A Change is Gonna Come
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In early June, John Boutte was at his studio workspace in the French Quarter, the “Boutte Bat Cave,” as he calls it. When asked about the storm, he quickly demurs.
“I never use the word ‘storm’,” he says. “I always say, ‘When the levees failed.’ The problem wasn’t the storm; the problem was the levees.”
“What was it like?” he asks. “It was like standing by I-10 and watching your family suffer a car wreck and you can’t get up on I-10 to help them. That’s what it was like. I was able to communicate back to New Orleans; I had ‘Jesus on the Mainline.’ I could get a first-hand account of the madness. But there were no flights back to the city; how weird was that? Before that day, it had never crossed my mind to pray that my home would still be there when I got back from a trip. We take a lot of things for granted. They caught us with our pants down, and our dirty drawers were showing.”
He stayed with a sister in Orlando, Florida, then with a friend in Naples, Florida, then with friends of a friend in North Carolina. Finally, five-and-a-half weeks after the levees failed, he got back to his hometown.
“It was devastating,” he recalls. “Trees knocked down; houses knocked down. I thought I was finished crying, but my heart just sank. Every now and then I still get depressed. We all do."
“I received a lot of help from strangers and friends. MusiCares really helped out, and so did Higher Ground, Quint Davis’ group in New York. The generosity came from everywhere. I’m a proud kind of guy; I don’t want people to give me shit. I’ve always worked for it. It’s a humbling experience when you have to go to people and you find out how generous people can be. What goes around comes around; they’ll be blessed for everything they did.”
He met Cowboy Mouth’s Paul Sanchez at a party in Michelle Shocked’s backyard years ago.
“Paul and I hit it off,” Boutte says, “and he said, ‘Let’s write some songs.’ I hadn’t written any songs in a long time; I wasn’t sure I wanted to sing my own songs on stage. Anyone who’s done it will tell you that it’s scary to get onstage and sing; you might as well be buck naked. But when you’re singing your own songs, you’re buck naked with your heart cut open. I didn’t know if I wanted to expose all that. But Paul said, ‘Let’s get together and have a writing session.’
“We sat around getting to know each other, kicking around ideas and then we stepped outside to get something to drink at the K&B. We saw the graveyard, and Paul said, ‘My dad is buried there,’ and I said, “My dad’s buried there.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, we’re all going to end up at the foot of Canal Street.’ Paul said, ‘That’s brilliant; that’s a song.’ So we went home and wrote ‘At the Foot of Canal Street.’”
That became the title track of Boutte’s 1999 album, which also featured the Boutte-Sanchez composition “Sisters,” Allen Toussaint’s “All These Things” and Boutte’s original recordings of “Didn’t It Rain” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
When the levees failed last August, something shifted within Boutte. It was no longer enough to sing beautifully about romantic relationships. It was necessary to explore the pain, anger and hope of post-Katrina New Orleans in his music. But how? He could become a protest singer-songwriter, but that wasn’t his strength and there were too many of those already. No, his strength was interpreting old songs to give them new meanings.
He climbed the short stairs to the stage in the Jazz Tent with the front brim of his straw hat turned up, the sleeves of his pale blue shirt rolled up to the elbows and the cuffs of his white slacks rolled up to the knees. He was backed by an expanded version of his d.b.a. band, and every song they sang carried new connotations.
“I felt like we were forgotten,” he says. “We’re Americans; we’re native sons. We belong to this land. But people treat us like we’re like the red-headed stepchild of the family; everyone wants to come and rub that stepchild’s head once in a while. Then they go home and say, ‘That’s New Orleans; it’s not really part of the country.’”
The Jazz Fest set reached its climax on Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.”
“Paul [Sanchez] and I were sitting on a porch in the French Quarter one night,” Boutte recalls, “talking about Jazz Fest. I was trying to pick his brain for ideas because I wanted this show to be special, especially after the levees failed. Paul said, ‘Just give them yourself. Give them New Orleans. People are hungry for New Orleans.’ Then he played me that tune, ‘Louisiana 1927,’ and I knew what he meant.
“I’d never heard the tune, though I’d had people come up and request it at shows. So it was fresh to me. I didn’t have to try hard to make it mine because I didn’t know any other version. Paul suggested that I personalize it, that I make it more significant for what’s happening now. So we started kicking around how we might change it. I realized that Randy Newman had written it from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, but I wanted to sing it as someone on the ground, as someone here in the shit. We changed a few words and when I sang the tune, I went, ‘Wow.’”
At the Jazz Tent, Leroy Jones announced the song with a forlorn sigh of a trumpet solo, as if burying a soldier with honors. After a smack of a cymbal, Boutte sang out the news: “What has happened down here, y’all, is the winds done changed.” His voice had an R&B grit absent from Newman’s version, a New Orleans drawl that indicated just where “down here” was. “The river rose all day; the river rose all night,” he sang in a sad elegy. “Some people got lost in the flood; some people got away alright.”
“When I sing a song, I do it the first time under control,” Boutte says in June. “Then I do it the second time without control; I just let it come. You have to give people something familiar, so they know where they are. But once you make that connection, you can go anywhere; you can just let go.”
So after Boutte had sung Newman’s original lyrics through one time, he started to mess with them. “Check this out,” he shouted to the crowd. This time, the line, “The clouds rolled in from the north and it started to rain,” became “The clouds rolled in from the Gulf.” This time the line, “Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline,” became “Twelve feet of water in the Lower Nine.” Now a buzz was running through the crowd beneath the canvas tent. Many of these people had seen what 12 feet of water could do to the Lower Ninth Ward.
Reacting to that buzz, Boutte shouted to the band, “Break it down y’all.” The musicians cleared some space for the singer to go into his storytelling mode. Newman’s line about “President Coolidge came down in a railroad train with a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand” became Boutte’s line, “President Bush flew over in an aeroplane with about 12 fat men with double martinis in their hands,” and he added a cocaine-snorting sound as punctuation to his description of the Dubya Gang. That got loud laughter from the audience, but he got serious again when he asked, “Ain’t it a shame what the river has done to this poor Creole’s land?”
Now people were rising spontaneously from their folding chairs as if moved by the spirit in church. They egged Boutte on with hollering and hands waving above their heads. He responded with, “Looo-eeez-eee-annn-a, they’re trying to wash us away.” Who was trying to wash us away? Well, he’d made that clear in the previous verse. What were we going to do about it? “Don’t let them wash us away,” he cried again and again. The stomping, shouting crowd sang back at him, “Looo-eeez-eee-annn-a.” Singer and audience were united in a ritual of shared pain, shared hope and shared determination, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever wash them away for good.
“I’ve always performed with drama,” he says in June, “but since the levees failed, I’ve had to dig a little deeper. It takes a little more meditation and preparation than it did before. I have to connect with people’s suffering and find a way to bring them up. You don’t do that by putting on an act. You do it by being yourself, by being honest about your own suffering and finding some hope in the middle of all that. You do it by being as human as you can.”