Acknowledgments

I would like to begin by thanking my thesis supervisors, who played a major role in this project and who I ultimately consider to have been my collaborators. The argument and structure of this writing grew out of my weekly meetings with Jane

Mathieu. Often times, when I had not yet found the language I was looking for, Jane had a clever way of guiding me toward better words and perspectives by asking me difficult, open ended questions. Meanwhile, I would never have landed on my topic were it not for the courses on New Orleans music that I took with Matt Sakakeeny. It was Matt who challenged my conceptions of the city, and his generous feedback on my drafts helped strengthen the writing on many fronts. I would also like to thank the third member of my committee, Dan Sharp, for his help in the final stages. I am very lucky to have taken courses with all three of these people. Each of them has impacted the way that I listen to and interpret music.

This thesis grew out of some challenging conversations that occurred in seminars with my classmates. I would like to thank two of my cohort members in particular: April

Goltz, whose commitment to facing uncomfortable truths inspires me; and Hannah

Isadora Forrester, who came to the see the Revolution sans Prince with me, and taught me a great deal about life.

I would like to thank my family for their love and encouragement: Tom and Riiko,

Owen and Willem, Jo and Don, Harriet and Frances, David and Sue, Peter, my Grampy, my Aunt Jo, and my new family—Emma, Paula and B. Most of you have listened to me

ii talk through my writing at some point or another. If you’re reading this, I hope it finally makes sense.

I am at a loss for words when it comes to thanking my best friends, my partner, and my parents. No one has made me laugh more than Ry O’Toole, Brendan Magee and

Chris Balcom. I’ll see you all at the Barbershop.

This project would never have come to fruition without the support of Kiera Foti, who has been by my side from page ten to the end. The strongest passages in this thesis bear your imprint—they arose from the clarity of mind that you bring me. The more frustrating days were also much easier to get through knowing that I would be spending the evening with you. Thank you for everything.

I save my last words of gratitude for my parents, who are largely responsible for my curiosity about and appreciation of music. My Father passed many years before I moved to New Orleans. It was a blessing to be in this strange, beautiful place amid some of the heights of my grief. Over the course of my three years in this city, it was you,

Mom, who guided me through my greatest struggles. You’re the best—this is for you!

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..… ii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………. 1

Literature Review

Outline of Chapters

2. THE HAUNTED MINSTREL………………………………………………..19

Introduction

Africans in Antebellum New Orleans

Congo Square: An Introduction

Part I: “Possessing Themselves Again”

Part II: The Concentric Circle

Part III: E.P. Christy at Congo Square

Conclusion

3. THE MASK OF CONVERSION.…………………………………………….48

Introduction

Raised in The Right Place

Voodoo in New Orleans

Dr. John’s Gris-Gris

The Voodoo Minstrel

Conclusion

iv BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………..83

v 1

When the white man steps behind the mask of the trickster his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personification of his disorder and chaos, but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped somewhere in the mystery of hell…

Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into the Boston Harbor masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

— Ralph Ellison, Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke

1. INTRODUCTION

Though Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is centered around The Band in their farewell performance in 1976, what makes the concert film so remarkable for many viewers is the long line of special guests. In addition to some knock out performances by

Muddy Waters and The Staple Singers, The Last Waltz features a who’s who of white rock and roll musicians—Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Eric

Clapton, and many more. The film’s sequence of performances takes several left turns along the way, though few are as affective as the transition between a reading from The

Canterbury Tales and what happens after a voice announces the arrival of “Dr. John… /

Mac Rebennack.” Dressed in a sparkly, dotted suit and donning an earring, beret, and sunglasses, he nods at the bass player and takes his seat at the piano. A first time viewer would not be alone in thinking there was something curious about this musician, and part of the curiosity would surround Rebennack’s obvious amalgamation of Black influences. 2

In discourse on cultural appropriation, there are two dominant viewpoints. One is that the appropriative artist has taken something that was not rightly theirs. The second is that some artist or other is different. Their exceptional qualities might even earn them a

“pass”—which is to say that, as far as the person making this case is concerned, this or that artist can be exempted from critique. Though these passes are by no means official, there are various ways of explaining why Rebennack was a longtime holder. A close look and listen at his vast musical output reveals both an undeniable virtuosity in playing

Black music as well as a lifelong commitment to interracial collaboration. He began his career in the Jim Crow South, crossing the color line in order to play varied roles in the

New Orleans rhythm & blues scene, where he made important contributions as a session guitarist and record producer. After he switched gears to become a popular singer and bandleader, he continued to hire and be hired by Black musicians for the remainder of his life. His immersion in Black culture was so thorough that Charles Neville once professed

“you couldn’t call Mac white. His skin might be white, but his soul is black” (2000: 95).

A century before Rebennack’s time, a man named Edwin Pearce Christy was rising to fame as a bandleader, singer, banjoist, and dancer. Though he died long before his music could be recorded, the historical record makes clear that he was amongst the most successful performers of his day. He had made his fame and fortune in the blackface theater—the leading American entertainment of the 19th century, and the space that spawned the country’s first form of popular music. The performers, or minstrels, many of them of Northern extraction, wore blackface makeup, played music they often claimed was “authentically” African, and lampooned Black people in a wide variety of sketches 3 and dances. Groups went by names like the Congo Melodists and the Ethiopian

Serenaders. A good portion of the material was centered around life on Southern plantations, a subject about which its mainly Northern audiences were curious.

Many would prefer to forget about minstrelsy. Scholars have made it abundantly clear, however, that the blackface theater is one of the wellsprings not only of enduring racial stereotypes but of contemporary popular music, both in and outside of the United

States. Matthew Morrison has argued that the scripts developed in the blackface theater have their sonic legacy in what he calls “Blacksound.” While the term is not meant to contain all of the sounds made by people of African descent, it does encompass the stereotypes developed in minstrelsy that continue to stand in for the varied experiences of

Black life (2019: 789-90). Long after Christy’s heyday, American music still tarries in the shadow of blackface.

It may come as a surprise, given the anti-racist disparagement of minstrelsy, that a beloved artist like Rebennack had much in common with Christy. First and foremost, the two musicians share the general attribute of having been successful white artists who appropriated Black culture that they had studied in New Orleans. Given the opportunity to address what many people would interpret as acts of cultural theft, Christy and

Rebennack both turned the tables on what would otherwise appear to be a one-way dynamic. In the case of the former artist, this meant implying that he was first possessed by the musicians he claimed to have studied. Though Christy was not apologetic about his appropriative work, he noted that, after some time away from performing, he was

“haunted” by the Black music he had heard as a youth. Meanwhile, Rebennack turned the 4 tables on this dynamic in two ways. Firstly, he frequently employed similar language as

Christy had, noting that he was “hypnotized” by the music he grew up around. Secondly, he presented himself as a disciple of — even a convert to — Black spiritual culture.

In this thesis, I refer to these narratives as “discourses of possession.” Without direct access to the moments when these artists encountered the music they would later appropriate, it is up to the individual reader to accept or reject their claims. In my reading, this is precisely the point: by presenting discourses of possession that preceded their appropriative work, they complicate — or at least attempt to complicate — our understanding of how appropriation happens on the ground. In other words, by inserting the spiritual concept of musical possession into the mix, the very idea that appropriative artists are themselves in control of their actions is called into question. Ultimately, I argue that Rebennack in particular challenges the very concept of cultural appropriation, which depends on some notion of group membership, by portraying himself as a convert and, therefore, a passing member of the spiritual communities that his music was rooted in.

Literature Review

This thesis hinges on the notion that there are two primary ways in which the possession of music is understood. The first is that, in spite of being a fleeting, invisible aspect of the material world, music is routinely claimed as a form of property. This is evident in the disputes over copyrights, authorship, sampling and cultural appropriation.

The second is that sound and music play a critical role in rituals of possession, be it the

Hammond organ heard in Black American churches or the chants of Sufi mystics. 5

Though the sounds played in such spaces are as diverse as the rituals themselves, the

“essential feature,” according to Gilbert Rouget, is the “change of state” that sound is believed to bring about (1985: 31).

Things get complicated when these two primary ways of understanding musical possession are brought into dialogue with each other: one moment it appears that music arrests or takes possession of us, the next we are engaged in a debate over who ought to own “it.” In her work on the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, Deborah Kapchan (2007) has explored these bilateral dynamics at length. The sacred music played by these musicians is a catalyst for trance within their spiritual community and, at the same time, Gnawa music has become a profitable cultural artifact in the global marketplace. Kapchan accordingly frames her discussion by mirroring these dynamics; she writes about both possessive culture and the possession of culture.

If one were to apply this line of thinking to the stories told by Christy and

Rebennack, it becomes apparent that something similar is at work. Both musicians claimed, in their own ways, that the Black musicians they studied with or grew up around had some kind of power over them, and in both of their narratives, these apparently life- changing moments occurred long before either musician had become a fixture in popular

American music. Without access to those moments, however, we can only say that in telling their stories, each artist presented a discourse of possession. Insofar as the scholarship on cultural appropriation revolves around disputes over cultural property, we might say that that scholarship is also a discourse of possession. 6

Part I: Cultural Appropriation as Contested Possession

The word appropriation is derived from the Latin appropriare, meaning “to make one’s own.” As words, property and appropriation share the same Latin root in proprius, meaning “own.” In a basic sense, to appropriate is to take possession of something—one of the OED’s definitions is the “making of a thing private property.” Presently, however, the word is most often used as a shorthand for cultural appropriation. In those contexts, the appropriator specifically takes possession of something that is understood to belong to another culture.

The concept of cultural appropriation accordingly relies on some understanding of cultural property. Although critics of cultural appropriation tend to center their attention on an objection to the act of theft instead of a defense of the very notion of cultural property, in order to make such an objection, there must be some understanding that the appropriator is not a member of the group whose cultural artifacts they have mined. There must be a distinction between insiders and outsiders, members and non-members.

Though cultural appropriation is an issue that spans the globe, few instances of cultural theft have received as much attention as white appropriations of Black American music.

The scholarship that studies race in relation to American music is broad. Within this framework, Ronald Radano is one scholar to have incorporated the dynamics of possession into his discussion. In antebellum times, Black music was considered an aspect of the enslaved body and, therefore, the legal property of a slaveowner. Although the musical talents of enslaved people would become “yet another way” for white people to extract profit from Black people and culture, Radano points out that music made by 7 enslaved people also “exceeded the realms of markets and exchange,” and therefore signaled “something beyond the economic containments of property.” After the Civil

War, white Americans would remain “committed” to the notion that racial differences could be heard in music. This cultural tendency to divide sound according to racial categories encouraged performers to produce music that ratified “color line thinking.” In

Radano’s mind, the very idea of Black music has accordingly been a “participant in the construction of race” (2010: 364, 366 368). Though he notes that the racialization of

American music was born from the possessive dynamics of enslavement, Radano ultimately rejects the notion that Black music is an entirely authentic or distinct form.

With his work on Blacksound, Morrison is also deeply engaged with the imprint that antebellum race relations have left on popular culture. The scholar explores the role that minstrel performers played in developing the notion of Blackness as a set of stereotypical attributes. Rather than configure white appropriation as a mining of

“authentic” forms, Morrison is concerned with the ongoing practice of anti-Black racial mimicry (2019: 796). Though many commentators are rightly concerned about the political economy of cultural appropriation — white musicians profiting immensely from

Black music while Black innovators struggle to make a living — Morrison’s focus on

Blacksound helps explain why, in the selection of case studies, critics of cultural appropriation often choose white performers who not only mine Black traditions, but emulate Black people and speech. For example, Amy Winehouse and Iggy Azalea been accused of both cultural appropriation and racial mimicry, with the former being likened 8 to a “(blues)face” performer (Brooks 2010; Guo 2016). Notwithstanding the occasional critique, each of these artists was/is enormously successful.

Black artists suffer very different harms when they are “caught” on the wrong side of the color line. Nina Simone was denied admission to study classical music at a conservatory in Philadelphia, while white jazz musicians had been enjoying the spoils of their appropriative work for decades. One way to frame the story of Jimi Hendrix, meanwhile, would be to say that he was a great artist in a constant struggle with and against the color line. When the incomparable guitarist and singer-songwriter emerged in the late 1960s, the R&B roots of rock had already been so thoroughly effaced that his music was simultaneously seen as “inauthentically rock” by white audiences and

“inauthentically black” by Black audiences (Hamilton 2016: 16; Palmer 2019: 8).

This brings us to the elephant in the room: the structures of white supremacy and privilege. In order for an artist to be considered guilty of appropriation, they must be a member of the dominant cultural group of the society in which they live. Erich Hatala

Matthes has summed this up well:

there is a general agreement that if cultural appropriation is morally objectionable, it is only objectionable when a member of a dominant cultural group appropriates from a member of a marginalized group: no reasonable person thinks that, for instance, an indigenous person does something wrong by employing some Western artistic style. There are many reasons why this is true, not the least of which is that it is in the nature of a dominant cultural group to dominate and impress its culture upon others. (2016: 347). 9

Recognizing that appropriation can be seriously damaging, Matthes asks whether it is possible to object to it without slipping into essentialism, whose harms, he argues, are

“eerily similar” to those caused by cultural appropriation (2016: 346).

If one is to object to any particular act of appropriation, they must draw some line between cultural insiders and outsiders, which requires “criteria” for cultural membership. When these criteria are reified as essential to the cultural group, that group can then be reduced and stereotyped as in some way static, homogenous or monolithic

(2016: 355). Morrison (2019) has similarly pointed out that when blackface minstrels created Blacksound, the result was a reductive, stereotyped and, again, monolithic concept of Black people. Rather than simply marvel at the complexity of this impasse, as

Radano does in his own way, Matthes struggles to work his way through it. In the end, he argues that since social marginalization is the “ultimate cause” of the harms of appropriation, and identifying and critiquing individual acts of appropriation only seems to “embroil” us in essentialism, it may be best to focus on fighting the systemic problem itself. Like many thinkers writing on social justice, he urges his readers to focus on the forest before the trees, which would then have a “downstream effect” (2016: 364). If one can imagine a future society that is structured equally, in which racial oppression and white supremacy have long been abolished, it may indeed follow that, in this future society, there would be little talk of cultural appropriation.

In addition to the scholarship that has problematized appropriation (or the very idea of it), there has been some interest in why artists choose to mine the traditions of other cultures beyond the motive of profit. Eric Lott has famously argued that blackface 10 minstrelsy was a countercultural movement that, though deeply entwined with the racism of the day, was also the fruit of a fascination with, even a love of Black culture. He reconfigures the blackface mask as a vehicle of self-transformation, through which the minstrel could escape the Victorian norms of the day. With some apparent sympathy with their racial-escapism, Lott wrote that the minstrels “immersed themselves in ‘blackness’ to indulge their felt sense of difference” (1993: 52-3). This viewpoint — that appropriation is often inspired by a genuine fascination with the cultural fabrics of

“Others” — is presently quite familiar in everyday conversations about appropriation.

Rather than attempt to uncover the true motive behind an artist’s appropriative work, I am interested in the narratives these artists put forward. In the case of both Rebennack and

Christy, this meant suggesting that they were first possessed by the culture their work was inspired by.

