Someone please write a serious monograph about music in Storyville. There’s a ton of untapped archival material and I don’t have time to sift through it all. It’s juicy, too: famous jazz musicians and gangsters and sex everywhere!
On this the 40th anniversary of The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults, enjoy our deep dive on the One Year podcast into the amazing/bizarre story of what happened when Geraldo looked for buried treasure on live TV slate.com/podcasts/one...
*30% off, of course. The book itself was rigorously copy edited and presumably doesn’t have typos like that (expecting my copies to arrive this week).
30% of my dad’s book! That’s a whole lotta trenchant analysis for your dollar.
This reminds me that Fab 5 Freddy was amazing on Drink Champs. He was Max Roach’s godson! And tight with Basquiat!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...
Twilight with fish, Elysian Fields and N Rampart, New Orleans
Crooked lawyers in New Orleans used poor people as pawns in a vast insurance fraud. The conspiracy ended in murder. Patrick Radden Keefe reports. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
This is especially rich considering the recent closure of Checkpoint Charlie’s
This posthumous collection of my dad’s writing includes a previously unpublished piece on how Chicago was segregated. It extends the analysis from his seminal book Making the Second Ghetto. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
RIP Juanita Brooks, gone way too soon. Eddie Bo was really cranking out jams in the late 60s.
Tradition defines Pigeon Town Steppers’ Easter second line
As the Pigeon Town Steppers second line down the street Easter Sunday, they are carrying on a tradition started by the Young & True Friends Benevolent Association.
The detail in the beadwork is really special
These guys had the greatest 8x10 promo pic on history (sadly not seen here). They covered “Something You Got” and were promoted (briefly) by Allen Toussaint & Marshall Sehorn.
great point! (and excellent example)
touche
A print ad for a brewery in New Orleans that says "Why not drink 'our' national bottle beer," with the word "our" inexplicably in quotation marks
Phenomenal use of quotation marks in this ad from the 1912 Blue Book (the directory of sex workers in Storyville)
When I lived on this block I had neighbors. We saw each other regularly, for years. It was nice. So was walking past Checkpoints and seeing people hanging out year after year since the 90s. The block was a bulwark for locals between the Quarter and Frenchmen. RIP.
it was really rough. The public outcry when he was confiscated led to the passage of a state law that would make it possible for the owner to keep him, but the agency holding him let him loose before the owner could navigate the process.
The state’s treatment of Saffron the possum and his owner was worse than indicated here: Saffron was taken while crossing Bourbon, not strolling down it for $, and released into the wild despite being domesticated from birth. LDWF did this after the legislature created a path to legal ownership.
![“When Bill Withers showed up,” Halverson says, “he comes walking in with his guitar and a straight-back chair, like a dining room chair, and asks, ‘Where do I set up?’ I showed him right in the middle of the room, and then he left and he came back in with this platform, a kind of wooden box that didn’t have a bottom. It was about four inches tall, and was maybe 3 foot by 4 foot; it was a fairly large platform, and he set it down in the middle of the room. Then he put his chair on it and got his guitar out, and he’s sitting on top of this box. So I miked him and I miked his guitar, and then I was doing other things—getting sounds together.
“But then he calls me over and he points down to the box and says, ‘You gotta mike the box.’ Well, the way I was trained, you serve the artist, whatever the artist needs. So I got a couple other mics and I miked the box, the place down near the floor, next to this platform.
“And now, when you listen to ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ you know that all that tapping that goes on [while Withers sings] ‘I know I know I know’ all through it, actually, that’s him tapping his feet on the box, which is actually more intricate than the guitar on that track. He had evidently rehearsed that in his living room, maybe for years.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vtqkh4q3vlh7rltd4tnaweh2/bafkreig3codqyfxdi2er2sqqri34kumkg2izjo4k7gtxp6pfipsxyx3yxe)
“When Bill Withers showed up,” Halverson says, “he comes walking in with his guitar and a straight-back chair, like a dining room chair, and asks, ‘Where do I set up?’ I showed him right in the middle of the room, and then he left and he came back in with this platform, a kind of wooden box that didn’t have a bottom. It was about four inches tall, and was maybe 3 foot by 4 foot; it was a fairly large platform, and he set it down in the middle of the room. Then he put his chair on it and got his guitar out, and he’s sitting on top of this box. So I miked him and I miked his guitar, and then I was doing other things—getting sounds together. “But then he calls me over and he points down to the box and says, ‘You gotta mike the box.’ Well, the way I was trained, you serve the artist, whatever the artist needs. So I got a couple other mics and I miked the box, the place down near the floor, next to this platform. “And now, when you listen to ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ you know that all that tapping that goes on [while Withers sings] ‘I know I know I know’ all through it, actually, that’s him tapping his feet on the box, which is actually more intricate than the guitar on that track. He had evidently rehearsed that in his living room, maybe for years.”
"You gotta mike the box." the engineer Bill Halverson on the making of "Ain't No Sunshine," 1971 (from a Mix interview in 2012)
Top two stories in Chicago on July 28, 1970: plans to construct the Sears Tower and the riot ahead of the Sly and the Family Stone concert that inspired "There's a Riot Goin' On."
That sounds right
Robert Moses drew up a tunnel for a riverfront expressway in New Orleans like 75 years ago. It is now a cavern under the casino connected to nothing.
The University of New Orleans is getting put through the ringer but the Midlo Center is still doing great work there. They just collaborated with the Whitney Plantation on a new exhibit about resistance to slavery in Louisiana: whitneyplantation.org/event/amongs...
The most enlightening bit of this article explains very precisely a fundamental shift in Google search— how what we type in is a rough suggestion.
And it shares many useful operations and commands to get the information we want.
Plus it has a list of alternatives to Google search at the bottom. 📌
You’re welcome!
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A Black man in a ten foot tall suit of orange plumes stands behind a toddler in a suit of red plumes in the shadow of an elevated expressway.
Big Chief Demond Melancon of the Young Seminole Hunters and his Little Chief under the Claiborne bridge for St. Joseph’s Night last night. The Big Chief’s beadwork is some of the best I’ve ever seen, and this suit was stunning. He’s showing at the Venice Biennale this year.
