have a piece of meat to give them, they would ask for their eldest daughter. Take her out, wine her and dine her -- which doesn’t sound very good, you know."
In every bar, the singers are welcomed with a drink and, as the night wears on, they begin to sway a bit and the French lyrics become harder and harder to understand. The spirit of the musical tradition keeps coming through loud and clear, though, until the last singer stumbles home to catch a few hours sleep before New Year's morning mass.

Part Three: Southern Fusion

The river flows into the deep South, heartland of the blues and breeding ground for rock 'n' roll and soul music. This is farm and plantation country, and Memphis, the regional metropolis, is far less distinct from its rural surroundings than Minneapolis, St. Louis, or New Orleans. Its population retains strong country roots, and its musical history has been made by all the folks from the surrounding fields who came into the city to record and sell their music, just as the cotton plantation owners came in to sell their bales to the national brokers.
The plantations, built by African slaves and later worked by African-American sharecroppers, created a population in which blacks were the majority and, while their political power was brutally curtailed, they were a dominant influence on music. All the musicians to come out of this area, whatever their race, have been deeply affected by black traditions. Despite segregation, black and white musicians have traded tunes and played together for generations, from the days when Mississippi John Hurt was working at dances with the white fiddler W. T. Narmour to the Stax studio scene that produced the Memphis Horns. The mixing was not easy, but it made for a unique musical world that could produce a white r&b singer like Elvis Presley and a black country star like Charley Pride.

THE BOUNDLESS LOVE QUARTET

Western Kentucky has a long and honorable music tradition, though most of the area's greatest performers had to leave home to find wider acclaim. Those who have stayed home are generally unknown outside the region, but that is not because of any lack of talent. In small-town churches, southern gospel music continues to rock the congregation, complex harmonies and split-second rhythmic shifts serving to accent a message of faith and redemption. 
The Boundless Love Quartet, based in the small town of La Center, is typical of the best the southern gospel style has to offer, a multi-generational group that mixes old-time soul with youthful spirit. Backed in loose country style by an ensemble that includes piano, guitar and harmonica, the quartet runs through old standards and gospel pop songs that recall the trend-setting work of the Blackwood Brothers, the group that once inspired youthful southern soul singers like Elvis Presley.

SONNY BURGESS

Back in the 1950s, a bunch of white farm boys all across the South discovered that if they turned their radio dials to the right frequency they could hear music that was a lot more exciting than anything playing at the local square dance. In surprising synchrony, these young people began to mix a bit of this wild music in with the haunted strains of Hank Williams and the acoustic overdrive of Bill Monroe's bluegrass. When Elvis Presley hit, they were ready, and dozens followed his lead to the Memphis offices of Sun Records. 
One of the new wave of what would come to be called "rockabilly" artists was Sonny Burgess, who had been tearing up roadhouses in his hometown of Newport, Arkansas. Newport in the Fifties was in one of the few "wet" counties in an area dominated by prohibitionists, and boasted a formidable strip of honky-tonks where music, gambling and wild living were the order of the day. Burgess and his Pacers were the kings of the local scene, the hottest, rawest white rockers around.
Forty years later, Burgess has mellowed a bit, but he can still rock with the best. In the King of Clubs, an old-time roadhouse where Elvis played one of his first shows and Conway Twitty got his start, he leads his band through a set that touches on everything from Jimmy Rodgers's country yodels to New Orleans r&b and the hits that made Burgess a rockabilly legend. As he tears into "We Wanna Boogie," the floor fills with dancers and the clock turns back to the days when rock 'n' roll was born.