To bring things full circle, it will be worthwhile to return to the basics and expand on the etymology of some key words. It was noted above that property and appropriation share the same root in proprius, meaning “own.” When music is swindled from the hands of its creators and morphed into the legal property of music business associates, massive profits are made. On a material level, however, music tends to resist absolute ownership.

Though it is admittedly a minor adjustment in wording, perhaps a better way to understand music as a contested form of property is to think of it as a thing possessed rather than owned. The OED points out that possession, drawn from the Latin possidēre, has long been used in a variety of ways — “to hold as property, to have as a quality, to occupy as a tenant, to occupy, inhabit, to take up (a space)” and, on the other hand, “to 11 engross, to overwhelm, to influence strongly, to dominate, to take control of, to seize, to exercise power over.” The “primary component of possession” is not ownership, then, but

“physical control.” When the appropriative artist seizes the cultural fabrics of “Others,” the end result is not absolute ownership, but the (finite) power to do what they wish, so to speak, with those expressive materials.

Part II: Musical Possession as a Discourse

Defining possession as a kind of physical control over something brings us to the concept of spiritual and musical possession. Whereas in appropriation the artist is taking possession of another culture’s expressive practices, here the dynamics are flipped: now it is the person (artist, follower, disciple, convert) who is understood to be possessed by the expressive practices. The OED notes that the root words from which we get today’s

“possession” can be traced at least as far back as the 4th century, and have long referred to the way in which a person is thought to have lost physical control of their body. In these instances, a spirit or some unnamed, mysterious force controls the body “from within.” In his seminal Music and Trance (1985), Rouget observed that although rituals of possession are extremely varied across the globe, music is frequently understood by practitioners to play a critical part in the process. Studies that look at the role of music in culturally specific rituals of possession abound.1

Though musically induced states of possession are certainly of interest, here I am more specifically concerned with why speakers choose to allude to these experiences in

1 For example, Basso (2006), Jankowsky (2010), and El Hadidi (2016). 12 making statements about the so-called power of music. Take, for example, some familiar remarks used in everyday conversations: “I couldn’t help but get up and dance,” “this song really puts me in a trance,” or “this song is so catchy—I can’t get it out of my head.”

The speaker does not have to subscribe to a spiritual tradition that embraces possession.

They are simply claiming that the music has an overpowering quality. These casual allusions to music’s overpowering and possessive qualities are part of a larger tendency to talk about music and musicians as magical. As it turns out, these associations have deep roots. According to Gary Tomlinson: “music and magic are linked in the etymologies of their names… Both derive from ancient mythical or semimythical figures, from the

Muses of ancient Greece and the Zoroastrian priest/shaman of the ancient Middle East, the Old Persian magush, [meaning] sorcerer” (1993: 1-2).

These links find expression in a great deal of the discourse on Black music in particular. “Sorcerer” is, in fact, the carefully selected title of a Herbie Hancock piece that was originally recorded for an album of the same name by the Miles Davis quintet (of which Hancock was a vital part). When the pianist chose to record the piece again for his

Speak Like a Child, he explained in the accompanying liner notes that the piece was inspired by Davis’s famous air of mystique: “His music sounds like witchcraft. There are times I don’t know where his music comes from. It doesn’t sound like he’s doing it. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else” (1968). Similarly, Marvin Gaye once said that on account of their rhythmic sensibilities, James Brown and Bo Diddley both were

“certified witch doctor[s]” (qtd in Ritz 1985: 38). These admiring statements about Black musicians by their Black musical peers are but two examples in a long tradition of 13 inverting Western stereotypes that have portrayed Black people as magical in some

“primitive,” malicious sense. While magical qualities can and have been attributed to music made all over the world, one of the most common tropes applied to Black music in particular is the notion that it is infectious.

This subject is at the center of Barbara Browning’s Infectious Rhythm. Browning explores how, on the one hand, many artists have recuperated what she calls “metaphors of contagion,” celebrating the global spread of African and diasporic Black culture as a sign of its “vital, life-giving, and productive” qualities. On the other hand, the global dissemination of Black culture has often been treated as a virulent problem by racist white critics. The jazz craze and its accompanying dance crazes were, for example, vilified by many observers as some kind of threat to European values. These same tropes have been invoked in attempt to naturalize the fact that people of color often suffer disproportionately during global epidemics, or to characterize Black people and culture as an inherently “chaotic or uncontrolled force” that “can only be countered by military or police violence (1998: 6-7).

A very similar grain of thought is at the heart of Ishamel Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.

In the novel, an ancient, spiritual contagion called “Jes Grew” (re)surfaces and spreads across America. The plague is fundamentally rhythmic, and those who catch it dance with abandon, speak in tongues, and break into frenzied states. Though no one is immune to its spell, it is certainly Black (or African derived) and understood to be a threat to white (or

European derived) culture. While governments arm themselves against it, others welcome the diffusion of Jes Grew because it is “electric as life and is characterized by ebullience 14 and ecstasy.” Whereas historical plagues were perceived to the manifestation of God’s wrath, “Jes Grew is the delight of the gods” (1972: 6). Browning echoes Reed when she writes that Black diasporic culture often inverts the script of Black contagion by framing this infectiousness as an “anti-plague.”

As Browning is quick to point out (1998: 18), Reed seems to have meant for

Mumbo Jumbo to be difficult to summarize and decipher. What is clear is that Jes Grew often appears to be a stand-in for Black music’s curative, irresistible qualities. While Jes

Grew is of course fictitious, an important aspect of the author’s approach is to quote from sources that follow his line of thinking. Soon after setting the opening scene, for example, he throws a quote from Louis Armstrong’s My Life in New Orleans into the pastiche.

Armstrong is explaining that, in the city of his youth, people who were not attending a funeral might drop in on the ensuing parade, becoming part of what is called the second line. Reed italicizes one part of the quotation: “the spirit hits them and they follow” (qtd in Reed 1972: 7). The author also takes the novel to great comedic lengths in mocking white people’s efforts to suppress the anti-plague.

The story of this cultural conflict is also satirized in many of George Clinton’s songs, with “the funk” playing a similar role as Jes Grew. In “Sir Nose D’Voiddoffunk,” from Parliament’s Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome, the title character has it out with Starchild, the “Protector of the Pleasure Principle.” Admitting minor defeat in the tune’s introduction, Sir Nose says: “I have always been devoid of funk / I shall continue to be devoid of funk / Starchild, you have only won a battle… I will never dance.” Later in the song, Starchild tells his audience that, should they see Sir Nose, “Tell him Starchild 15 said… ‘Put that snoot to use you mother! / Cause you will dance, sucker’” (1977). As with Clinton’s Sir Nose, Reed could have easily figured Christy and Rebennack into his novel as “victims” of Jes Grew. By the time the latter artist got around to writing an autobiography in the 1990s, he had become a devotee of the anti-plague. Tearing a page off of Clinton’s book, he closes his opening epilogue with a comical warning: “You can’t shut the fonk [sic] up. No, the fonk got a mind of its own” (1994: 2).

Outline of Chapters

Though there is a world of difference between them, E.P. Christy and Mac

Rebennack are ideal subjects for this study because they have certain key things in common. First of all, they were both white men whose artistry was rooted in the Black musical spheres of New Orleans, and they both depended on these lessons in achieving and maintaining their success as performers of American popular music. Secondly, they both flipped the narrative of appropriation as a form of theft, invoking metaphors of contagion in order to portray themselves as having first been possessed by Black music.

Subtle or not, the implication in their stories is that the Black musicians that they studied with were the real catalysts of the appropriative work that followed because they were the ones to “cast the spell.” Finally, each of these artists chose to present this information to a reading public. In Christy’s case, these were two short autobiographical sketches that appeared in print during his lifetime. In the case of the latter artist, this was a full-length memoir co-authored with Jack Rummel. 16

This thesis consists of two chapters, each dealing with the artist in question. In

Chapter 1, I begin by introducing Congo Square, the Black social sphere that Christy claimed as his primary source of influence. Since the gatherers who filled this space were primarily enslaved people, it follows that the dynamics of possession in this context are more complex than those that appear in Chapter 2. Taking cues from Kapchan’s aforementioned work on the bilateral dynamics of possession in Gnawa trance culture, my first chapter has a three-part examination at its core, with each section exploring the multilateral dynamics in their relevant context. In the first section, this involves unpacking the dynamics of possession at the center of Congo Square, where enslaved people sang and danced in antebellum times in attempt to transcend their legal status as property—as Joseph Roach has put it, “possessing themselves again” (1996: 210-211). I then turn to the concentric circle of mainly white observers, who came to the Square to protect their racial investments, perform their developing sense of whiteness, and take in some of the sounds and gestures of the event. Since these dynamics of possession were active around the periphery of the Square, they were intimately tied up with the dynamics of the gatherers. In my reading, this created a complex web that set the stage for Christy’s appropriations. In the third section, I turn to Christy, one of the most celebrated artists of his era, and conduct a close reading of his autobiographical texts. In the end, I argue that by admitting that the gatherers at Congo Square had a kind of power over him, Christy enacted a discourse of possession.

In Chapter 2, I jump a century ahead and arrive at Mac Rebennack, known to his fans as Dr. John. Rebennack’s memoir is a fascinating document that has yet to receive 17 the attention it deserves. In the first four pages of his autobiography, titled Under a

Hoodoo Moon, the musician touches on New Orleans music, Congo Square, minstrelsy, racism, and the mystical qualities of music. Rebennack does not express regret or even address his appropriations of Black music. Yet it does not seem like a coincidence that he opens the first chapter of his memoir by stating: “Music is something no one person owns” (1994: 3). The fact that he had a lucrative career based in Black music, and that he appears to be widely accepted and appreciated by Black musicians makes Rebennack a puzzling figure, and I do not attempt to resolve that tension.

I begin my second chapter by introducing Dr. John more fully. The first section of this chapter follows the story of his youthful immersion in New Orleans. Rebennack portrays the city as a place that was bustling with infectious rhythms, and he positions himself within it as an eager, spell-bound student. After introducing his discourse of possession, my next section examines Voodoo, the spiritual practice that Rebennack would be initiated into. From there, I listen to Rebennack’s first work as Dr. John. In the fourth section, I discuss the diverse influences behind Gris-Gris, and interpret the album as both an extension of his spirituality as well as his background in minstrelsy. I conclude the Chapter by reflecting on Rebennack’s inhabitation of his stage persona. Rather than simply put this mask on only to take it off again, Rebennack assumed the Dr. John persona for life. To borrow from Ralph Ellison, whose words are included as the epigraph to this thesis, we might say that he virtually became that which he had intended only to symbolize. In the end, I argue that for all of his racial mimicry, Rebennack challenged the 18 notion that he was guilty of cultural appropriation by portraying himself as passing member of a predominantly Black spiritual community. 19

2. THE HAUNTED MINSTREL

Introduction

On May 20, 1862, a man named Edwin Pearce Christy threw himself out the window of his New York City apartment and died the following morning. The New York

Times reported that he had been “laboring under temporary insanity” prior to his suicide

(“The Death of E.P. Christy” 1862: 8). At the time of his death, he was one of the most revered artists in the nation. An admired singer, dancer, and bandleader, he obtained his celebrity and fortune donning a burnt cork mask in the blackface theater—the preeminent

American entertainment of the 19th century. Scholars generally consider Christy to have been one of the three or four main innovators of the style, alongside the likes of Thomas

Rice, who was “the first” to jump Jim Crow (Saxton 1975: 5). The anti-racist disparagement of the art form may have something to do with his near disappearance from the American cultural consciousness; Christy is certainly not a household name in the present era.

For all of the blackface theater’s preoccupation with Southern life, scholars have established that the art form was by and large a Northern entertainment made up of

Northern entertainers (Lott 1993), who often claimed to have based their acts on Black culture they studied while traveling through the South. Christy is unusual in this regard in that he appears to have lived there for a good part of his youth. During his lifetime, two notably similar biographical sketches appeared in print, both of which emphasized that the artist had moved to New Orleans at the age of ten (around 1825) and had learned the 20 the tricks of his trade from local enslaved people. Detailing these encounters, his

“Authentic Memoir,” published in The Age, noted that “At that time, it was the custom of the [enslaved] to hold all their holiday meetings at a place known as ‘THE CONGO

GREEN,’ and few of their meetings took place without Mr. Christy being a silent but close observer of their manners, and a willing student of the queer words and simple but expressive melodies” (1848, no page numbers).

Though there are substantial bodies of scholarship on both the blackface theater and the gatherings at Congo Square, the two have hardly been in dialogue with each other. The notable exception can be found in the work of Freddi Williams Evans, who has written the most comprehensive book on the gatherings. Citing Christy’s biographical sketches and tidbits of his performing career, Evans excavates the blackface minstrel as something of a landmark appropriator, who circulated Black New Orleans culture before

Black people had any power to do so (2011: 46). Yet this is a passing point in her study.

Meanwhile, Black New Orleanians have yet to make much of an appearance in studies of blackface minstrelsy. This chapter seeks to alleviate this lack of connection, using what

Joseph Roach has called the “behavioral vortex” of Congo Square as a springboard for discussion (1996: 64).

Insofar as Christy conceded to the power that Black music had over him, I argue that he enacted a discourse of possession that preceded his own appropriative work.

Though his cultural mining is an obvious example of an attempt to possess the culture of

“the Other,” the careful wording of his biographical sketches implies another dynamic— that the singers, drummers and dancers at Congo Square also, in a different sense, took 21 possession of him. This chapter’s three-part examination begins at and moves outward from the center of the Square, exploring the multilateral dynamics of possession through to Christy. While the scholarship on the gatherings has mostly focused on the participants themselves, the Square was also a popular destination for locals and tourists to convene around the spectacle of Black culture (Roach 1996; Sakakeeny 2011). In consequence, the space became a site of “observation, imitation, and appropriation” (Smith 2019: 59).

In the Creolized milieu of antebellum New Orleans, observation led to imitation and, in the case of Christy, appropriation. By working through these multilateral dynamics of possession centrifugally, a web of attachments is built along the way, and we end up with a more complex picture of how appropriation can happen on the ground.

My examination is broken into three parts, all of which look at the dynamics of possession that shaped their respective contexts: the circle(s) of gatherers; the concentric circle of observers; and Christy, who extracted his appropriations of Congo Square out into the world. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of the artist’s enactments.

Before this discussion can adequately begin, however, Congo Square must first be introduced and situated in the wider sphere of antebellum New Orleans.

Africans in Antebellum New Orleans

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has famously stated that New Orleans was and is “in spirit, the most African city in the United States” (1992: 59). She draws attention to, among other things, the prevalence of interracial alliances, the “relatively feeble” control of the white elite, the colony’s total dependence on highly skilled Africans and their 22 technologies, and the “tightly knit” cultural fabric of the dynamic Black population as evidence of this African character (1992: 63, 77, 85). Taking a close look at the racial makeup and demographics of the city, she reveals startling numbers and ratios. For example, some two thirds of the Africans coming into New Orleans during French rule all came directly from the Senegambia region, making the Black population of the city much less diverse than was typical in the Anglophone United States. Meanwhile, in 1746, there were about 3,000 Black people living in the city, roughly twice the white population at that time (1992: 68, 77). Though this ratio was a highpoint in the colonial period

(1718-1803), and Africans coming from the Kongo-Angola region (by way of Haiti) would come to represent the largest, most dominant African ethnic group in New Orleans by 1810 (Hall 2005: 75; Sublette 2008), Hall also sees the impact of the early Black inhabitants as more than a consequence of numbers (1992: 66).

