Trying to wash us away…
April 28, 2008 by nonotes
The NYT, if you didn’t see it, had what I thought was a pretty good article about “Louisiana 1927,” the Randy Newman song that has a kind of second meaning now, post-Katrina. I almost wrote something about that song on this site once, and maybe I’ll dig up my draft and try to revive it later this week. But this piece is definitely worth checking out. I don’t know about you, but I get a little choked up even reading about “Louisiana 1927,” and how its lyrics resonate today.
Snippet:
“It’s a New Orleans tradition that you can take any music and mess with it,” said Bruce Boyd Raeburn, the curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. The key lyric is “They’re tryin’ to wash us away,” he said, because it is applicable to most periods of New Orleans history. “It captures that feeling that you’re trying to cling on to your culture, to your life, in the face of this wave of indifference, of racism, of malevolence and of water itself.”
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a 
Thank you for linking this story here. If it weren’t for you, I would never have read this article.
Also, I really enjoyed the SJI compilation article in Offbeat. There were obvious choices and to your credit, some very interesting choices that forced me to go back and listen to versions that aren’t in my normal SJI rotation.