Today, as part of our week long celebration of Mardi Gras,
we take a look at 4 legendary New Orleanians
Who played major roles in the development of
the New Orleans music scene!
ESQUERITA
“In the early 1950s, Richard Penniman, who would soon become famous as Little Richard, liked to sit around an all-night restaurant in the bus station in Macon, Georgia, and watch people come in. Oh boy! he thought, when he saw an imposing, six-foot-two figure descend from the bus: It was Eskew Reeder, another gay, Black teenage performer moving between the worlds of the church and the chitlin’ circuit, as the network of African-American performance venues was known.
Reeder was fifteen or so, and he was already traveling the South with a ‘lady preacher’ named Sister Rosa, who was hawking store-bought bread that was supposed to be blessed. As Penniman later told the story, he and Reeder met in the bus station restaurant where Penniman was ‘trying to catch something—you know, have sex…I thought Esquerita was really crazy about me, you know.’
Reeder’s handsome face was punctuated by lips that seemed to be permanently set into the kind of cocked, half-ironic sneer that would come to define a certain kind of rock & roll star, from Elvis Presley to Billy Idol. Penniman had already cut a couple of unnoticed records by then, but Reeder, who would later be known as Esquerita, would that night become Penniman’s teacher.
Little Richard: ‘Esquerita and me went to my house and he got on the piano and he played One Mint Julep; It sounded so pretty. The bass was fantastic. He had the biggest hands of anybody I’d ever seen. His hands were about the size of two of my hands put together. It sounded great…and that’s when I really started playing.’
It was a night that changed American music. It wasn’t just the way Esquerita pounded out a percussive rhythm with his left hand that impressed Penniman. He overlaid it with the high-and-loose honky-tonk treble plinking that he likely learned from the country songs he loved to hear on the radio.
Esquerita and Little Richard stayed in touch as friends, collaborators, and rivals until 1986, when Little Richard was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Esquerita died, a victim of AIDS who was buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island, New York. Their careers had mirrored each other over rock & roll’s first thirty years, playing out the dualities of the sacred and the profane, music and money, and God and the Voola, what Esquerita called his mojo, the spirit that motivated his music." (Esquerita and The Voola, Baynard Woods, Oxford American 2019)
Little Richard talks about Esquerita
SAM BUTERA
"Sax player and arranger Sam Butera was ‘Keith Richards to Louis Prima’s Mick Jagger’ once he joined the great trumpeter, singer and bandleader in Las Vegas in 1954. With vocalist Keely Smith, the group leaped into national consciousness on the wings of songs like ‘Just A Gigolo,’ ‘Jump Jive An’ Wail’ and ‘That Old Black Magic.’ Burt Kearns and Rafael Abramovitz sat down with Butera in 1991 and got the real story about the Mob’s connection to Vegas and the raunchy private lives of the musicians.
Sam Butera was a red-hot, 27-year-old rhythm and blues tenor saxophone player from New Orleans when, on Christmas Eve 1954, he got the call to work with his musical hero, Louis Prima, in Las Vegas. The result — a joyful mix of Dixieland jazz, jump blues and rock ’n’ roll, combined with the impeccable vocals of a deadpan female singer — launched “Louis Prima & Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses” into the biggest musical success the gambling city had yet to see. Butera’s wailing, honking sax and innovative arrangements provided the crucial spark, and recordings of songs including Just A Gigolo, When You’re Smiling, Jump Jive An’ Wail, and That Old Black Magic extended their fame far beyond the Vegas Strip.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to Sam Butera as “Keith Richards to Prima’s Mick Jagger.” Butera was also known for his fierce loyalty to Prima and as a man who knew how to keep secrets. Like the mobsters who ran the casinos and clubs where he worked, and the goodfellas who made up a significant portion of his fanbase, Butera lived by the code of omertà, and when he died in 2009, it was assumed he’d taken his secrets with him. No one knew that in February 1991, he told all. Over days in the living room of his home on Chapman Drive in Las Vegas, Butera revealed to journalists and screenwriters Burt Kearns and Rafael Abramovitz the story behind the rise and fall of “The Wildest Show in Vegas.”
COSIMO MATASSA
Who is Cosimo Matassa?
Cosimo Vincent Matassa was an American recording engineer and studio owner, responsible for many R&B and early rock & roll recordings that established the golden age of New Orleans rhythm & blues.
In 1945, at the age of 18, Matassa opened the J&M Recording Studio at the back of his family's shop on Rampart Street, on the border of the French Quarter in New Orleans. In 1955, he moved to the larger Cosimo Recording Studio on Gov. Nichols Street, nearby in the French Quarter. As an engineer and proprietor, Matassa was crucial to the development of the sound of R&B, rock and soul of the 1950s and 1960s, often working with the producers Dave Bartholomew and Allen Toussaint.