This influence would seem to have come from a sense of empowerment within the violent and oppressive confines of a racialized society. The colonists relied on

Africans for practically everything: not only for plantation labor, but as cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, even as surgeons and militiamen in their conflicts with Indigenous communities. This allowed some people of color to attain a sense of self-possession in spite of enslavement. Others acquired freedom more literally. Whether by escape or manumission, Africans in Louisiana commonly broke the bonds of slavery—more frequently, in fact, than elsewhere in the country. In this frontier society surrounded by cypress swamps, where pursuing a runaway slave meant risking one’s life, the outskirts of the city quickly became dotted with maroon communities. The strongest of these was 23 led by a charismatic leader known as St. Malo, and could be guarded by some 500 runaways (Hall 1992: 77, 81). As for those who attained legal freedom, in New Orleans they were in such great number as to constitute a third class of people. Gradually after

Louisiana became a part of the United States in 1803, these mixed-race Creoles and freed

Black people became tenuously situated between the two tiered, Black and white system that prevailed in the rest of the country. It has been estimated that in New Orleans, free people of color represented nearly 29 percent of the population in 1810, 23 percent in

1820, 25 percent in 1830 and, marking a decline that would continue from there, as much as 18 percent — still about 20,000 people — in 1840 (Hirsch and Lodgson 1992: 192).

Though Hall would recognize that any Black inhabitant of the city and its outskirts, whether enslaved, fugitive, or free, was nevertheless living under the terror of white supremacy, she portrays the group as an assertive one, whose culture was not eradicated but transformed through contact with other cultures. And though the city would experience gradual Americanization when Louisiana was absorbed into the United States, and more enslaved people were imported from diverse territories, Hall is attentive to the fact that newcomers would not be entering a cultural vacuum, but would be acculturated into this Africanized and Creolized milieu (1992: 85).

In addition to its relatively empowered Black inhabitants, the unusual urban geography of the antebellum city helped ensure the omnipresence of African culture.

New Orleans was a bustling port city, the largest in the Southern U.S., and enslaved and free, white and Black, generally lived in close association, such that residents were

“huddled in crowded interracial neighborhoods” (Hirsch and Lodgson 1992: 197-8). 24

Richard Campanella’s close analysis of these living patterns reveals that while free people of color tended to live downtown, enslaved Black people were “intricately intermixed with the greater population,” so much so that there was not one exclusively

Black neighborhood. Though the intention behind this arrangement was to keep the enslaved under close surveillance and at arms reach, it also meant that white New

Orleanians encountered African-derived culture on a regular, if not daily basis (2006:

297-300).

Congo Square: An Introduction

Black people living in antebellum New Orleans seem to have found their greatest space of expression on a patch of grass behind the French Quarter that would come to be known as Congo Square. In fact, Hall’s insistence that New Orleans was (and is) the most

African city in the country is nowhere more compelling than in considering what occurred here. From the earliest days of settlement and leading up to the Civil War, the area was used by people of African descent, enslaved and free, as a Sunday gathering and marketplace. According to Evans, in the heydays of these gatherings — intermittent periods between 1820 to 1840 — there were sometimes several thousand people in attendance (2011: 35).

Though scholars have established the long history of the Square, the most famous accounts of the gatherings do not arrive until the second decade of the American period, perhaps because, as Matt Sakakeeny has suggested, colonizers and Creoles did not find them particularly remarkable (2011: 298). In 1819, Henry Knight wrote that Africans 25 congregated and “rocked the city with their Congo dances” (qtd in Evans 2011: 1). Later that year, the most famous account came from Benjamin Latrobe, who in spite of his stated distaste for everything he saw and heard there, managed to produce sketches of the instruments and detailed descriptions of the playing and dancing. One might argue that he betrayed his intrigue:

They were formed into circular groups… In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, and set to each other in a miserably dull and slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument… They made an incredible noise. The most curious instrument… was imported from Africa. The body was a Calabash. ([1819] 1980: 204).

What Latrobe described is known widely as a ring shout, wherein participants form and dance around a closed circle, accompanied by music with a propulsive rhythm.

These shouts were a central part of Black culture in antebellum times and provided common ground for enslaved people throughout the US who had come from diverse parts of Africa (Stuckey 1987). While the shout is often studied in relation to practices that developed in the Black church, Samuel Floyd has argued that in New Orleans, the ring

“straightened itself” into jazz funeral and second line parades that developed into iconic

Black performance traditions in the twentieth-century (1991: 267).

Evans conceptualizes the Square as the “ground zero” of African culture in New

Orleans and, by extension, the United States (2011: 2). Like all scholars writing on the subject, she is aware that the gatherings were exceptional in the United States as a whole, and imagines a direct link between Congo Square and the Africanized cultural traditions that formed in the city long after the Square was closed (see also Johnson 1995). For 26 example, she notes that the use of handkerchiefs in second line dancing can be traced back to practices at the Square, such as those Latrobe described, and that the washboard used in zydeco music may descend from the use of a mule’s jawbone as a percussive instrument played by enslaved musicians (2011: 106-7, 73). But the most significant characteristics of local Black music said to be rooted in this deep history are the African rhythmic cells still heard in second line parades, Mardi Gras Indian music, and New

Orleans jazz and funk (Evans 2011; Stewart 2000).

The notion that Congo Square functions as a sort of root system for all New

Orleans music can also be encountered without reading the scholarship. Sakakeeny

(2011) traces the complex history of the Square’s mythical status, from George

Washington Cable’s (1886) poetic rendering — which was widely read and influential — to New Orleans jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet’s autobiography, Treat it Gentle (1960), which is bookended by tales of the Square. Bechet claims his tales were passed down to him through his grandfather, Omar, an enslaved man who had attended the gatherings.

Through Omar, the artist claims cultural memory of the Square as the root source and inspiration of his own music. Though the accuracy of both Cable and Bechet’s accounts has fallen under scrutiny,2 Sakakeeny sees their status as widely read works as contributing to the widely held belief that the ring shouts in Congo Square are directly linked to jazz and subsequent styles. This idea has also entered the field of popular lore.

Tributary albums by local musicians abound (Harrison 2000; Marsalis 2007), and the average would-be local historian will certainly tell you so.

2 See Wagner (2009), cited below. 27

The legacy of Congo Square, then, is as a place of African retention and African

American hybridization, generative of New World artistic styles. Historians and musicologists have tried to reconstruct what occurred there, or measure the lasting impact the gatherings had on Black New Orleanians and their music. Yet if the gatherings have received considerable attention in this regard, the broader implications of their very existence may still be under theorized. Most critically, in the second and third parts of the examination at the center of this chapter, I turn my focus away from the dancers, singers and drummers, to the periphery, where onlookers gathered by the hundreds, “telling each other how scandalized they were even as they pushed and shoved to obtain a better view”

(Roach 2001: 107). That people of African descent were permitted to gather freely at the

Square in the first place has often been considered a sort of colonial relic, a French custom that Americans either conceded or embraced over time. But an equally convincing reason the gatherings continued into the American period is that the white elites of New Orleans had motives of their own in putting them on display. What was

“allowed” to occur at Congo Square was, in other words, just as likely part and parcel of the racialized city.

Part I: “Possessing Themselves Again”

This discussion of the multilateral dynamics of possession at Congo Square begins at the musical heart and center. In this section, I attempt to fathom the Square’s function for those who came to sing, dance and partake in other social recreations. By interpreting the gatherings as both outward, critical performances and, at the same time, 28 reparative safe spaces, the stage is set to build a web of attachments that Christy would get “caught” in (and ultimately profit from).

As was discussed above, it was more common for Black people living in antebellum New Orleans to break from the conditions of slavery than in other North

American sites. Some joined maroon communities, others gained legal freedom, while others secured elevated positions within the hierarchical slave system—becoming surgeons, woodworkers, etc. In all of these cases, people of color were navigating liminal spaces in a racialized society. Though fugitivity, manumission and upward mobility may have been the most enduring, they were not the only ways that people of African descent transformed the alienating, violent world in which they lived. While it is important to keep in mind that historians have yet to locate an account of Congo Square written by a participant, insofar as the Square was a safe, reparative space, it offered the possibility of communion with each other and with an African past. In order to unpack this idea, I turn to Roach’s insights on the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, and to Ashon Crawley’s insights on the Blackpentecostal church.

In spite of the implications of its name, the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is a Black

New Orleanian practice that is thought to hold an exceptionally high degree of African retention,3 and is at least partly inspired by the shared history of resistance between Black and Indigenous communities against white supremacy in South Louisiana. Members of distinct groups or “tribes” spend countless hours throughout the year sewing their Indian suits in preparation for comparatively informal parades that display the striking beauty of

3 A recent book by Jeroen Dewulf (2017) argues that the Indian tradition can be traced back directly to the Kongo from which the Square gets its name. 29 their detailed, colorful beadwork. These spectacles are accompanied by performances of

Mardi Gras Indian music and, like the suits, this music is thought to be both localized and deeply rooted in West African tradition.4 The informative plaque that stands inside Congo

Square lists the Mardi Gras Indians first among several local Black performance traditions that descend from the African cultural expressions of Congo Square.

Rather than attempt to locate the precise origins of the Indian tradition, Roach is interested in their performances as vehicles to social memory and self-possession. In a particularly brilliant passage, he writes:

A body possessed of its social memory — call it a “spirit” — is a body in some sense possessed of itself. It is even possessed of itself as property, to put it in the mystified but ennobling legal jargon whereby Anglo- Americans claimed certain inalienable rights. This amends somewhat the idea that the Mardi Gras Indians, or the Plains Indians, danced for the repossession of territory, though that is true; they also danced to possess themselves again in the spirit of their ancestors, to possess again their memories, to possess again their communities. They danced to resist their reduction to the status of commodities. In other words, they danced — and they still dance — to possess again a heritage that some people would rather see buried alive. (1996: 210-211, emphasis added).

Following Roach, I suggest that this line of thinking can be applied to the gatherers at

Congo Square, who danced, sang and played instruments of African origin on Sundays.

In so doing, they could “possess themselves again,” breaking from their daily, unjust reduction to objects of property. This dynamic of possession is accordingly defined by its

“taking back”— it is an act of repossession.

While Roach’s choice of words and the context to which they are applied makes his work particularly relevant to this discussion, a body of scholarship that turns inward

4 For more information on the Mardi Gras Indians, see Roach (1996), Sakakeeny (2006), Lewis (2009). 30 on Black music’s communal, reparative function is currently in bloom. Though an extensive discussion of this movement is outside the scope of this writing, Crawley’s conception of “otherwise possibility” is particularly useful here. In the expressive gestures of Blackpentecostal practice, Crawley sees and hears fugitivity, a liberating break from the normative, anti-Black world. Otherwise possibility is the desire for and seeking of an alternative social sphere marked by intense sociality. Though Crawley is focused on the Blackpentecostal church specifically, he argues that its “disruptive capacities” are “but one example” of Black culture’s breaking from a world that is deliberately violent toward Black bodies (2017: 4-5). Insofar as the Square was a similarly liberating social sphere, where Black gatherers sought to possess themselves again, Crawley might argue that it was another example. Many of these acts of repossession may have also been rooted in spiritual practice: in 1808, one observer noted that Africans at the Square “collected together to perform their worship after the manner of their country” (Schultz 1810: 197). This line of thinking unites diverse Black performance traditions by their desire for and enactment of otherwise possibility, a place wherein congregants or performers can momentarily transcend oppression and possess themselves again.

Crawley is also interested in how such performances carry “the capacity for commentary [and] for critique” (2019). Though the gatherers at Congo Square may have sang and danced for themselves first and foremost, as I discuss in the following section, they also presented their music and movements to a crowd, some of whom were their active oppressors. It is possible that, much like the contemporaneous Black artists in 31

Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent, some gatherers sought to “defamiliarize” themselves by disturbing the representational tropes of Blackness to their onlookers (2006: 5). This notion may remain a matter of speculation in the absence of accounts written by participants, but it is worth noting that the accounts written by observers often remark on the elegance of the gatherers. In 1833, for example, one traveler noted that they dressed

“like princes,” and called them “the first dandies in the city—in the best of broadcloth and the finest of hats” (qtd in Evans 2011: 147). Dressed in flashy clothing, dancing to complex polyrhythms played on big, booming drums, these descriptions hint at a display of mock royalty. Sakakeeny similarly suggests that in their outward form, these performances signified the power of Black culture within a society that imposed servility

(2011: 298).

Part II: The Concentric Circle

Considering that the gatherers at Congo Square may have come to the area not only to repossess themselves but also to perform a critique of slavery, it should already be apparent that the dynamics of possession ran in more than one direction in this space. As the gatherers sang and danced in the musical heart and center, crowds gathered around and performed a possessive act of their own. One can imagine that some of the onlookers were slaveowners, coming by only to witness “one of their own” plucking a banjo, while others were making their first and only visit, perhaps realizing a long held desire of hearing the famed African music of New Orleans, an experience that they would later record in journals and letters. This section takes the first centrifugal step away from the 32 gatherers, putting the concentric circle of predominantly white observers at the center of analysis.

In the antebellum period, the concept of whiteness was still in the early stages of its evolution into a (strange) form of property, one that people would (and do) possessively “invest” in (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1998). This reevaluation of whiteness into a form of property was taking place at the same time that white people all over the world, especially in New Orleans, were benefitting from the peculiar institution that reduced enslaved Black people to property. To make things all the more complex, these possessive investments took place while white American identity was evolving from what we might call its “European base.” A key aspect of this formation — especially in the Africanized,

Creolized milieu of New Orleans — was the borrowing from the culture of “the Others” with whom white Americans shared space. To adopt Arun Saldanha’s wording (2007),

“Otherness” would come to be “constituent” of whiteness.

Though it has been acknowledged that Congo Square functioned as a sort of cultural spectacle, white perceptions of the Square have never been the basis of scholarship. An exception can be found in Shane Lief’s master’s thesis, which explores how, as New Orleans gained a reputation for its distinctive Black American music and dance, white economic elites began to see their culture as a viable source of profit, laying a foundation for the cultural industry of the present. Lief’s focus, however, is on the decades leading up to and into the 20th century, when several citywide events were put on that “foregrounded” Black New Orleanian culture. These included retrospective pageants that put expressive practices associated with Congo Square into the spotlight. 33

One of these set aside a whole day to celebrate the antebellum period, placing the bamboula and calinda dances, accompanied by the strumming of banjos, at center as signs of the city’s (Black) uniqueness (2014: 3-4, 54-55).