RUFUS THOMAS

Rufus Thomas is a legend, the self-proclaimed "World's Oldest Teenager," and universally acclaimed sage of Memphis's Beale Street. Thomas first came to Beale Street some seventy years ago. "Back then," he says, "Beale Street was a black man's haven -- I couldn't say heaven, but close. People were coming from far and near, from the river to the railroad, from Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, coming to Beale Street. If you had a whole lot of troubles and things were bothering you, come to Beale Street and all your problems were gone. You could have nothing but good times on Beale Street and that's what it was all about."
Thomas was soon tap-dancing in theaters, and before he was out of his teens he was an established, all-around entertainer: a singer, dancer, comedian, and one of the most ebulliant showmen in a town noted for its great performers. As a talent show host, he gave BB King and a hundred others their start, and he reigned as a d.j. on WDIA, the "Mother Station of the Negroes," playing the latest hits to an audience across the deep South. In the 1950s, he had one of the first hits for Sun Records, and in the 1960s his "Walking the Dog" became a groundbreaking hit for Stax, the label that would define southern soul.
Today, Thomas continues to perform, often at the Memphis Blues and Heritage Festival, but he is even more captivating as a raconteur, telling tales of the glory days of old Memphis. He knew all the greats, from the bluesmen who played for tips in Handy Park to Elvis Presley and Otis Redding, and he has his own acerbic slant on the history of a town that has produced as much great music as any in the world.

MEMPHIS COMMUNITY MUSIC

All the recorded music in the world, and all the professionally performed music, is only the tip of a huge iceberg. Real folk music, the music people make among themselves, is still alive in every schoolyard. In Memphis, little girls play clapping and jump-roping games, singing rhymes to keep time that have been passed down for generations and continue to evolve. A game that a hundred years ago might have been a contest to name different kinds of animals is now a game of naming TV stars, but the spirit of the songs is unchanged. At the Georgia Avenue Elementary School, a group of kids, both girls and boys, showed off their skills in double-dutch jump-roping and clapping games.

The street and playground traditions have also been formalized into more involved displays. At the Katie Sexton Community Center, a drill team performed its intricate formation marching. The girls, in black and gold, brightly-sequined costumes, twisted, bent, kicked and turned, accompanied by a band of teenage guys beating out complex polyrhythms on a variety of drums.

A few more years, and it is the men's turn to show off. During the spring rush at the University of Memphis, fraternities vie for new pledges, and one of the most potent advertisements is a hot team of "steppers." This year, the Kappa Alpha Psi steppers trump the competition by arriving on the campus in a helicopter. Jumping out, they go into their routine, rapping out rhymes while they dance in tight choreography, executing flashy maneuvers with their canes. Students crowd around, shouting encouragement, and admiring the slick stylings.

THE MEMPHIS HORNS, WITH ANN PEEBLES

In the 1960s, Stax Records and its competitors defined a new style called Southern Soul. The names on the record labels tended to be those of singers (Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes), but what made the records cook was the churning, grinding rhythms of the backing musicians. The Stax rhythm section would become famous as Booker T. and the MGs, and the horn section would make its mark first as the Mar-Keys and later as the Memphis Horns. The Memphis Horns are, in fact, just two men, Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, weaned in the Stax studio and the Memphis bar scene, and they have become the most-recorded horn section in the world, playing with everyone from the classic soul stars to later rockers like Sting.
Andrew was the son of a black preacher, while Wayne's father was a white traveling salesman, but the first time they played together they realized that they were two of a kind. "There was something about the way our tones blended," Andrew says. "His sound and my sound, it was just perfect." They played together around Stax and the other Memphis studios, honing their distinctive sound. When the bottom dropped out of the local soul boom, they hit the road, becoming studio stalwarts who could always be relied upon to sail in and add that certain sound that, to a world of listeners, would always say "Memphis."
River of Song caught the Horns in a familiar setting, a Memphis recording studio, but the session was anything but typical. After laying down horn tracks on a record by Ann Peebles, the soul diva who came to Memphis from St. Louis in the early 1970s and burned up the charts with "Can't Stand the Rain," they sat back and joined her on an acoustic blues, backed only by piano. In this setting, they stepped out of the riff-centered approach for which they are famous, and blew gorgeous jazz solos, Jackson's trumpet recalling Louis Armstrong while Love's tenor sax growled, warm and sexy, wrapping itself around Peebles's powerhouse vocals.

ROBERT LOCKWOOD, JR.