Cosimo recorded many hits, including The Fat Man (Fats Domino), Little Richard's Tutti Frutti along with records by Ray Charles, Lee Dorsey, Dr. John, Smiley Lewis, Bobby MItchell, Tommy Ridgley, the Spiders and many others. Cosimo was responsible for developing what became known as the New Orleans sound, with strong drums, heavy guitar and bass, heavy piano, light horns and a strong lead vocal.
Cosimo retired from the music business in the 1980s to manage the family's food store, Matassa's Market, in the French Quarter. He died on September 11, 2014, aged 88, in New Orleans but the songs live on forever.
DR. JOHN AKA MAC REBBENACK
Dr. John has always been one of my favorite New Orleans musicians. I have a special memory of having opened a show @ The Lone Star Cafe in NYC while I was with the Freelance Vandals back in 1980. We had a grand old time telling each other stories about our various exploits in the music business when we were all hanging out in our dressing room. I miss you Mac…I hope you are still making sweet sounds somewhere in the cosmos.
Dr. John aka Mac Rebbenack has played a major role in the development of the New Orleans sound. Growing up in the 3rd Ward of New Orleans, he found early musical inspiration in the minstrel show tunes sung by his grandfather and a number of aunts, uncles, sister, and cousins who played piano. Mac's father exposed him as a young boy to jazz musicians King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Throughout his adolescence, his father's connections enabled him access to the recording rooms of rock artists, including Little Richard and Guitar Slim. Later he began to perform in New Orleans clubs, mainly on guitar, and played on stage with various local artists.
When he was about 13 years old, Rebennack met Professor Longhair. Impressed by the professor's flamboyant attire and striking musical style, Rebennack soon began performing with him, and began his life as a professional musician. Mac later recalled that his debut in the studio took place in about 1955 or 1956. He joined the musicians' union at the end of 1957, with the help of Danny Kessler, and then considered himself to be a professional musician. At age 16, Rebennack was hired by Johnny Vincent as a producer at Ace Records. Rebennack was expelled from the high school in 1954 and from then on focused entirely on music.
At some point in his musical career, Rebennack became very interested in New Orleans Voodoo which led to him developing the idea of the Dr. John persona for his old friend Ronnie Barron, based on the life of Dr. John, a conjure man, herb doctor, and spiritual healer who came to New Orleans from Haiti. This free man of color lived on Bayou Road and claimed to have 15 wives and over 50 children. He kept an assortment of snakes and lizards, along with embalmed scorpions and animal and human skulls, and sold gris-gris, voodoo amulets which supposedly protect the wearer from harm.
Rebennack decided to produce a record and a stage show based on this concept, with Dr. John serving as an emblem of New Orleans heritage. Although initially, the plan was for Barron to front the act assuming the identity of Dr. John, while Rebennack worked behind the scenes as Dr. John's writer, musician, and producer, this did not come to pass. Barron dropped out of the project, and Rebennack took over the role (and identity) of Dr. John. Gris-Gris became the name of Dr. John's debut album, released in January 1968, representing his own form of voodoo medicine.
Along with Gris Gris, Dr. John is perhaps best known for his recordings in the period 1972–74. 1972's Dr. John's Gumbo, an album covering several New Orleans R&B standards with only one original, is considered a cornerstone of New Orleans music. In his 1994 autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon, Dr. John writes, "In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the late 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar." With Gumbo, Dr. John expanded his career beyond the psychedelic voodoo music and theatrics which had driven his career since he took on the Dr. John persona, although it always remained an integral part of his music and identity.
It was not until 1998's Anutha Zone that he again concentrated on this aspect of his music wholly for a full album. "After we cut the new record", he wrote, "I decided I'd had enough of the mighty-coo-de-fiyo hoodoo show, so I dumped the Gris-Gris routine we had been touring with since 1967 and worked up a new act—a Mardi Gras revue featuring the New Orleans standards we had covered in Gumbo."
Dr. John would go on to create many albums in the years to come. My all time favorite album by Dr. John is Dr. John Plays Mac Rebbenack. “Dr. John was always respected as a consummate pianist, but he didn't make a solo, unaccompanied piano record until 1981's Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack. The wait was well worth it. His music had always been impressive, but this is the first time that his playing had been put on full display, and it reveals that there's even more depth and intricacies to his style than previously expected. More importantly, the music simply sounds good and gritty, as he turns out a set of New Orleans R&B (comprised of both originals and classics) that is funky, swampy and real.” (All Music)
MIND SMOKE MARDI GRAS - VARIOUS ARTISTS