Such events constitute examples of what Lief calls the “elite embrace” of local

Black culture by white New Orleanians: “an ephemeral social gesture… that superficially signifies concord, but does not communicate any affection or respect enduring beyond the moment” (2014: 3-4). The elite embrace is indeed superficial in the sense that it signifies a concord that was absent from the racialized society of New Orleans, and the cultural events that Lief details evince more than an elitist, phony approval of local Black culture.

As these functions were designed to extract wealth from people of color, they were not unlike other forms of racial capitalism practiced in the city, which scholars have shown to be typical of New Orleans in the past and present (e.g. Woods 2017; Adams and

Sakakeeny 2019). A cultural industry fueled by Black creativity and labor but controlled by white economic entrepreneurs speaks to white people’s simultaneous “fascination and rejection” of Black culture and people (Lief 2014: 3-4).

Several writers have contributed meaningful work on the Square’s peripheral status as a cultural exhibit. Roach has written that the concentric circle around the Square was a place for onlookers to both observe and perform race, an activity that, he speculates, brought them great pleasure (2001: 107). Following Roach, Sakakeeny has similarly argued that visitors experienced the gatherings as a racial spectacle, departing with an impression that would be circulated, or “amplified” by their writing even as it was distorted by racism (2011: 298). Evans has also looked to the periphery of the Square 34 as a white local and tourist destination. Besides her critical unearthing of Christy as an appropriator of Black New Orleanian culture, her research uncovers all manner of primary sources that point to the possessive dynamics at work along the Square’s periphery. These sources are critical to the scholarship on the Square, since the events took place before the advent of film and sound recording technology, and historians have yet to locate an account written by a participant. But they also speak to the character of the observers. As Mark Smith has noted, for all of the frustration that comes from not being able to actually hear the past, text does, at the very least, have the power to capture

“the meaning of sounds to the people who were doing the listening” (2015: 57).

Black sociality has long been a matter of municipal concern for New Orleans’ white elite. After the 1811 German Coast uprising — the largest slave revolt in U.S. history — was suppressed on its way to the city, a set of strict ordinances was issued in response. They forbade enslaved people from assembling unless the events were pre- approved, and restricted their Sunday afternoon recreation to spaces appointed by the mayor. In 1812, after sixteen enslaved people were arrested at a ball that police had failed to disband, the mayor announced that the ordinances of the previous year had to be amended. But when, several months later, the city council resolved to criminalize all gatherings for enslaved people besides funerals, the mayor advocated for the continuation of Sunday gatherings, this time under police watch. These municipal debates eventually led to the appointment of Congo Square as the one public place that enslaved people could gather in large numbers for Sunday recreation (Evans 2011: 139-143). 35

The primary motive behind this effort to regulate Black mobility and sociality was the fear of revolt. This is clearly apparent on the restrictive side of the debate, but it was as much and all the more sinister part of the argument for the continuation of Black gatherings. As the mayor himself declared: “when they are dancing, they cannot conspire against us” (qtd in Evans 2011: 141). This notion that an allotment of free time for enslaved people was actually a method of preserving the slave system has been explored by Saidiya Hartman. She notes that this criticism was made early on by Frederick

Douglas and other abolitionists, who observed that the purpose of such diversions was to thwart the emergence of revolutionary thought. As Douglas concluded, “Not the slave’s happiness but the master’s safety was the end sought” (qtd. in Hartman 1997: 47).

Though Hartman does not bring Congo Square into her discussion, it is certainly possible to think of the gatherings in this light. To apply the language used in this thesis, it can be argued that the gatherings existed partly to preserve the racial investments — whiteness as a possession that enabled Black people to become their property — of white elites living in antebellum New Orleans. In other words, the city’s calculated allotment of

Black sociality speaks to its possessive attachment to the racial order.

In Hartman’s assessment, when festivities for enslaved people became spectacles for white observers, these encounters also helped preserve the institution of slavery by turning the Black body into a vehicle of enjoyment for the onlookers. In the eyes and ears of observers, the prevalence of Black music-making confirmed the “restricted sentience and immunity to sorrow” of the enslaved (1997: 23). Though it is impossible to measure the degree to which the spectacle of Congo Square worked to sustain the racial order, the 36 accounts written by observers certainly perpetuated the myth of the happily enslaved

African. As we saw above, one traveler’s impression was that the gatherers seemed to dress “like princes” and were “the first dandies in the city—in the best of broadcloth and the finest of hats.” As if to put the nail in the coffin, this same traveler opened their description by remarking that the gatherers seemed to be better off than enslaved people elsewhere in the South (qtd in Evans 2011: 147). The following year, James Creecy wrote that gatherers assembled:

in great numbers in Congo Square, on every Sunday afternoon in good weather, to enjoy themselves in their own peculiar manner. Groups of fifties and hundreds may be seen in different sections of the square, with banjos, tom-toms, violins, jawbones, triangle, and various other instruments… The dancers are most fancifully dressed with fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells, and balls, jingling and flirting about the performer’s legs and arms, who sing a second or counter to the music most sweetly… ([1834]1860: 20-21).

Though much has been made of Latrobe’s impression, upon approaching the

Square, of a “most extraordinary noise,” many of the accounts lack such claims to personal aversion. As is apparent in Creecy’s account, just as many observers expressed their fascination and amazement. The fact that convening around the gatherers at Congo

Square was a popular Sunday pastime in the first place suggests that white observers had what Hartman calls a “fixation on the slave’s ‘good times’” (1997: 25). While this reading does not undermine the Square’s singular place in Black American musical history, it may have a certain disenchanting effect. Roach may be correct in thinking that observers came to the gatherings partly to perform their whiteness. And it may be true, as

I have suggested, that they also came to protect their racial investments—Black people as 37 property, whiteness as property. In the absence of any accounts that willfully admit to having gone home to imitate the singers and dancers, the final dynamic of imitation and appropriation cannot be explored here. However, Christy’s appropriative work, which I discuss in the following section, certainly suggests that some observers did indeed emulate the gatherers.

For a white person living in the Creole city, attending the gatherings at Congo

Square on any given Sunday could have meant engaging with any one of the dynamics of possession discussed in this section: protecting their racial investments; performing their whiteness against the reference point of the Black spectacle; and, consciously or unconsciously, absorbing the sounds and gestures of the event. As these dynamics were active around the periphery of the Square, they were intimately tied up with the dynamics of the gatherers. In my reading, this created a complex web that set the stage for Christy’s appropriations.

Part III: E.P. Christy at Congo Square

Two biographical sketches of Christy appeared in print during his lifetime. The first of these, his “Authentic Memoir,” was published in 1848 in The Age. The second appeared six years later, and served as a preface to the fourth volume of his songbook series, the Plantation Melodies. Neither piece has an identified author, but seeing as the latter is clearly based on the former, and was published “under the authority” of the artist, it is safe to assume (at the very least) that Christy approved of and was an informant to both pieces. Each sketch traces important points along the arc of his life, making a series 38 of bold statements about his singular genius along the way. They also include “FACTS in

FIGURES [sic]”—the number of concerts he gave and amounts of money he made in specific years, and the “Authentic Memoir” closes with a sequence of extracts from journals and letters. In every case, these figures and additions are meant to drive home the point that Christy was an extraordinary artist and entrepreneur (“The Authentic

Memoir” 1848; “Preface” 1854).

According to these accounts, Christy moved to New Orleans at the age of ten after being brought up in Philadelphia. His parents had sent him to the city in order for him to pursue an education and professional career as a clerk, but he was drawn to performance at a young age, and soon took to the road with a circus company. He returned to New

Orleans after this tour, and it was then and there that he began to acquire his “superior knowledge of the negro characteristics” (“Preface” 1854, no page numbers). Neither source makes an explicit claim for how long he was in the city, but each places him in

New Orleans from about 1825 to 1832, from the age of ten to seventeen, after which time they mention further travels and his eventual return to the North (“The Authentic

Memoir” 1848; “Preface” 1854).

Though he began performing in a burnt cork mask as a youth, it was not until the early 1840s that he formed his own blackface troupe, Christy’s Minstrels. The group rose to prominence during the period of minstrelsy’s greatest popularity (1846-1854). After an encouraging start in Buffalo, they relocated to New York City, where they began a seven year stint at Mechanic’s Hall, on Broadway, that is widely considered to have been one of the stand out moments in the history of the art form. In 1853, the rising star and lead 39 comic of his troupe suddenly left him for another band. According to William J. Mahar, this split marked the downturn of Christy’s career. He disbanded his troupe in 1854, and although he would reappear after this on occasion as a guest star with other groups, he had essentially retired from performing (1999: 35-37).

As with Dr. John, the musician at the center of my second chapter, Christy is an enigmatic subject of study. After the disbanding of his troupe, he continued to work on the sidelines of show business; he ran a chain of theaters called Christy’s Opera Houses, and continued to publish his Plantation songbooks. He also worked hard to authenticate his legacy, going so far as to press the legal matter that he was the true “originator” of blackface minstrelsy (Nathan 1962: 285-86). The following piece from The New York

Times also suggests that he spent the better part of these years living in luxury:

Among the celebrities of New-York is E.P. Christy, the negro minstrel, who, having made a princely fortune out of burnt cork and Ethiopian melodies, now lives the life of a wealthy and fashionable New-Yorker. He recently made a great dash in the streets, with a magnificent sleigh, which attracted unusual attention, from its splendor and the beauty of the prancing stud of snow-white horses to which it was attached… His wealth is prodigious, and, as he has been economical and laborious while earning it, he feels authorized to spend it freely. He may be frequently seen in the dress circle of the Italian Opera, and is always the observed of all observers. (“The Millionaire Negro Singer” 1857: 5)

For all of the grand happiness this story is meant to imply, Christy took his life about five years later. When the Times reported his death, they noted that he had been

“laboring under temporary insanity” (“The Death of E.P. Christy” 1862: 8). Though it is tempting to speculate about his mental condition, the reality is that we know as little about the motives behind his suicide as we do his character. In light of an intriguing life 40

— from his teenage immersion in New Orleans, his rise to national fame, his exceptional stint on Broadway, to his suicide at the age of 46 — it is a bit surprising that Christy has never been called, say, “the Elvis” (or whoever) of the 19th century.5 In any case, as the decades passed, his celebrity faded. While fans of centuries-old American music may encounter Christy by way of his connection to Stephen Foster, the celebrated songwriter with whom he shared a curious working relationship (Hamm 1979; Emerson 1997), he is essentially no longer part of the American cultural consciousness.6

His exact contributions to the art form are also difficult to pin down. Christy claimed to be the “originator” of blackface minstrelsy and “the first to harmonize negro melodies” (“Preface” 1854). While the former claim was simply a ploy in the wider project of authenticating his legacy, the latter claim is intriguing. When the minstrel was pressing his claim to these titles in court, one of his greatest rivals conceded that Christy had in fact contributed not only the harmonized parts, but the by then standard three-part separation of acts, as well as the “wench-dancing and solo playing” (Nathan 1962:

285-86). Perhaps this is why Cockrell has made the passing point that Christy’s calling was not as a performer, but as a manager—by which he may have meant, by extension, an architect of the form (1997: 154). Meanwhile, Lott claims that Christy’s success can

5 I do not mean to suggest that such comparisons are worthwhile. It is worth noting, however, that Elvis actually recorded “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” a minstrel tune that appeared in the second volume of Christy’s Plantation Melodies.

6 This is not to say that he has been ignored by scholars of minstrelsy. While Christy has yet to receive the full biographic treatment given to his (more or less equally successful) rival, Dan Emmett (Nathan 1962), he appears in many of the major texts on minstrelsy, from Toll (1974), Saxton (1975), Lott (1993), Cockrell (1997), Lhamon (1998), Mahar (1999), up to Smith (2013). In most of these studies, his troupe’s seven year run at Mechanic’s Hall is singled out as exceptional, and in some cases, other details of his life and career appear when they are of interest. Among these scholars, only Mahar mentions Christy again and again throughout his study. 41 be attributed to his “middle-of-the-road” appeal—his troupe was considered to be neither too vulgar nor too “refined” (1993: 180). Regardless of his “true calling,” playbills reprinted by Mahar (1999) confirm that in addition to writing songs, organizing his group, and playing a wide variety of parts in the theater, Christy appeared regularly in solo and in group acts, playing the banjo, singing and dancing. If his enormous success is any indication, he would seem to have done so with more competence than most.

Christy’s source materials are also perplexing, and this issue applies to blackface minstrelsy in general. While the performers often claimed to be re-enacting authentic

African or Black American culture, scholars have made it abundantly clear that the art form’s source materials were much more varied than this. Morrison (2014), for example, has shown that in many cases, European and especially Irish influences typically provided the core source material — including the song forms — for minstrel music and dance. Much in keeping with the notion of masking at the center of blackface, stereotyped movements and dialect would then be incorporated into, or lain atop of these

European derived forms.

Evans argues that, by scoring and harmonizing what he heard at Congo Square,

Christy’s reinterpretations were culturally syncretic (2011: 44). The performer also seems to have understood, if only implicitly, that his act was not “purely” derived from African traditions. This is implied by his insistence that he was “the first to harmonize negro melodies,” and his biographic sketches allude to this process several times, usually in openly racist terms. The general notion they advance is that Christy captured and refined the sounds made by Black musicians at Congo Square. In his “Preface,” for example, the 42 music Christy came to possess is likened to “native airs” that “floated wildly” or

“hummed in the balmy breezes of the sunny south.” His “passionate love” for these sounds led him to organize a minstrel troupe of his own, whose members had to “possess sufficient science and practical skill in music.” These talents would enable them to harmonize and “SCORE systematically the original [sounds]” so they could be sung and played “with true precision and effect” (1854). Though Christy was not the first to celebrate this “refining” process wherein “raw” sounds have to be improved upon using the high art of harmony,7 few accounts of an appropriative process are so flagrantly racist.

When it came time to pinpoint his sources, Christy specified the enslaved people of New Orleans, particularly those who gathered at Congo Square, as his one and only influence.8 Though it is not possible to determine precisely what the minstrel took from

Congo Square, Evans postulates a theory that merits further research. She notes that historians have credited Christy as the originator of the “walk-around,” which became a traditional ending in the final act of a minstrel show. During the walk-around, members of the troupe were arranged in a semi-circle, and took turns stepping into the center, where they would compete with each other by displaying their best dancing skills.

According to Evans, this routine is very similar to a practice that is prevalent in

7 In fact, Christy’s contemporary, the New Orleans born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), wrote several reinterpretations of Black music that he had heard in the city of his youth, Brazil, Cuba, and elsewhere. As Sakakeeny has pointed out, Gottschalk’s work was received as an example of cultural elevation (2011: 298).

8 Evans seems to have been the first to dwell on this claim, which is the basis of her excavation of Christy as a landmark appropriator of Black music in New Orleans. She was not the first to cite his biographical sketches, or mention his time spent in the city, however. Other scholars to have made note of Christy’s connection to New Orleans include Toll (1974), Winans (1976) and, more recently, Smith (2013). 43 traditional African dancing, only in those contexts, the circle is fully formed (2011: 44). If

Christy can indeed be credited for contributing this element to the art form,9 it is certainly possible that his altered version was appropriated from similar practices he had observed at Congo Square.