For a lot of people, the Mississippi Delta is virtually synonymous with the blues. Robert Lockwood, Jr. is part of the generation that put the Delta on America's musical map. Stepson of the Delta's most famous early star, Robert Johnson, Lockwood cut his first records in the 1930s, then teamed up with harmonica king Sonny Boy Williamson on the King Biscuit Show, a daily radio program that blanketed the Delta and introduced a new, electric sound that today is, somewhat paradoxically, called "Chicago blues."
Lockwood went on to play jazz and pop music, but returned to the blues in the 1960s and has been playing it ever since. These days, he can usually be heard fronting a crack electric band, most of whose players are young enough to be his grandchildren, but he can also play acoustic blues that he learned from Johnson as a teenager, and he reigns over the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival, held in West Helena, Arkansas, home of the radio show that started it all.

LEVON HELM with JAMES COTTON

One of the highlights of the King Biscuit Fest is a "Midnight Ramble," held on a riverboat and featuring Levon Helm, a bunch of his Arkansas buddies, and harmonica legend James Cotton. Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, just outside of West Helena, and used to come into town to sit at the feet of the King Biscuit Show's musicians as they broadcast. He went on to be the wailing voice and solid drummer of the Band, the group that arguably invented the whole concept of American roots music back in the 1960s, after a stint as Bob Dylan's backing band.
Every year, Helm comes home to play the King Biscuit Fest, sometimes with his Band mates and sometimes with the Cate Brothers, a group of hometown friends. This year, he is joined by James Cotton, who came up in Muddy Waters's band and became one of the trendsetting Chicago harmonica players and bandleaders, in a set that ranges from traditional blues jams to Band hits like "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

JACK JOHNSON with THE JELLY ROLL KINGS

While other musicians headed north in search of blues stardom, Jack Johnson stayed down in the Delta, and his music has a raw, country feel that city bands somehow can never capture. His father was a fiddler, and Johnson grew up in the old, acoustic tradition. He can still kick back and play early Delta classics like "Catfish," the acoustic guitar echoing his earthy, knowing vocals. 
Johnson made his name, though, as a member of the Jelly Roll Kings. The Kings, a trio filled out by harmonica and keyboard man Frank Frost and drummer Sam Carr, were famous as the hottest band in the Delta, rocking the juke joints and keeping up the area's reputation as the heartland of blues. Over the years, they drifted apart, and Johnson hit the road as a soloist, but they still get together once and a while when the gig is right. River of Song filmed the original Jelly Roll Kings in a classic juke in Bobo, Mississippi--a crossroads outside of Clarksdale--where the grocery store pushes aside the shelves on Saturday night to make room for a cramped and sweating crowd of dancers. 
As Carr and Frost hold down a grinding, boiling beat, Johnson plays electric slide with the dirty, greasy feel of Elmore James and shouts verses that sound as old as the land, telling stories about roosters that creep into the wrong henhouse and lovers walking away down long, lonesome roads. The dancers rock and roll in the erotic motions that gave a later music its name, and the Delta lives up to its mythic reputation.

JOHNNIE BILLINGTON

Johnny Billington is originally from the Delta region, and started playing guitar and singing blues after listening to the King Biscuit radio show he was in his teens. He would later move out to Arizona, then up to Chicago, but he never stopped playing. It was after coming back to Clarksdale in 1977, though, that he found his unique calling. For two decades now, he has been gathering together groups of young, local, black kids, and teaching them the basics of the blues. He then brings his band of teenage bluesmen with him to local schools, lecturing the kids on their heritage and instilling a sense of pride in the rich Delta tradition.
Billington says that, at first, not everyone understood what he was doing. After all, the blues has not tended to have a savory reputation on its home turf. "After I got two or three kids that was interested, we messed and we practiced, and finally we got a few songs together to take to play. Then the next thing that happened, the police came and said, 'You have to turn the guitar amps down real low, like a radio, or turn 'em off. The neighbors and the peoples in the city are complaining about the music.'"
Billington kept at it, and the complaints and police kept coming and shutting him down. Finally, he decided to take matters into his own hands. 
"I went to the mayor's office and I said, 'I just come down to talk to you about me playing my guitar. I says, the police comes tell me I can't play it.' 
So he said, 'Yeah, I know about it, the peoples complained.' 
I said, 'Well, you know, I have three or four kids over there'. 
He said, 'Yeah, we know about it'. 
I said, 'Well, why don't you all go pick them up'? 
And he said, 'Well, for what, why should pick 'em up'.
I said, 'Well, you need to lock 'em up'. 
He says, 'For what'? 
I says, 'Well, you know I have a guitar in their hand. You gonna stop us from playing it. So, you stop us from playing it and you gonna put a gun right in their hand. They're kids now, but they'll be adults tomorrow and they'll have guns rather than guitars'. 
He says, 'Well, I 'm gonna call the chief'. He call the chief and he said, 'Leave Mr. Billington alone.'"

LITTLE MILTON

In the 1950s, blues evolved into a new, gospel-tinged style that would ease seamlessly into the southern soul sound of the next decade. The reigning kings were based at first in Memphis: artists like B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, and Little Milton. Milton started out as a teenage guitar player in Greenville, Mississippi, recorded for Sun Records, then headed up to St. Louis and spent years there, filling the clubs in a friendly rivalry with his fellow Mississippian Ike Turner. 
Signed to Chess Records, the Chicago label that defined down-home blues, Milton had a respectable string of blues hits, then came into his own in the 1960s as a soul-blues singer and balladeer. His uptown sound, full of rich horn lines and singing guitar solos, is the antithesis of the Jelly Roll Kings' rough-hewn approach, but there is no questioning his depth of soul and emotion. While white blues fans have dug for an ever-rootsier sound, it is Milton's uptown sound that brings African-American audiences into the string of southern clubs known affectionately as the "chitlin' circuit."
Today, Milton records for the Jackson-based Malaco label, and is one of the most consistent sellers in the southern blues market. His eyes glint as he works his audience, joking with the men and seducing the women. His songs are still filled with cheating women and no-good men, but they are wearing fancy gowns and cologne, not overalls and brogans. His show at the Flowin’ Fountain, on Greenville's fabled Nelson Street, is a sort of homecoming, and he is joined by his mentor, Little Bill Wallace, and the raunchy Arkansas blues star Bobby Rush for an evening that brings together the roots and the branches of the Delta tradition.

MISSISSIPPI MASS CHOIR

Frank Williams, leader of one of the South's most popular gospel quartets, the Jackson Southernaires, had a dream. He wanted to put together a choir that would show the world all that Mississippi had to offer. With a few associates, he proceeded to spread the word that he was seeking singers from all over the state, and soon the audition tapes were rolling in. Williams picked out the best few hundred cassettes and called those singers in for auditions. In the end, he had roughly a hundred of the greatest singers in a state long famous for its depth of musical talent. He brought them together, rehearsed them, and called them the Mississippi Mass Choir.
Frank Williams is dead, but his dream lives on. Mississippi Mass is the most successful choir in gospel music. Every record it makes shoots instantly to the top of the gospel charts, and several have lingered on those charts for years. The group has toured Europe, Japan, and most of the United States, bringing its unique blend of tight, modern arrangements and old-time churchy passion. 
It is the downhome soul and sheer technical brilliance of the singers that have set Mississippi Mass apart, and kept it consistently ahead of the imitators that have sprung up in its wake. Other choirs can put together hot arrangements, but none can boast the depth of vocal talent that comes together in the choir's rehearsal space, a modern church building on the outskirts of Jackson. From teenagers to grandparents, these are the deepest, soulfulest singers in America, and when they start swinging in time, their robes swirling around them, there is no resisting the force of their message.

Part Four: Louisiana, Where Music is King

Louisiana is a world unto itself, and music is a big part of what makes it special. Or, more accurately, Louisiana is several worlds, each completely distinct from the others. North Louisiana is part of the deep South; New Orleans is part of the Caribbean; the Cajun country is a sort of southern Quebec with bayous and a rich African-American heritage; as for the Isleño area at the Mississippi's mouth, it is a tiny pocket of its own. Each of these areas has its distinctive music and food, two things which tend to go together in Louisiana, and which are valued here as in no other part of the country.