Although he was unabashed about his desire to possess Black culture, in the

“Authentic Memoir” that appeared six years before the fourth volume of his Melodies, the minstrel alluded to a preceding dynamic of possession. Though the memoir, much like the later biographical sketch, locates Christy’s success in his ability to “refine” the sounds and movements he heard at Congo Square, attention to the careful wording finds the tables momentarily turned on this power dynamic. The author notes that, prior to

Christy’s breakout in New York City, he had found considerable success in Buffalo, and:

For a time, it seemed as if he had resolved to settle down, but his love for the old Negro melodies still haunted him; and, after much deliberation, he determined, in the year 1842, to organize a band… and to that lucky determination, carried out as his original intention has been by skill, prudence and business habits, MR. CHRISTY owes the acquirement of his handsome fortune. (1848, emphasis added).

In other words, Christy may have gone in some other direction, but these Black sounds, these “queer words and simple but expressive melodies” would not leave his mind alone

(“Authentic Memoir” 1848).

The language is potent. His love for these old melodies still haunted him. It is as if

Christy was, for a brief moment, admitting a slip in his sense of self-control. According to the OED, to be haunted is to be “Frequented or much visited by spirits, imaginary beings,

9 This notion is difficult to confirm. As far as I can tell, it was Christy himself who staked the claim for having been the “creator of the semicircular arrangement” (qtd. in Mahar 1999: 19). 44 apparitions… etc.” In more secular contexts, the term is used to suggest that one’s preoccupation with an idea or memory feels uncontrollable. Furthermore, to haunt is

“The act or practice of frequenting or habitually resorting to a place.” Thinking of

Christy’s relationship with Congo Square in these terms, the multilateral dynamics begin to reveal themselves: the young artist used to haunt a place whose residual sounds haunted him in turn. Drawing on the language of this thesis, it can similarly be said that as Christy returned to Congo Square again and again, the musicians and dancers had in some sense taken possession of him and/or his attention. Further, their possession of him preceded his own possessive (that is, appropriative) career as a blackface minstrel.

Though his account confirms that he gazed upon this Black social sphere in wonder, what registered in Christy’s ears was not music but “native airs” that “hummed in the balmy breezes of the south.” The light that went off in his head in hearing this historic music was, in other words, the same light that colonists saw in “discovering” the raw gold they found all over the Americas. Christy heard an unrefined resource, something ready to be extracted, processed, and improved upon using, in his words,

“sufficient science and practical skill in music” (“Preface” 1854). It is possible to compare his arrival at the scene of the Congo Square gatherings to any other inceptive moment in the history of imperial resource extraction. Calling himself a “silent but close observer” and a “willing student” of the enslaved Black gatherers, Christy returned again and again, later making a fortune off of an act that he proudly revealed to have been based on what he had collected there (“Authentic Memoir” 1848). 45

Bringing the discussion from the previous two sections into dialogue with these dynamics, I propose a web of attachments. In the first section, it was shown that the gatherers at Congo Square used the space partly to possess themselves again, thereby rebelling against their legal status as property. Though these gatherings were surely affective in this centripetal sense, in the second section, the concentric circle of observers was shown to have used the African “Others” at Congo Square not only as a reference point to perform their whiteness but as a safety valve to preserve their racialized possessions. Furthermore, I speculated that as some observers became attached to the ritual of attending the gatherings, Black culture was influencing them, such that this so- called “Otherness” would be extracted as a constituent part of their white American identity. The question of the primarily white onlookers being transformed by their time spent observing the gatherers at Congo Square may be a matter of speculation, but

Christy’s claim to have studied these musicians and dancers affirms that some onlookers did indeed emulate what they heard and saw. Following Christopher J. Smith’s aforementioned line of thinking, the Square was not only a site of participation and observation, then, but of imitation and appropriation as well (2019: 59).

Conclusion

As one of several epigraphs to his study of blackface minstrelsy, Lott includes a quote from the New York Tribune, published in 1855, that marveled at the infectiousness of the art form. Remarking specifically on the wild popularity of Thomas Rice’s Jim

Crow act, the author noted that it “seemed as though the entire population had been bitten 46 by the tarantula.” All over the country, the song and dance “monopolized public attention” (qtd. in Lott 1993: 3). The allusions to infectiousness in this passage are shining examples of what Barbara Browning calls a “metaphor of contagion” (1998).

Before reflecting on the implications of Christy’s enactment of a discourse of possession,

I would like to extend this metaphor of the spider and the web.

As with the participants and observers, Christy’s relationship with Congo Square was not unilaterally possessive. Insofar as he arrived at Congo Square looking to seize the expressive practices of the Black gatherers, it is possible to think of him in one sense as the intruding spider who had little to do with the web’s creation. In Christy’s biographical sketches, however, the performer made a point of noting that years after visiting the place, his “love” for the sounds he had heard at Congo Square “still haunted him” (“Authentic Memoir” 1848). The love he had for this music was what drew him back to the Square time and time again. To expand on the metaphor of contagion employed in the passage from the Tribune, Christy was not simply an acquisitive visitor to this web of attachments, but another bug caught in the stickum.

By willfully admitting that the gatherers at Congo Square had a kind of power over him, I have argued that Christy enacted a discourse of possession that preceded his appropriative work. It is tempting to argue further that in doing so, Christy set the tone for 20th century white appropriations of Black American music. The affects and implications of his enactment are difficult to determine, however, especially when the impact of this artist’s writings cannot be measured. What is clear is that a direct line can be drawn between this artist and Mac Rebennack, the subject of my second chapter. My 47 hope is that this writing will encourage further research on the role that Congo Square played in the development of what we now call American music. 48

3. THE MASK OF CONVERSION

Introduction

In the mid 1960s, a young musician from New Orleans by the name of Mac

Rebennack was securing his place in the backrooms of popular music history as a songwriter, studio ace, record producer, and talent scout when he began fronting a band of his own. The music he and his group recorded on Gris-Gris, his first album as a bandleader, is more difficult to categorize than most albums made in that era. Though it is possible to think of it in one sense as New Orleans’ answer to the psychedelic rock craze, it is a far cry from rock and tends to be labelled voodoo-funk, hoodoo-R&B and the like.

In the album reviews, one finds all manner of exoticizing descriptions—the “atmosphere is thick, smoky, serpentine, foreboding” (Jurek n.d.), and it sounds like a “psychedelic voodoo ceremony invading your living room” (Unterberger 2010).

Taking a stage name that he would keep for life, one borrowed from a 19th century Voodoo practitioner, Rebennack opens the album by introducing his persona:

“They call me Dr. John / Known as the night tripper… I got medicine, to cure all y’all’s ills / I got remedies of every description” (1968). As he coaxes his listeners into trying this or that potion, his backup singers answer him in hair-raising tones. Mandolin trills enter and disappear quickly, while eerie electric guitar lines weave around the mix

—“serpentine” indeed. Taking the music on tour, he appeared on stage in carnivalesque makeup, animal skins, top hats, and pieces borrowed from genuine Mardi Gras Indian 49 suits. In a contemporaneous review of the album, one critic wrote that by some

“sympathetic magic,” Rebennack had “stolen the black man’s soul” (Goldman 1968).

With his Voodoo priest persona, Rebennack revealed himself to be more of a direct descendant of blackface minstrelsy than most white musicians of his era. As he openly acknowledged in his autobiography, the melody of “Jump Sturdy,” from Gris-

Gris, was adapted from a minstrel tune that his grandfather, a former minstrel himself, sang to him as a child. Furthermore, the stage antics of his Gris-Gris era performances were, according to the musician, inspired by those employed in the blackface theater

(1994: 3-4, 145). In spite of this transparent footing in minstrelsy, Rebennack has been all but spared from criticism; to my knowledge, he has never been discussed by scholars writing on cultural appropriation. Assessments of his competence in performing Black music, including from Black musicians, are uniformly positive. In common parlance, we might say that he gets a “pass.” Though this pass is not materially real, several reasons for its apparent existence do come to mind—perhaps most importantly, his sincere respect for and lifelong working relationship with Black musicians.

More in keeping with the concerns of this thesis, Rebennack exceeded the narrative of appropriation as love-based-theft by presenting himself as someone who had a spiritual relationship with Black music in general, and New Orleans music in particular.

In this chapter, I argue that he turned the tables on the dynamics of possession inherent in his appropriative work by portraying himself as a convert to Black culture. Though he made a career out of his cultural mining, a careful reading of Rebennack’s version of the 50 story reveals a narrative in which he was both a self-possessed artist and a disciple, a fully-realized subject who was nevertheless “under the spell” of Black American music.

After making a few more albums in the vein of Gris-Gris, Rebennack went on to prove himself as an incomparable chameleon, making records that are considered New

Orleans classics in homegrown R&B, funk, and the piano professor tradition. With these works, he could be compared in many respects to any other white musician whose artistry was based on studied appropriations of Black American music, be it Tom Waits or Harry

Connick Jr. Like these two artists, his work is firmly rooted in the Black musical spheres of New Orleans. Some of his best known albums, especially Gumbo and In The Right

Place, certainly have their place in a wider discussion of cultural appropriation in the city.

Here, however, I am specifically interested in how Rebennack attempted to distinguish himself from the Chet Bakers and the Mick Jaggers of the world by initiating a transformation of the self—to his fans, he was Dr. John.

I begin by tracing the arc of his musical career, paying special attention to the way he tells the story of his youthful immersion in New Orleans. I then turn my focus to his

Gris-Gris period. Before listening closely to the album, I situate the work within Voodoo and the city’s wider Black spiritual spheres. From there, I discuss some of the disparate influences behind Gris-Gris. I close the chapter by bringing his narrative of conversion into dialogue with his footing in minstrelsy. 51

Raised In The Right Place

Rebennack (1941-2019) was born and raised in the age of Jim Crow. Though his hometown of New Orleans has long been praised as an urban, liberal safe haven in a region that was otherwise afflicted by the violence of white supremacy, this romantic conception of the city as an exception to the brutally racialized South has been challenged by scholars.10 Rather than emphasize the city’s long history of “cultural exchange” and interracial alliances, Clyde Woods reminds us that New Orleans was meant to be the capital of the Confederacy, and would continue to be the epicenter of Southern white supremacy long after the Civil War. In response to the widespread oppression and anti-

Black violence upheld by what he calls the “Bourbon bloc,” Woods explores how the city’s Black residents “built a multidimensional culture in which the desire for freedom was expressed in thousands of different ways” (2017: 2). These alternative social spheres and their accompanying cultural expressions were part of a broad, collective project, which he often calls the “Blues agenda”:

The neighborhood and ward complex of large extended families, social and pleasure clubs, churches, healers, businesses, schools, other organizations and clubs, brass bands, musicians, artisans, workers, labor leaders, Mardi Gras Indians, and second lines provided an endless supply of community-centered leadership, development initiatives, and institutionalized planning. (2017: 91).

In sum, Woods configures New Orleans as the nerve center of organized white supremacy and, at the same time, a headquarters for the Black American freedom struggle.

10 See, for example, Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity, co-edited by Matt Sakakeeny and Thomas Jessen Adams. 52

By the 1920s, the Blues agenda fostered the development of a large group of jazz musicians, several pivotal stars among them. The vast majority of these musicians were of African descent, though mixed-race Creoles played a distinct role in jazz history (Ake

2002). It also appears that, in spite of segregation, white New Orleanians were mining

Black music then and long before. For the most part, these were “ethnic whites,” who cultivated a scene of their own that was entwined with but somewhat separate from sites of Black musical performance (Raeburn 2009). Although the jazz era is outside of the scope of this chapter, it should be stated that whites playing Black music was a constant and unsurprising feature of New Orleans throughout the hundred and some years between

Christy and Rebennack.

After the Civil War, the city’s historically “intermixed racial patterns” began to change dramatically, giving way to a more typically segregated city (Campanella 2006:

300). But if Rebennack’s childhood memories are any indication, the close living patterns of former decades continued to have an impact. Although his neighborhood was a white one, he remembers the Third Ward of which it was a part as a “racially mixed place.”

According to the musician, “In spite of the best efforts of segregationists, the races had a natural tendency to mingle and mix, jook and jive, rock and roll. Wherever you went — black neighborhood or white — there was a real feeling of community” (1994: 14, 18).

Since these racial lines were drawn especially in professional and public places, they extended to musical spheres like clubs and recording studios. When Rebennack began a professional career in music, he was sometimes fined by the musician’s unions for collaborating with Black artists. But he had been crossing these barriers long before then. 53

Raised not only by a musical family in this musical city but by a father who fixed

PA systems and owned a record store, the first chapter of Rebennack’s autobiography finds him obsessed with Black music from the get-go. He recalls his childhood records —

Joe Turner, Louis Armstrong, Memphis Minnie — and the family gatherings where various aunts and uncles would take turns at the piano, playing everything from old jazz numbers to “great boogie.” He remembers his Aunt Andre with particular fondness: “We shared something secret. We were hypnotized by the riffs that were just right for whatever mood we happened to fall into.” When he was about eight, his father started bringing him along when he was fixing PA systems at clubs. According to Rebennack, these errands greatly expanded his exposure to local acts like the Papa Celestin band, Dave

Bartholomew, Professor Longhair, and “a hundred others.” He remembers waiting in the car when the PA would suddenly start working: “The sounds blew out into the street… and I got high on the riffs (1994: 11-14, 19, emphasis added).

These early encounters inspired Rebennack to play the piano, the instrument he is most closely associated with today. In a city famed for its virtuosic pianists, however, he was initially intimidated, and chose to begin on the guitar. Sensing his eagerness, his father soon arranged for him to take lessons with the likes of Walter “Papoose” Nelson, one of Fats Domino’s guitarists. From there, he was passed on to Roy Montrell, another

Domino sideman (1994: 20-2). In an interview with Rolling Stone conducted in the early

1970s, Rebennack looked back on these early lessons:

In the days when it was very difficult for a black guy and a white guy to even socialize, for a black guy to give a white guy guitar lessons when he’s scuffling to make a livin’ is beyond beautiful… I was like a little punk 54

kid with those guys saying, hey, could you show me how to do this, and they would. In a time when black people were not accepted by white people, they were willing to overlook that to help me play music. And these guys was not just street musicians, they was the best guys there. (qtd in Gambaccini 1973).

The fact that a young boy just starting on his instrument soon found himself taking lessons from two major R&B musicians may say as much about New Orleans as it does about Rebennack’s family.

After years of sitting outside of or sneaking into clubs, Rebennack remembers that he was finally welcomed inside by prominent musicians like Paul Gayten, who took a liking to him. Though still an early teen, he recalls settling into a routine wherein he would skip morning mass to catch what for the musicians was a late night set. Some of these players would soon form the house band at the J&M Studio (discussed below). For

Rebennack, hearing them play on a regular basis in the early hours before school was

“heaven” (1994: 28). Though his entrance into Black social spheres carried none of the dangers that came with a Black person entering an all white space, he remembers

Gayten’s transgressions with great admiration:

He was instrumental in breaking up the strict color line that prevailed at that time in the clubs and recording studios in New Orleans… later he helped me get some of my first recording sessions with the studio cats, many of whom were black… At his own club, he ignored the segregation laws as much as he was able to and still keep the place open… He had to take all kinds of flak from folks, especially the black music union 496 and the vice squad. But in his own soft-spoken way he saw that battle through; eventually, his way won the battle, but not the war, which still continues. (1994: 30).