KENNY BILL STINSON	

In northern Louisiana, country and blues came together, and a quirky breed of songwriter was born. Jerry Lee Lewis and his childhood friends and cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart come out of here, as does swamp country singer/songwriter Tony Joe White. Kenny Bill Stinson is part of a long tradition. 
"Where I'm from is kind of like a train-wreck of country music and blues," Stinson says. "They kind of crashed together and blew up there. So I play a blend of country, blues, rock 'n' roll -- whatever I can throw together to make a living. I've been playing music, it seems like, ever since I was a baby. My mother said that I came out singing, not crying, and I've been hollering and yodeling and warbling ever since."
Stinson leads a band that rocks parties and barrooms throughout northern Louisiana, but River of Song filmed him doing a solo set on the porch of a riverside saloon in Natchez-under-the-Hill, Mississippi. With his guitar chopping out a solid boogie rhythm and a rack harmonica punctuating the verses, he sang good-time, party music that spoke of southern cooking, pretty women, and the bright side of the honky-tonk life.

GOV. JIMMIE DAVIS

Outside Louisiana, Jimmie Davis is best known for his original version of "You Are My Sunshine," one of America's theme songs. Instate, he is also remembered as the two-time governor, a man who, during his first term, starred in his own Hollywood biopic and placed several records in the country Top 10. The "Singing Governor" would bring his band with him on the campaign trail, and forgo complex speeches in favor of old-time singalongs on his country and gospel hits. 
A pioneer of country recording, Gov. Davis (as Louisianans still call him) is now 98, and he celebrated his birthday at the Strand Theater in Shreveport, riding his tour bus out from his opulent home in the shadow of the Baton Rouge state capitol. For the occasion, he was joined by the cast of the Louisiana Hayride, the radio show that once rivaled the Grand Ole Opry and gave early national exposure to both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, and a special guest concert by Merle Haggard. The highlight of the evening came when the Governor, now in a wheelchair, took center stage to sing his trademark hit, with Haggard bending over to stand cheek to cheek and add sweet harmony on the chorus.

D. L. MENARD

Guitarist and songwriter D.L. Menard is a local legend in the bayou country. "The Cajun Hank Williams," he started out as a country singer, the guy who would sing the latest English-language hits in between the older French numbers. In his teens, though, he met Hank Williams at a local show, and Williams told him he should be proud of his own culture and play his own music. Menard reacted by reshaping Williams's "Honky Tonk Blues" into the most popular Cajun song since "Jole Blon," the picaresque "La Porte En Arriere," or "The Back Door."
That was back in the early 1950s, and over the next four decades Menard has written hundreds of songs, all in French and illuminated by his keen insight and sure lyrical touch. He is also a popular bandleader, the finest old-time entertainer in Cajun music. His shows are a mix of irresistably danceable music, heart-wrenching vocals, and strings of weird non-sequitors and off-beat philosophizing. 
River of Song filmed Menard in his back yard, hosting a crawfish feast along with his regular band and two of the finest young players in the field, the traditional accordion master and singer Robert Jardell and guitarist and singer Christine Balfa, whose father Dewey started the modern Cajun renaissance and who now leads the popular Balfa Toujours.

GENO DELAFOSE

Geno Delafose is a standard-bearer for traditional zydeco, the popular music of the Creoles, or black Francophones, who have lived alongside the Cajuns for centuries. In an evolution that parallels what has happened in the Anglophone South, black French music has seen a startling and imaginative evolution over the last century that often left the white French music looking rather stolid and conservative by comparison. Delafose's father, John Delafose, helped set off the latest wave of zydeco, bringing people back to the rhythmically unstoppable button accordion.
Delafose took over his father's band a few years back, and he has proved himself one of the most versatile musicians in south Louisiana. Moving with ease between the one, two, and three-row button accordions and the piano accordion favored by zydeco king Clifton Chenier, he can play everything from old-fashioned waltzes, two-steps and jurés to blues and soul hits. At Slim's Y-ki-ki in Opelousas, he fills the floor with nimble dancers whose ages encompass three generations and more of zydeco tradition.
Back home in Eunice, Delafose tends to his other passion, keeping up a stable of six fine riding horses. With his white cowboy hat and colorful shirts, he exemplifies a cowboy tradition that -- though few Northerners know it -- was never limited to white Anglo-Saxons. Delafose dreams of a crossover into country music and, between the rollicking energy of his music and his engaging cowboy persona, he seems perfectly suited to bring zydeco to this wider audience.