It is worth stopping here to reflect on the fact that in Rebennack’s autobiography, these encounters function as the formative moments that led him to pursue a career 55 playing Black music. In describing these critical encounters, he frequently invokes metaphors of contagion (Browning 1998). From a young age, Black music had power of him—it “hypnotized’ him,” got him “high,” sent him to “heaven.” He draws on these tropes in a positive sense, celebrating the curative, life-giving properties that are widely assigned to Black music. At no point does the artist allude to some internal struggle against these forces, nor is there a single moment dramatizing some final, spiritual

“surrender.” There is, however, a recurring narrative throughout the text in which he is compelled to enter into the room of Black culture, and close the door behind him. Read through the lens of this thesis, his is a discourse of possession.

By the time he was in high school, Rebennack was taking hard drugs, selling songs to record labels, and gigging as regularly as possible. Local musicians like Huey

Smith would take him to famous Black venues like the Dew Drop Inn, and he became first an occasional, then a frequent sideman at the J&M Studio. In a recent book, Bryan

Wagner outlined J&M’s history succinctly:

After the Second World War, New Orleans became a national hub for rhythm and blues as well as one of the incubators for rock ’n’ roll. No institution in the city was more important to this music scene than J&M Studio (1945-1956), a bare- bones outfit behind an appliance store on Rampart Street managed by Cosimo Matassa. This was where Roy Brown made “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in 1948, Fats Domino made “The Fat Man” in 1949, Lloyd Price made “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952, and Little Richard made “Tutti Frutti” in 1955. (2019: 16).

Wagner concludes that as far as the history of popular music is concerned, it would be

“hard to overstate” the studio’s influence on what was to come (2019: 17). The “straight” or “backbeat” drumming style developed by Earl Palmer at J&M would set the tone for 56 rock and funk music’s development away from the shuffle rhythm that prevailed in R&B up to that point (Stewart 2000). The New Orleans sound was also one of the main sources of inspiration for white rock and roll musicians like Elvis and Buddy Holly. Though the style that was being pioneered at the studio would surely have existed without him,

Rebennack’s contributions to New Orleans R&B were not of minor consequence.

Consider, for example, that in 1959, he played guitar on the most famous rendition of

“Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” by Professor Longhair (1994: 214).

By the late 50s, he had become a full-time professional musician: playing live and on records, scouting talent, rehearsing and producing groups. Though he remembered those years fondly, his career was often hindered by legal troubles. He recalls the constant

“turf wars” between the Black and white musician’s unions, who encumbered the development of the New Orleans music scene by making it difficult for musicians to have mixed sessions. He also lamented the damage done by city officials. When Jim Garrison became the city’s district attorney in 1961, he began closing many of the live music venues. While these obstacles were discouraging, it was his growing heroin addiction that put the nail in the coffin. Rebennack’s early career came to a dramatic halt when he was arrested on drug charges, for which he would serve a two year sentence in Fort Worth,

Texas (1994: 89-90, 124). Once freed, he headed straight for Los Angeles.

The musical expertise that Rebennack attained while growing up in New Orleans resists encapsulation. Though the guitar was his main instrument in those years, he was also learning to play the keyboard, drawing influence from Longhair and other musicians who were part of what is colloquially known as the “piano professor” tradition. After 57 nearly losing his finger in a violent altercation, Rebennack’s ability to play the guitar was severely hampered, which led him to pursue the keyboard more intently. Accepting the offer of lessons, he sound found himself learning to play the organ under the tutelage of

James Booker, perhaps the greatest of all New Orleans pianists. Rebennack reserved special admiration for Longhair and Booker, devoting whole sections of his memoir to their memory. He considered Longhair to be something of a father figure, not to mention the “guardian angel of the roots of New Orleans music.” With regards to his musicianship, he said Longhair “had a deep brand on me; for the longest time, his playing became a dominant part of how I thought about the piano.” As for the younger prodigy,

Rebennack said: “I consider him to be a genius. If I was ever blessed to meet one, James

Caroll Booker was” (1994: 107, 212, 223, 210).11

Arriving in California in 1965 with a set of chops that made him an invaluable asset to any studio band, he was quickly put to work. Taken under the wing of Harold

Battiste — a major figure in New Orleans music, who had produced records for Sam

Cooke, and was working hard to improve professional life for Black musicians —

Rebennack continued to demonstrate himself as a studio ace, playing keys and guitar on records by Frank Zappa, Sonny & Cher, and many others. But even in exile, he spent much of his time with “a little clique” of New Orleans musicians. Over halfway through his autobiography, Rebennack takes the fateful turn: “things was breaking up fast in LA, and other opportunities were glimmering on the horizon. An old New Orleans character named Dr. John was about to be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes” (1994: 130, 139).

11 Rebennack would later pay tribute to the piano professor tradition on several of his most cherished records: Dr. John’s Gumbo, and the two volumes of Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack. 58

His transition into the role of a frontman was, as the story goes, something of an accident. In his own autobiography, Battiste recalls that when he and Rebennack were putting things together for the first Dr. John album, they had both wanted Ronnie Barron, another white musician from New Orleans, to play the central character. Battiste described Barron as a great singer, whose vocals could “pass” as Black (2010: 97). After it was confirmed that Barron would not be taking the part (he would still play on the album), he and Rebennack both tell the story as if the latter simply fell into the role.

Battiste recalls some hesitance on the latter’s part: “I felt that Mac’s sound was right for the part, but he was reluctant… He didn’t see himself as an upfront artist” (2010: 97).

This intriguing tidbit of information was included in the New York Times obituary

(Edwards 2019), and many of the commemorative pieces written for the artist after he died last year, thereby circulating anew the notion that Rebennack never intended to enter the spotlight. But, as I discuss in the final section of this paper, this was not only a transition from the side to the frontline. By assuming the role of Dr. John, Rebennack was putting on a mask that would change the course of his entire life.

Gris-Gris was the first in a long line of albums released under the Dr. John moniker. After several albums made in a roughly similar vein as his first, Rebennack took a left turn with Dr. John’s Gumbo, an album made up of R&B covers that were popular or made in New Orleans — Longhair’s “Tipitina,” Earl King’s “Let the Good Times Roll”

— plus one original (1972). With the help of Allen Toussaint and The Meters, he followed Gumbo with In The Right Place (1973), one of the most popular albums in New

Orleans funk history. The opening number, “Right Place Wrong Time,” would be the 59 biggest single of his career. But Rebennack was not done with his Voodoo shtick, and dipped back into it, as he sometimes would throughout his career, for one track, “I Been

Hoodood.” According to the musician, this song was, like “Jump Sturdy,” based on a minstrel tune that he had learned from his grandfather as a young boy (1994: 4). In his memoir, these formative moments with his grandfather represent some of the beginnings of another education, not in New Orleans R&B or funk but in Voodoo and minstrelsy.

Voodoo in New Orleans

In order to conduct an analysis of Rebennack’s first work as Dr. John, we have to pivot away from the mid 20th century, back into the past from which this character came.

This section sketches out some important details surrounding New Orleanian Voodoo and the artist’s relationship with it. As many people know, “Voodoo” can be a problematic term.12 According to Kodi A. Roberts, who has recently established himself as the leading scholar of this religion, the term is worth resuscitating because it foregrounds the perspective of early 20th century practitioners in New Orleans who, like Rebennack, not only said the word but used it “interchangeably with terms like hoodoo” (2015: 9).

Though Rebennack draws certain lines of his own, he is not always clear about where they fall. For example, he sometimes refers to the Spiritual Churches, which I discuss below, as “the hoodoo church” (1994: 159, 165).

12 In New Orleans and the U.S. more broadly, the word carries distinctly racialized undertones, signifying the supposed primitivity of Black spirituality. When it is used without anti-Black connotations, there is still the problem of the term’s diverse usage. Voodoo can point to everything from a syncretic religion with deep roots in Africa to a tourist attraction in the city’s French Quarter; and there is a great deal of confusion with regards to New Orleanian Voodoo’s relationship to Haitian Vodou, a world religion with millions of followers, and Hoodoo, a set of African derived magical traditions practiced throughout the United States. 60

According to Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the dawn of Voodoo in New Orleans is marked by the arrival of enslaved Africans coming directly from the Bight of Benin. She notes that the word gri-gri, which refers to a magical charm or amulet, appears in the city’s court records as early as 1773 (1992: 85-6). Though the African roots of Voodoo are irrefutable,13 one of Roberts’ watershed contributions is his insistence that if we are to base our understanding of the religion on the accounts of real practitioners, we have no choice but to reframe the religion as a multi-racial and distinctly localized practice:

Voodoo may very well demonstrate ties between cultures created in Louisiana, Africa, Haiti, and a great many other sites throughout the Americas. However, most salient in the practice of Voodoo in New Orleans is the unique impact of the immediate cultural context of [the city], the American South, and the United States… Rather than being a monolithic and unchanging set of traditions handed down from African ancestors… the practice of Voodoo in the Crescent City represents a dynamic subculture practiced by a racially diverse group of professional and lay practitioners that was constantly growing to incorporate social and economic influences from the wider American culture…” (2015: 6).

In Roberts’ analysis, everyone who partook in the practice of Voodoo should be considered a co-creator.14 Though the religion was led predominantly by Black people, it was not an exclusively Black faith. In fact, Voodoo was one of the few cultural practices to have transcended the color line in the Jim Crow era. Roberts argues that what united

13 Many people believe that Voodoo arrived in New Orleans with the large migration of Haitians fleeing the country in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Between 1809 and 1810 alone, some ten thousand people, including over three thousand enslaved Black people, arrived in New Orleans by way of Cuba (Lachance 1992: 105). This massive wave of refugees certainly influenced the development of religious practices among the city’s residents, but it was not the beginning of New Orleanian Voodoo.

14 This would include: enslaved Africans living in the antebellum city; early French Roman Catholics who venerated the saints; a mixed bag of Black and Creole leaders; white pharmacists who acted as suppliers of Voodoo paraphernalia; and the many white women who “not only validated practitioners” by attending and financing their rituals, but sometimes even became “professional practitioners in their own right” (Roberts 2015: 197). 61 these diverse practitioners was not gender or race but the power that Voodoo promised to those who were willing to buy in (2015: 197).

The defining moment in the history of the religion came with the reign of Marie

Laveau, still known today as the city’s Voodoo Queen. Like most practitioners, her life is shrouded in myth and mystery. According to Roberts, Laveau (1801-1881) left a very specific legacy behind her. Decades after she had passed, the religion continued to be led by charismatic women, and continued to operate as a kind of spiritual business (2015:

7-8). By the early decades of the 20th century, when practitioners had the opportunity to add their voices to the historical record, the religion had become distinctly transactional, so much so that Voodooists called themselves “workers,” and their followers “clients”:

Workers necessarily provided services for a fee, and their clients expected an immediate result in exchange for that fee. In turn, workers offered money, candles, and other ritual “sacrifices” or payment to the saints and spirits employed, expecting observable returns in exchange. Voodoo is therefore a business, perhaps in a more obvious way than some other American religions. (Roberts 2015: 17-18).

Second only to Laveau, the namesake of Rebennack’s persona was a legendary practitioner. Like the Voodoo Queen and later figures, the historical Dr. John had clients on both sides of the color line (Roberts 2015: 96). The artist traces his interest in the figure back to unspecified historical writings that his sister and others had recommended.

“For many years,” he writes, “I had nurtured my little idea of forming a musical group around [his] personality.” Rebennack’s understanding was that Dr. John had been active as a root doctor in the mid 19th century, and was someone “larger than life, a medicine 62 man who claimed to have been a prince in Senegal” before he was captured and shipped to Cuba, where he gained freedom before settling in New Orleans.15

While the historical Dr. John was certainly an inspiration, this was neither the beginning nor the end of Rebennack’s relationship with Voodoo. When he was growing up, a practicing community was still very much alive in the city, but had been operating largely in secret for decades.16 In spite of this, the artist claims to have had childhood encounters with the religion. Though his grandfather was the first to sing him that

“hoodoo song,” it was his grandmother, “a woman who possessed unusual powers,” who passed on to him a “curiosity and inclination toward spiritualism and voodoo.” His encounters with what he called “the real thing” did not begin until later, when he became acquainted with the Spiritual Churches (1994: 4, 7, 163). While these Churches exist in localized forms throughout the country, a scholar who has studied their nationwide dispersal has called New Orleans the “Mecca of the Spiritual movement” (Baer 2001:

22). The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans are the subject of an extensive study by

Claude F. Jacobs and Andrew J. Kaslow.17 According to these scholars, the simplest way

15 Rebennack also claims to have read a piece by Lafcadio Hearn that detailed the historical Dr. John’s arrest alongside one Pauline Rebennack. In his mind, this story suggested a familial relation between him and the accomplice of this legendary Voodooist, and so he felt “more than an incidental sympathy for the man whose name I took” (1994: 140-1).

16 As we saw in Chapter 1, there were major restrictions on Black sociality during the antebellum period. When gatherings attended by enslaved people were raided by the police, the accompanying reports often commented on illicit spiritual activities. In one case, as many as a hundred people were thought to have been present when the police arrived. Of the eighteen people arrested, all were women—two enslaved Black people, fifteen free people of color, and two whites (Roberts 2015: 23).

17 The authors trace their history, delve into their belief system, and offer an ethnography based on fieldwork conducted in the 1980s. By then, the number of Spiritual Churches had dwindled significantly. This decline has continued into the present, but during their heyday, in the 1920s and 1930s, there were about 100 Spiritual Churches in the city, accounting for approximately 1/6 of the Black congregations in New Orleans at that time (JK 1991: 43). 63 of explaining this faith is to think of it as a variable mixture of Pentecostalism,

Spiritualism, Catholicism and Voodoo (1991: 52).18

Though the connections between Voodoo and the Spiritual Churches are complex,19 both religions practice rituals of possession. In the Spiritual Church, there are at least two forms. According to Jacobs and Kaslow, the first is comparable to what takes place in Pentecostal churches, in which the visiting presence is singular—it is the Holy

Spirit. Meanwhile, the second form of possession is compared what takes place in Haitian

Vodou, in which various loas “mount” the believer, or “horse.” In this second form, the variety of figures that are believed to assume control of practitioners is quite a mixed bag:

“Spirit guides,” deceased relatives, Native American war heroes, and Catholic saints

(1991: 131). These practices are widely recognized as African retentions that survived in the New World (Hurston 1981: 104; Alexander 2011: 52), and each is considered to have existed “on the shores of Louisiana” before either the Pentecostal or Spiritual Church movement began (Lawless 2008: 145).

18 Though practitioners use candles, venerate the saints, and incorporate Catholic imagery (altars and robes are core visual features), Jacobs and Kaslow found that followers often criticized Catholic churches for being “cold,” and not open to “feeling the Spirit” (1991: 52, 65). This preoccupation with the Spirit may very well be the defining attribute of the religion.

19 Jacobs and Kaslow were certain of this connection, but by the time these authors were conducting their fieldwork, many of their informants had come to reject this relationship (1991: 17). Rebennack thought of the two traditions as partly distinct from each other, but he was also assured of their common ground. In his mind, the two religions shared the same roots, as well as an emphasis on healing (1994: 161). This question has been taken up more recently by Roberts, who explains that when Church founder Leafy Anderson arrived in the city in the 1920s, she was confronted with a community of people already providing and relying on spiritual work that was rooted in Voodoo. In response to the criminalization of the religion, however, most of these people were practicing covertly. Roberts argues that Anderson’s creation of the Church provided a “model of religious practice [that] brought the appearance and legitimacy of ‘church’ to many spiritual practices in New Orleans previously regarded only as ‘voodoo’” (2015: 63). In other words, Anderson gave workers the option of adapting to her model, which would allow them to fold their spiritual work into the flexible umbrella of the Spiritual Church. 64

During the heyday of the movement (1920-1930), the most prominent Spiritual

Church leader was Mother Catherine Seals, who ran her Temple of Innocent Blood in the

Lower Ninth Ward.20 Within a religion famed for its healers, Seals was considered the

“supreme healer” (JK 1991: 38). When the Reverend Mother died in 1930, thousands of people came to pay their respects. Like Laveau and Dr. John before her, Seals was able to attract people on both sides of the color line. When the Louisiana Weekly covered her passing, they celebrated her promotion of racial harmony:

The seething mass of humanity that turned out at her funeral rites eloquently testified to her far-reaching influence… Now that she is gone, let us hope that her work will not vanish like an idle dream… Her life and her passing proved one thing, and that most convincingly, namely that racial barriers are purely artificial, for white and black folk mingled, in the most promiscuous manner, in paying their respects” ([1930] qtd in JK: 41).

Seals had counted among her many followers Ernie Cagnolatti, the jazz trumpet player, and Frank Lastie, Church drummer and head of the great New Orleans music family.

After the Reverend Mother died, Lastie founded a Spiritual Church of his own and remained devoted to Mother Catherine (Berry 2009: 43-53).

Rebennack’s acquaintance with the Churches began when he was a teenager, through a friendship with David Lastie, one of Frank and his wife Alice’s children.

According to Rebennack, he “copped a lot of understanding about the gris-gris and the spiritual church” just by hanging around the family:

20 Seals was visited by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, who was in awe of the Reverend Mother: “Catherine of Russia could not have been more impressive upon her throne than was this Black Catherine sitting upon an ordinary chair at the edge of her platform… She might have been the matriarchal ruler of some nomad tribe as she sat there with the blue band about her head like a coronet.” Hurston visited the Temple in the 1920s, but her fascinating piece on Mother Catherine did not appear in print for some six decades (1981: 24) 65

About the fourth or fifth time I met [Frank] Lastie, he laid a piece of red cloth on me and wrote one of those spiritual sayings on it, followed by the initials MCS. I asked him what the MCS stood for, and he enlightened me right away: Mother Catherine Seals, probably the greatest reverend mother in New Orleans during this century… From Mr. Lastie I learned that Mother Catherine Seals performed miracles…[She] healed people in her church through the laying on of hands, and by mystical extraction of objects from people’s bodies. (1994: 160-1).

Through his relationship with the Lasties and various Reverend Mothers, the young artist established contacts that would pave the way for his later initiation into Voodoo practice.

Of course, there are limits to what can be known about Rebennack’s spirituality—there is no way of measuring the depth of his faith, nor the extent of his immersion in this spiritual community.

Religion is an extremely important subject in his autobiography, however. Several years after he recorded Gris-Gris, a group of Voodoo practitioners approached him with a request: “they asked me to front a temple, which we ended up calling Dr. John’s Temple of Voodoo.”21 In Rebennack’s narrative, this opening of a Voodoo business in “his” name inaugurated his “spiritual education.” He claims that two of the Reverend Mothers associated with the Temple took him aside one day, insisting that he allow them to

“school [him] about gris-gris” (1994: 164-6). Though he admits that he was not always an obliging student, and that his drug problems often got in the way, this section of

Rebennack’s memoir is critical to his broader narrative of conversion; self-deprecation aside, the story is that he was being welcomed into the faith. At times, he delineates his transition from outsider to insider quite clearly:

21 This group was comprised of two unspecified Reverend Mothers, and three other people—Jack Richardson and a married couple, Boots and Oneida Toups. I have not been able to locate any significant information about these figures or the Temple. 66

One of these reverend mothers used to make me swear I would do right by them, repeating a series of oaths… When I took these oaths, I thought some of them was kind of funny; to me, they sounded more like welcome- to-the-family Mafia rituals than spiritual promises. But I don’t want to push my luck, so the parts I learned under oath I won’t reveal. (1994: 164-6).

Over time, he would meet all of the surviving Reverend Mothers, and various people associated with the Temple would teach him about the different herbs and roots used in spiritual healing. In this section of his autobiography, he mostly portrays himself as an imperfect student, taken under the wing of the real experts. He suddenly sounds more like a specialist, though, in describing a “typical hoodoo ceremony”:

A litany would start the ceremony. The four corners of the room, which represented the quatre parishes of the universe — earth, wind, fire, and water — would be cleansed by sprinkling water and burning incense. Sometime during the litany, someone would begin to chant and play sacred rhythms on broomsticks nailed with bottle tops, Coke bottles, pots and pans—anything available. A person or two might bring congas and start to build the rhythm. All of these voices, congas, bottles, and pans would work together until a mesmerizing chant was laid down to help the healing. The music was a way of getting into the spirit to heal the meat. (1994: 167).

By telling the story of his initiation into Voodoo practice, Rebennack is able to designate himself as a cultural insider, even as he refrains from stating plainly that he is a practicing

Voodooist and/or Spiritual Church member.

As I discuss in more depth below, bringing these aspects of New Orleanian

Voodoo history into dialogue with this section of Rebennack’s memoir alters our perception of his Voodoo themed music and Voodoo priest persona. For some listeners,

Gris-Gris might appear to be a rather insensitive appropriation of Black spirituality. If

Voodoo was and is indeed a multiracial and distinctly localized practice, however, and if 67

Rebennack was a genuine practitioner, then his first album as a bandleader can be read as an extension or an expression, rather than a mere extraction, of Voodoo practice. By portraying himself as a passing member of this community, Rebennack marks himself as an insider and, therefore, not an appropriator per se.

Dr. John’s Gris-Gris

After an unaccompanied saxophonist opens the curtain,22 the artist enters, introducing himself: “They call me Dr. John.” The song is called “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya

Ya,” and the listener soon learns that our narrator is selling something. Perhaps among other practitioners, he is “the last of the best.” Armed with a “satchel of gris-gris” in his hand, they also call him “a gris-gris man.” The Doctor assures his audience that, whether it is your love life or your neighbors giving you trouble, he has “just the thing for ya”—“Try my dragon’s blood, my drawin’ powder, and my sacred sand / Try a little

Black Cat oil, if your woman got another man.”23

The references to Voodoo on this first number are easy to unpack. Firstly, of course, Rebennack has assumed the identity of a real practitioner, the historical Dr. John.

Secondly, as we saw above, gri-gri are magical amulets first used in New Orleans by enslaved Africans who had been brought to the colonial city directly from the Bight of

Benin, and who may have been the first to practice Voodoo in the city. Thirdly, when the

22 Many listeners mistake this for an electric guitar. As I discuss below, the saxophone was played through a filter, altering its timbre.

23 This rendering of the song’s lyrics are the result of a synthesis of the lyrics that Rebennack printed in his autobiography (which, oddly enough, have a few errors and omissions) and my own transcription. Elsewhere, the lyrics that I have printed are based on careful guesswork. To my knowledge, most of the lyrics from Gris-Gris were never released in print. 68

Doctor refers to his “many clients” who come “from miles around,” he is clearly singing about the religion as a transactional practice (1968). Things take a dramatic turn away from clear-cut allusions, however, as the first song comes to a close. Though four of Gris-

Gris’ seven songs either follow familiar song structures and/or circle around a lyrical trope or story, the remaining three are seemingly meant to give the impression of a

Voodoo ceremony. Of the former four, which I discuss separately from the others, the first is the most referentially clear.

Among these, the next tune is something of an anomaly. Lyrically, “Mama Roux” is a tribute to the Mardi Gras Indians.24 Dr. John essentially drops the menacing tone that he adopts elsewhere (though he does boast that his listeners “know better than to mess with me”) and settles into an inviting, danceable groove. The song still fits neatly the aesthetic of the wider work, however, by maintaining the album’s trademark use of unusual textures: the bass line is played on the organ’s bass pedals, a mandolin riff opens and is heard throughout the song, and intricate rhythms are played on a miscellany of percussion instruments. Moreover, the bandleader frequently draws on Mardi Gras Indian and Louisiana Creole patois — “two way pocky way” — and refers to himself as a

“medicine man” (1968).

After over ten minutes of challenging, chant-heavy music, the singable melodies swing back for “Jump Sturdy,” which tells the story of a fictional Voodooist. According to Rebennack, Jump Sturdy was a home-brewed alcoholic drink that was once popular in

24 In addition to having a musical tradition of their own, the Indians have been honored by a number of New Orleans R&B and funk artists, including Danny Barker (1953) and Professor Longhair (1964). For more information on this, see Bryan Wagner’s recent book on the The Wild Tchoupitoulas (2019). 69 and around the city and, as I mentioned above, later became the subject of a minstrel tune that his grandfather liked to sing. Lifting the melody of that number, Rebennack reconfigures Sturdy as a “treacherous lady,” who “came out the swamps like a crazy fool.” The fictional Voodooist gets “tangled up” with a real figure, the Queen Julia

Jackson, and is killed when the latter drops a “Zozo Labrique” (1968). According to the artist, his telling of this made-up story would eventually land him in trouble with Jackson, who approached him after a show in anger (1994: 4-5, 169).

The central theme of the album returns in full force for the closing piece, “I Walk

On Guilded Splinters.” The song incorporates several chants, as in the more ceremonial sounding tunes, and includes two well-crafted verses. If the Doctor was searching for new clients on the first number, he saves his last words for an assertion of his prepotency.

In the second verse, he tells us that he will:

Roll out my coffin, drink poison in my chalice Pride begins to fade, and you’ll all feel my malice Put gris-gris on your doorstep, soon you’ll be in the gutter Melt your heart like butter, and-and-and I can make you stutter

In addition to his renewed mentioning of gri-gri amulets, in the first verse he refers to himself as “the Grand Zombi.” In an entry in his encyclopedia of Voodoo, Jeffrey E.

Anderson notes that although little is known about the actual figure, the Grand Zombi is sometimes erroneously thought to have been the name of a pet snake kept by Marie

Laveau (2015: 111).

The musicians on this record were never more successful in finding the “unusual, textured sound” that they were looking for (Rebennack 1994: 142). The simple, 70 pentatonic melody that is first introduced as an elemental bass line later becomes an eerie turn around played by the saxophonist, and is occasionally imitated by the melodic- minded percussionists. Two congueros play against each other throughout “Guilded

Splinters.” Over five minutes in, all of the instrumentalists drop out, leaving space for one of these to play unaccompanied for a stretch. When Dr. John reenters as lead vocalist and mystic, it is with one of his many cryptic phrases: “till I burn up.”25 He is quickly answered by a host of back up vocalists, who, as one reviewer put it, ratify their leader’s power “like mambo priestesses in unison” (Jurek n.d.). As the instruments begins to fade out, these singers repeat the tune’s most central chant in whispered tones: “Kon bouday- kiddy kon-kon / Walk on Guilded Splinters.” After a final statement of this phrase, they break into animal imitations. The saxophonist, sounding farther away than ever, repeats the melody a final time.

The music is as murky in these closing moments as it is in the remainder of the album. On “Croker Courtbouillon,” vocal choruses chant wordless vocals throughout the song, without any obvious contribution from their leader. The most prominent of these chants is “Grubba grubba goobie ya / Grubba grubba goobie ya.” Midway through the tune, the theme fizzles out and drifts away from the tonal center. Singers mimic the hissing of snakes, the cooing of owls, and other animal sounds, while a flutist meanders in the back before the theme returns. Meanwhile, “Danse Fambeaux” begins with a

25 Many listeners hear this as “till I murder,” or “Ti Alberta.” The latter interpretation is intriguing: according to Kodi Roberts, someone known as Titi Albert was thought by some to have been an associate of Marie Laveau. Meanwhile, a mystical text called the Tit Albert was frequently mentioned by early 20th century Voodoo practitioners (2015: 40). Slowing the song down and listening intently, however, I still hear “till I burn up.” 71 trilling mandolin. Then enter, in quick succession, a chugging electric guitar, bird- imitation whistling, and a tambourine. A chorus soon joins, chanting a line they are to repeat many times: “Snake a la gris-gris / Calimbo, calimbo.” If the geographic source of this unusual admixture seems ambiguous, New Orleans becomes a candidate as the additive 3-3-2 tresillo rhythm settles into place. When Dr. John makes his entrance, his bewildering lyrics are cast over the groove: “Jack be nimble, Jack be slick.” The song soon finds him singing about a limbo pole, a pot of red beans and rice, and so on (1968).

According to Rebennack, when Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records first heard the album, he exclaimed: “How can we market this boogaloo crap?” (1994: 142).

The Voodoo Minstrel

Boogaloo crap or a “classic collection of startlingly deep tunes” (Jurek n.d.), Gris-

Gris is a perplexing album. In terms of lyrical content, Voodoo is, of course, the driving theme behind Rebennack’s first work as Dr. John. On the other hand, the source materials of the music are diverse and elusive. In this section, I begin by addressing some of the album’s less controversial influences—namely, psychedelia and Black American music.

From there, I look at Gris-Gris as both an extension of Voodoo and, at the same time, of minstrelsy. In my mind, Rebennack created an album that was bound to be divisive, and I do not attempt to resolve the contradictions inherent in his incorporation of these disparate influences. Somehow, the artist manages to walk a thin line between authenticity and exoticism, spiritual expression and farce; and in that, Gris-Gris is very much in keeping with Voodoo. 72

Of course, Rebennack was not the first American musician to draw lyrical inspiration from the religion. References to Voodoo go way back in Black music, with

Louis Jordan’s recording of Wesley Wilson’s “Somebody Done Hoodooed The Hoodoo

Man,” and Muddy Waters’ recording of Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” being the most famous examples (1940; 1954). In the latter song, Waters sings about his mojo, his black cat bone, and his John the Conqueror Root. These themes would find arguably their greatest musical expression in the late 1960s when Jimi Hendrix penned “Voodoo

Chile” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” both of which appeared on his Electric

Ladyland (1968). Given how often Voodoo/Hoodoo themed blues songs make reference to Louisiana, it should come as no surprise that Dr. John was not the first New Orleans musician to take the religion as a source of lyrical inspiration. As with “Hoochie Coochie

Man,” Rebennack would have been familiar with Papa Celestin’s recording of “Marie La

Veau,” released on his final album (1955). In that song, which Rebennack covered later in life (1983), Celestin lays out a version of the Marie Laveau story in simple verses:

There lived a conjure lady, not long ago In New Orleans, Louisiana, named Marie La Veau Believe it or not, strange as it seems She made a fortune selling Voodoo and interpreting dreams She was known throughout the nation as the Voodoo Queen Folks come to her from from miles and miles around She’d show them how to put that Voodoo down.26

As Celestin makes his way through these lines, his backup singers linger behind him, singing “ah, ah / ah, ah.” Though the lyrics do not paint Laveau in a negative light (many of the ensuing verses find her helping those who come to her in need) the arrangement is

26 In the liner notes to the original LP, Robert L. Gurley is credited as the writer of this piece. I have not found any information on Gurley. 73 meant to impart an eerie feeling in the listener. All in all, Celestin’s “Marie La Veau” sounds like a Halloween song played in the style of a great New Orleans jazz musician.