DAVID AND ROSELYN

The streets of New Orleans have been the training ground for many of the city's brightest talents, and they still present a free-form showcase of musical talent, from brass bands and a cappella groups to a virtuoso on the musical glasses. David and Roselyn have been singing on the streets of New Orleans for over 20 years, raising three children and sending them off to college with coins and bills thrown into David's guitar case by enthusiastic passersby.
David and Roselyn met in the Air Force Band in 1959, and married shortly afterwards. They first came to New Orleans in 1963, as part of a voter registration drive, but did not relocate to the city until the 1970s. Ever since, though, they have been a regular sight on Royal Street, or a corner of Jackson Square. They are a striking pair: David with his high hat, flowing white hair, goatee and cascading moustache, plays guitar and harmonica, occasionally switching over to trumpet for an old jazz standard. Roselyn, with her dark, African features, long braids and wide hats, plays mandolin, guitar, and various sizes of African thumb piano, from the tinkling kalimba to the thumping rumba box.
David and Roselyn have a vast repertoire, ranging from church songs to folk music, country hits, blues, jazz, and plenty of New Orleans r&b. They will even throw in oddities like a romping version of the Labelle disco hit, "Lady Marmalade." Whatever they play, their solid musicianship, Roselyn's huge voice, and the good-time feel of their performances are sure to draw a crowd.

HENRY BUTLER

Henry Butler's name is not a household word, but over the last decade he has established himself as the finest all-around pianist in New Orleans, a city known for its piano masters. Butler is equally at home in jazz, blues, or r&b, and has toured with the Verve Big Band as well as being an acclaimed club performer in his own right. He is also something of a historian of New Orleans music, and can present a one-man chronicle that reaches back to the days when Jelly Roll Morton was helping invent the music now known as jazz in the red-light district of Storyville.
In the second-floor concert room of the Funky Butt club, Butler sits at the grand piano and shows how the Caribbean mambo beat came into New Orleans music, was adapted by Professor Longhair, and mutated into the basic pulse of Crescent City dance music. His fingers trace a delicate filigree of ragtime, and inject modern harmonies and dazzling single-note runs into standards like "Basin Street Blues." Across the street, in Armstrong Park, Butler fronts his crack band at a summer Jazz Park event. Alternating between grand piano and electric keyboard, he runs through a set that includes a tribute to Longhair, with Butler wailing the lyrics in eerie evocation of the Professor's idiosynchratic style, jazz instrumentals, and a guest set by New Orleans stalwart Eddie Bo. Truly a musicians' musician, Henry Butler blends old and new, and preserves New Orleans's reputation as the birthplace of musical masters.

EDDIE BO

Eddie Bo is a New Orleans landmark. One of the classic generation of pianists that includes Allen Toussaint and Huey "Piano" Smith, he had several strong regional hits in the early 1960s, all featuring a rocking Caribbean rhythm and off-beat humor (one classic has the tag line: "Confucious say, 'Every Dog Has His Day'"). Today, Bo remains a stalwart of the French Quarter, playing most afternoons of the week at Margaritaville. He was playing the gig for years before Jimmy Buffett bought the club and changed its name, and he is set to remain there into the foreseeable future.
Along with his musicianship, Bo is a street corner philosopher and an evocative booster for his hometown sound. "There's that mysticism, that little extra beat that you can always tell comes from New Orleans," he says. It's an extra beat inside the beat that we can't seem to explain to people. We call it a stutter step, that extra step that the second liners do [in the street parades]. We incorporate that from when we are children, and when you hear it, then you know it, 'cause there's only one set of people that's able to bring that forth, to incorporate that extra little thing that's going on in there. Mister, you can tell New Orleans anywhere you go."