Although any of these songs could have been an inspiration, Gris-Gris’ resemblance to them is only skin deep.

The same can be said for the album’s footing in psychedelia. Gris-Gris was recorded in L.A., where the psychedelic craze was ablaze in the late 1960s; it has a unifying concept; and there are plenty of effects, overdubs, and animal sounds. When it came time to unpack the details, however, neither Battiste nor Rebennack, who led the sessions in arranging, producing and songwriting, provided many clues about the recording process. Rebennack recalls that on some tracks, they used two basses (1994:

142). In the liner notes to an anthology of his work, he also recalled that for the title track, they had Plas Johnson play his saxophone through what the artist referred to as a

“condor box” — some kind of filter — resulting in a sound that to Rebennack’s ears fell somewhere between an electric guitar and an oboe. In these same notes, he reveals that he played the bass line for “Mama Roux” on the organ’s bass pedals (qtd in Hannusch

1993). But beside these studio effects, the album bears very little resemblance to the contemporaneous work of Jefferson Airplane or Jimi Hendrix. Moreover, while other psychedelic bands were flirting with the spiritual world views of exoticized “Others,”

Rebennack was paying tribute to a religion that he had actually grown up around.

In addition to the album’s recurrent lyrical allusions to this spiritual practice, the music itself seems to have been rooted in Voodoo. In his autobiography, Rebennack recalls that, shortly before recording the album, he ran into one Mother Shannon, and told 74 her he “wanted to cut some voodoo songs.” After this initial request was rejected, he adjusted his appeal, asking if he could simply use the tunes with altered words. According to his story, she accepted (1994: 163-4). Shortly after Gris-Gris and long before the publication of his autobiography, this topic came up in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Rebennack claimed that, in response to the album, he had been criticized “by some” for

“taking sacred music.” In his mind, this was a false accusation: “that was no sacred music, that’s music I wrote. I patterned it around voodoo church music, but it wasn’t exactly the music or the lyrics or nothin’” (qtd in Gambaccini 1973). In both of these instances, the artist stated that he was in some undefined way drawing on an existing body of New Orleanian Voodoo music.

Generally speaking, Gris-Gris pulls deeply at the roots of New Orleans music. In the intentionally esoteric liner notes that Rebennack penned for the original LP, the musician claimed that he had “dug up the old Danse Kalinda” in order to remind his audiences that “the old chants” had not been “chopped out.” And so begins the second tune, in which several chants do indeed propel the music forward. The most prominent of these gives the song its title, “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom” (1968). According to Freddi

Williams Evans, the Calinda is one of the first African-derived dances to have been documented in New Orleans, with several accounts dating back to the mid 18th century.

There is some speculation that there may have been a restriction imposed on the dance during the 1840s, possibly because of an association between the Calinda and Voodoo.

Though these links have not been confirmed, Evans sheds light on the origins of one of

Rebennack’s old chants: 75

The influence of the Calinda dance surfaced during interviews that W.P.A. staff conducted in New Orleans. They found that African descendants called any dance with the movement of jumping up and down the Calinda. “Bou-doum bou-doum,” found in the refrain of songs that accompany the [dance], was reportedly a sound word that meant to fall down. Thus, the catchphrase “Dansé Calinda, Boudoum Boudoum, Dansé Calinda Boudoum Boudoum!” served as an enticement to get children to leave their playthings and take a bath… Some interviewees explained that [these same] sounds words… mocked the cannon fire in Congo Square that announced the city’s curfew for the enslaved. (2011: 98-101).

Evans reprints the lyrics to an old New Orleans song, originally sung in Creole, that has the same chant sung in Dr. John’s “Danse Kalinda” functioning as a refrain (2011: 101).

In the absence of any recordings of this song or the “voodoo church music,” it is difficult to compare Gris-Gris to its forebears in New Orleans roots music. That being said, Rebennack was also drawing on his time spent in the local R&B scene. While Gris-

Gris does not sound anything like the hit records coming out of the city from the late

1940s to the mid 60s, it does bear some resemblance to a little known recording by Prince

La La.27 This musician had a minor hit with “She Put the Hurt On Me” (1962), which he recorded with several musicians who worked on Dr. John’s first album—Harold Battiste,

Jessie Hill, and John Boudreaux. Around that time, La La also cut “Need You,” which was shelved for decades before it appeared on a compilation of rare grooves from New

Orleans, More Gumbo Stew (1993). In the liner notes to the aforementioned anthology of

Rebennack’s work, Battiste cited “Need You” as the precursor to the Gris-Gris sound:

“The arrangement was that African, New Orleans, Congo Square kind of spiritual thing

27 Unfortunately, the available information on this musician is quite scarce. His real name was Lawrence Nelson, and he was the younger brother of Rebennack’s former guitar teacher, Papoose. He died at the age of 27, and left only a handful of recordings behind him. 76 you can only find here… It was something New Orleans musicians all could feel, but it was Mac who eventually made the sound commercial” (qtd in Hannusch 1993).

Years later, in his autobiography, Battiste would make a similar statement about

New Orleans musicians in recalling the days he spent working with Rebennack. In the making of Gris-Gris, he emphasized that New Orleans musicians were critical to getting the sound they were looking for. In his mind, these musicians would understand “the spirit” of the whole thing (2010: 97-99). In addition to Rebennack and Battiste, New

Orleans musicians who played on the album included the guitarist Ernest McLean (who doubled on mandolin), drummer John Boudreaux, percussionist Richard “Didimus”

Washington, and singers Jessie Hill, Shirley Goodman, Tami Lynn, Ronnie Barron, and

Dave Dixon (1968). Several of these artists are credited with having contributed to Gris-

Gris’ percussive foundation. According to Rebennack, his longtime collaborator, Richard

“Didimus” Washington, was the vital organ of this percussive body. As with Prince La

La, there is very little information available on this musician. Rebennack recalls that

Didimus was born in Ethiopia to a family of Coptic Christians, and had then moved to

Cuba, where he studied with Chano Pozo, the great conguero. In Rebennack’s mind,

Didimus’s style was of his own making. He played a special “battery of nine percussion instruments,” and had mastered many styles of drumming, from Cuban jazz to Haitian finger-style. Though it is difficult to determine precisely what each musician contributed to the album, it possible that Didimus contributed the guiding seven stroke bell pattern 77 that drives “Croker Courtbouillon” forward.28 All in all, Rebennack remembered him as the “heart and soul” of the Gris-Gris band (1994: 105, 175).

Battiste recalls that when Rebennack first pitched the Dr. John idea to him, he had envisioned the concept as a “tongue-in-cheek thing.” But as he tells the story of putting it together, there is no mistaking that he began to take the project more seriously. He remembers feeling “spiritually” connected to the music and the group of people making it; and, when it came to photograph a costumed Rebennack for the album cover, he recalled that, as with the recording sessions, they created “an atmosphere that welcomed the Spirit” (2010: 97-99). Between his and Rebennack’s statements of spiritual sincerity, the album’s many lyrical references to Voodoo, and their apparent incorporation of

“voodoo church music,” Gris-Gris can be interpreted in one sense as a heartfelt tribute.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to overstate the sincerity of the album.

The truth is that the bandleader and his group were, at least at times, only mock serious in their sonic representation of Voodoo. In this sense, the album further reflects Rebennack’s footing in minstrelsy. While there is no reason to think that other songs from the album were based on minstrel melodies (as in “Jump Sturdy”), there is an understudied trope in the history of blackface theater wherein the religious practices of Black people are represented as primitive and exotic. Rebennack was well aware of this, and made a point of specifying that his maternal grandfather “ran the hoodoo song and other numbers” with the Al G. Field’s minstrel troupe (1994: 3-4). A songbook of theirs includes a

28 According to Ingrid Monson, Max Roach used this same bell pattern for “All Africa,” as part of his Freedom Now Suite, as a way of enacting an African diasporic sensibility. The pattern is found not only in West Africa but in the “sacred musics of the Caribbean and Brazil” (2001). 78 composition titled “Hoodoo Moon.” Rather than lampoon Black spirituality, the song paints an exoticized portrait of the Deep South—“Bull frogs croakin’ in de old bayou,” and so forth (n.d.). While it bears no resemblance to the “hoodoo song” that Rebennack later adapted, nor to any of the music from Gris-Gris, it is certainly possible that the artist was familiar with it; Under a Hoodoo Moon is, after all, the title of his autobiography.

Though it is unlikely that a song like “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” was based on some long forgotten minstrel tune, the whole album can be interpreted partly as a work of exotica, perhaps even of neo-minstrelsy.

For a period of time after the album was released, it was not yet clear how the music would be transferred to the stage. Eventually, Rebennack would find the influence he was looking for in the stage antics of the minstrels:

I knew enough about the old minstrel shows that when I put together the original Dr. John act, I used a lot of the shtick they did. My entrance onstage with a puff of smoke was inspired by the minstrel magicians; I lifted their snake-handling routine by having one of the dancers, Kalinda, come out dancing with a snake wrapped around her body… I came up with the snake idea from what I had heard from my grandfather and all the other old-timers… What I wanted was entertainment for the eyes as well as the ears, and I knew the minstrels were the best there was at laying down a show. (1994: 145-6).

More so than his borrowing of minstrel melodies and stage devices, Rebennack’s appropriation of the Dr. John character signals his most glaring incorporation of blackface tradition. Though plenty of white American musicians have appropriated Black music and style, from subtle influences to outright racial mimicry, Rebennack went the extra mile by introducing himself to the world as Dr. John, back from the ashes. While this assumption of an alter ego may have initially been intended as a temporary 79 undertaking, the musician continued to present himself to the world as Dr. John long after

Gris-Gris — even fronting a Voodoo business under this name — thereby settling into and finding a home inside the persona. In many cases, the assumption of a new social identity can stem from a sense of disillusionment with the one assigned at birth. It can be empowering. In this case, however, we have a white musician lifting his dramatis personae from a Black man. This extraction is akin to masking; it is a close approximation of blackface.

Conclusion

Earlier in this thesis, I looked at the first half of Rebennack’s autobiography. I examined how the artist appears in the text as an overpowered subject, unable to resist the allure of Black music. In sum, I conceptualized these early chapters as a discourse of possession. Along with his appropriation of Black music in New Orleans, his desire to present his life-story to a reading public, and his toying with a Black persona, this discourse of possession is something that Rebennack shares with E.P. Christy, the subject of my first chapter. For everything that they have in common, however, there is as much that distinguishes them.

Their differences are on display in the very presentation of their discourses. I

Chapter 1, Christy was shown to have conceded to the power that Black music had over him. But this was no respectful genuflection. Christy’s discourse of possession is an admission of a momentary slip in his sense of self-control. After being “haunted” by it,

Christy affirmed his possession of and control over Black music like a miner over his 80 mine. Whereas Christy disavowed Black people, and looked to their expressive culture as a raw material resource in need of refinement, Rebennack’s autobiography finds him going in the opposite direction.

First of all, he tends to defer the credit for his greatest works to his collaborators and influences. When it comes time to tell the story of the second biggest single of his career, for example, the same number he would later perform on The Last Waltz,

Rebennack explained:

“Such a Night,” which I wrote, is a ballad, a sweet, easy groove that Allen developed into something that sounds almost like an old music-hall soft- shoe tune. Allen has always been one of the keys to great New Orleans R&B as a writer, player, producer, and singer. I had written the song eight years before, but Allen convinced me that we needed it for the album and I’m glad he did; it became a hit, with that fonky [sic] Allen Toussaint touch to the production” (1994: 192).

Secondly, Rebennack goes to great lengths in praising dozens of lesser known Black musicians, many of whom have yet to emerge from the fine print of popular music history. In addition to his ruminations on the artistry of James Booker, Professor

Longhair, and Richard “Didimus” Washington, he is exacting in his descriptions of the talents of all kinds of players, from New Orleans jazz and Spiritual Church drummers, to the little known horn players who played on countless hit records. Thirdly, he repeatedly denounces the racial capitalism of the music business, and seems to have applied these convictions to direct action—the shining example being his key role in the revitalization of Longhair’s career. Finally, Rebennack hired and was hired by Black musicians continuously throughout his life. A close look at his output reveals an uncommon amount of interracial collaboration. 81

Though all of these characteristics distinguish him from Christy, and could be said to have played a role in the acquisition of his “pass” as an appropriative artist, they do not necessarily distinguish Rebennack from every other white, 20th century artist whose entire act depended on the innovations of Black musicians. What really sets Rebennack apart from the pack, in my reading, is the manner in which he portrayed himself as a passing member of the spiritual communities that his music and persona were rooted in.

Though the discourse of possession that he presents in the first half of his autobiography could also be read as an attempt to rid himself of responsibility, it is his alleged conversion to (predominantly) Black spiritual culture that represents his most brazen challenge to any (real or imagined) criticism surrounding his appropriations. It may be true that when Rebennack first assumed the Dr. John persona, it was intended to be a mere and fleeting act. At some point, however, Rebennack began to inhabit the mask, initiating a process of “becoming.” By the time he set out to write his autobiography, he was ready to portray himself as an initiate.

I must admit that I struggle for words in bringing Rebennack’s narrative of conversion into dialogue with his penchant for minstrelsy. Though it could be argued that every white musician who partakes in the mimicry of Black people has some footing in the blackface theater, Rebennack’s is remarkably deep—in addition to mining Black music and emulating Black dialect and singing styles, he recycled minstrel melodies, borrowed minstrel stage antics, and assumed a persona that he had lifted from a Black

Voodooist. Though the entire Dr. John concept can be conceived as an extension of minstrelsy, there was also more than a measure of sincerity in the work, created as it was 82 by a person who was acquainted with and eventually initiated into Voodoo practice. It is also important to acknowledge that Gris-Gris and the Dr. John albums that followed it were the product of interracial collaboration. Insofar as this homage dabbled in the minstrel tradition, perhaps it is appropriate to borrow from Mother Catherine’s eulogist in saying that, in the Gris-Gris sessions, “white and black folk mingled, in the most promiscuous manner, in paying their respects.” 83

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BIOGRAPHY

David Cheney was born and raised in New Brunswick, Canada. He received his

BA in Music and Literature from St. Francis Xavier University, but he has never owned or worn the infamous “X-ring.” Upon submission of this thesis, he will have completed his Master of Arts in Musicology with a specialization in New Orleans music at Tulane

University. He is the recipient of a Cambon fellowship.