IRMA THOMAS

New Orleans has been a steady producer of r&b talent, from Fats Domino and Professor Longhair to the Neville Brothers. Irma Thomas first hit in the 1950s as a teenager, with one of the the rawest, hottest records ever to come out of the scene, "You Can Have My Husband (But Please Don't Mess with My Man)." She continued through the 1960s, with hits like "It's Raining," "Pain in my Heart," and "Time Is on My Side," later made famous by the Rolling Stones.
Other singers of her generation have retired, or limit their appearances to festivals and oldies packages, but Thomas's reputation has only grown with the years. Today, she is hailed as the "Soul Queen of New Orleans." She continues to record well-produced albums of new material, and fills clubs and concert halls around the world. This is due both to her vaulting, churchy voice, which can be reminiscent of such other soul queens as Aretha Franklin or Patti LaBelle, and to her stage presence. Thomas radiates a southern warmth, drawing audiences into her world and making them glad they came. She is completely at home onstage, and her manner has a casual ease and humor that is instantly engaging. 
This warmth and friendliness are an equal part of Thomas's offstage persona, which has helped her hold together one of the tightest bands in contemporary New Orleans r&b. A few years ago, she and her husband opened their own club, where Thomas could hold court and greet the fans. At the Lions' Den, she is in her element, running through a tasteful mix of classic hits and new tunes, then coming offstage to greet all the old friends who have come down for the party.

TREME BRASS BAND

New Orleans brass band music was around before jazz, and it is still the hottest sound on the city's streets. For a while, it seemed to be dying out with the old-timers who had put it on the national map in the 1920s and 1930s, but it came back strong thanks to the work of Danny Barker, a banjo player who set out to train young musicians in the classic repertoire. His students went on to form the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which took the basic marching band instrumentation and rhythms and applied them to everything from old standards to bebop tunes, r&b hits and television theme songs.
Dozens of bands followed in the original Dozens' wake. Among the strongest is the Tremé Brass Band, named for the neighborhood that has nurtured many of New Orleans's greatest musicians. Led by the percussion team of Uncle Benny Jones and Uncle Lionel Batiste, the Trémé band specializes in the jazzed-up hymn tunes that have been the stock in trade of marching bands playing for the city's famous jazz funeral parades, as well as a wide grab-bag of old-time jazz numbers and some hot originals. With James Andrews on trumpet, the band has one of the best young soloists on the current scene, and is an intergenerational standard-bearer for the marching band tradition.

SOUL REBELS

After the success of the Dirty Dozen proved that New Orleans marching band music could be experimental and contemporary, the floodgates were opened for a new wave of brass music. The Soul Rebels are the most exciting of a young generation of marching bands that pound home rhythms ranging as far afield as reggae and hip-hop. Rapping, soul-shouting, and blasting out an assault of what is, in the truest possible way, heavy metal, the Soul Rebels play a music that is not exactly jazz, not exactly r&b, but unquestionably the hottest dance sound around. As long cars cruise the back of town, their windows rolled down, the Soul Rebels' hip, angry street sound blasts from the tapedecks that anywhere else would be playing the latest LA gangsta rap.
The Rebels have a hometown reputation almost as tough as their music, but offstage they are thoughtful and articulate, as befits the most proficient rap writers in brass music. They dream of a worldwide success that would allow them to bring back some prosperity to the hard, poor neighborhoods where they got their start and still live. Their lyrics speak of the problems of life in the ghetto, but also of brotherhood and hopes for a brighter future, and their music is utterly uplifting, its fiery power forcing the listeners to forget their troubles, hit the floor and dance.

IRVAN & ALAN PEREZ

Out on Delacroix Island, in the swampy ground where the Mississippi breaks up and flows out into the Gulf of Mexico, a group of immigrants from the Canary Islands have preserved a pocket of Spanish culture for almost two centuries. The Isleños still sing a cappella ballads that hark back to the Middle Ages, as well as newer songs about local pursuits like shrimping and muskrat trapping.
Irvan Perez, a retired trapper, fisherman, and carver of wooden duck decoys, is the finest singer in the Isleño community. Now in his seventies, he sings in a high, clear voice, carrying the listener back to a slower, quieter time and place when people entertained themselves during long hours in the swamps. Taking his small boat out through the waterways, he navigates the twisting maze of channels and pools as easily as a city dweller would make his way down a familiar street, all the time telling tales of the old days, before the oil boom brought English-speakers out to the islands. Then, beached in the reeds of a sheltered cove, he sings the songs ancestors and neighbors have handed down for generations.