Singer and songwriter Dana Abbott is recalling the day that Lake Pontchartrain devoured the 17th street canal in New Orleans. Even though Hurricane Katrina had moved well north of the City, the waters kept rising and Pontchartrain became a malignant entity as she swept through a two-block breach in the main levee, taking lives, homes and hopes along with her. Abbott wonders if there is too much “Katrina fatigue” and hesitates on elaborating any more about how the rising waters forever changed her own life. But her husband, John Beyer, encourages her to keep speaking. It is a story that needs to be told. America had a collective wake for New Orleans in the immediate aftermath, but still, two years later, recovery is slow, and no one is phoning the city and its residents to see how they’re doing.
We are sitting at a table in the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen—a stone’s throw from the French Market and a few blocks from the heartbeat of New Orleans—The French Quarter. The doors and windows are open to the street on a mid-November balmy afternoon. It’s Saturday, so there are more tourists than regulars. The hum of paddle fans is drowned out by the annoying voice of an overweight middle-aged woman decked out in Bermuda shorts, cell phone earpiece, sun visor and sunglasses. She’s talking to the kids back home about what a terrific time she is having. Score one for New Orleans. Subtract one from ambience.
Katrina was the great leveler for the music business in New Orleans. Famous and not-so-famous and completely unknown musicians, singers and songwriters were wiped out. Completely wiped out by the flood. Musicians not only lost the physical structures of the home that sheltered them, they lost their instruments, songbooks, notes, CD collections, studio tapes and masters—you name it. Cyril Neville told us that he lost 25 years of reel-to-reel tapes that represented a lifetime of recording. The sludge of chemical soup, salt-water and sewage made restoration impossible. He is keeping them anyway.
Abbott was living on Bellaire Drive, about ten blocks from the 17th Street Canal when all hell broke loose. The water eventually reached the ceiling of the apartment below, but not before Abbott and Beyer were able to evacuate. Ironically, they left 1500 music CD’s behind and the collection survived, unscathed by looters and water. “Yeah, we were looted,” Abbott says.
‘They took all of our movie DVDs, except for the BBC collection,” she laughs. “I don’t know how they managed not to track in any mud.”
Precious instruments, the tools of her trade, did not fare as well. A guitar was filled with dead bugs and warped by the humidity by the time they were able to get back into the apartment—a month after the flood.
Memories of Katrina are stored in the vault of memory and memory is an individual thing. What is etched in personal perceptions is a manifestation of time and life interrupted—snapshots of what life was like before fate, government malfeasance and the perfect synchronicity of a major hurricane intervened.
It is now two years later, and Abbott recalls playing at Southport Hall the night before she and her husband evacuated to his mother’s place in Georgia. She was the opening act and was sitting at Parlay’s Bar after the show was over in time to catch a 2 AM weather report that seemed ominous. By 8 AM it was clear they should evacuate and so they were long gone before the Sunday night mandatory evacuation was issued for New Orleans.
A formaldehyde spewing FEMA trailer was home for the next six months and soul-searching replaced song-writing as the difficult decision about whether to stick it out in New Orleans against all odds consumed conversation, dreams, and just about every waking moment. Abbott worked a stint at Catholic Charities to help keep body and soul together while slowly coming to the realization that New Orleans was home now, and there was no way she could or would want to leave.
“The city has always been and is still a musician’s boot camp,” Abbott smiled.
How does she describe her unique voice and songs?
“A combination of blues, folk, rock and blue-eyed soul,” she says with zero hesitation.
No minor statements from a 25 year-old who left Vermont after high school to pursue a dream and has not regretted that decision or anything else that life has pitched at her. The Road Home took her through Chicago and finally to New Orleans, where the roots took and the future looks bright for a talented newcomer.
Halfway Home is the title of Abbott’s EP, which was produced by Malcolm Burn, who has also produced Emmylou Harris’s acclaimed Red Dirt Girl.
Georgianne Nienaber is a writer, author, and investigative journalist. She lives in the world. Her articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, SCOOP New Zealand, Glide Magazine, Rwanda's New Times, India's TerraGreen, COA News, ZNET, OpEdNews, The Journal of the International Primate Protection League, Friends of the Congo, Africa Front, The United Nations Publication, A Civil Society Observer, and Zimbabwe's The Daily Mirror. Her fiction exposé of insurance fraud in the horse industry, Horse Sense, was re-released in early 2006. Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey was also released in 2006. Nienaber spent much of 2007 doing research in South Africa, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was in DRC as a MONUC-accredited journalist, and recently spent six weeks in Southern Louisiana investigating hurricane reconstruction. She is currently developing a documentary on the Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE.
Thank you for your continuing articles on the plight of the people of New Orleans, this one especially.
I was fortunate that my home received minor damage and unlike many of my friends upon returning I had running water, electricity, and cable. I did lose one thing, my lady-friend, not that she was lost in the storm, but Katrina blow away what was left of our relationship, which left me with an empty home. Which allowed me to house friends until they could get back into their homes or those formaldehyde coffins FEMA has the nerve to call trailers.
Being a one time musician (my claim to fame being the last percussionist for James Booker before his untimely demise) and in my earlier years also was part owner of the original Tipatina's and managed the defunct Dream Palace, now the Blue Nile on Frenchman Street, still the hippest street in the country. With side-by-side music clubs for three-blocks running, often called the "Bourbon Street for New Orleans locals", my love for the city and especially the music scene is why long ago I made this my home.
Once I exhausted the list of friends I approached the Tipatina Foundation and since have been housing a family of musicians, the David Leonard & Roselyn Lionhart, and from time to time their jazz-singing daughter Arlee, and Stormy, their gentle giant of a son. David & Roselyn are a unique, as are all, story themselves having played mostly on the streets of New Orleans for 34 years and raising and putting their three children through college in doing so. Before they became my house-mates over the years one of the best things I'd love to do is take a stroll down Royal Street on a sunning Spring day and catch their act. When the TF told me it was David & Roselyn I would be housing I felt that I was simply helping someone that were already old friends.
Soon their house will be ready and they'll be more to help. There are just too many musicians that are still driving a hundred miles each way to do a one night gig.
I have to mention that none of this would have been possible if not for the largess of my landlord. With all the horror stories of people losing their homes, if not due to Katrina, but price-gouging landlords, mine was a prince. Joe not only refunded my 3 months in advance rent, but didn't charge me rent for another year and now is only charging me what it costs in expenses.
But if this city is to come back, it's food may be the backbone, but it's soul is most certainly it's music. The food is back. As a matter of fact there are more restaurants now then before Katrina, but that can't be said for the musicians. Their plight is indeed a story of hardship piled upon hardship in a city that although is accommodating to musicians is a hard place for them to survive even in the best of times. Your reference to New Orleans as being a "boot camp" for musicians is spot-on. Many make their bones here but have to move-on to make a living. So, your focusing on the musicians is, as I've mentioned, touches me more than I can express in this note.
There are times when it seems that it is the most venerable and beautiful that fall prey to the worst elements on Nature and mankind. It's few cities that can be called beautiful, most are truly ugly, visually and spiritually, but New Orleans is unique in that it has both physical beauty and it's a fountain of spiritual wealth, and it is it's musicians more than anything else emulate that spirit.
Thanks again for the good work in reminding the rest of the world that we still need their help.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1436 comments)
on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 11:04:04 AM
Having lived in New Orleans as a teenager I fell in love forever with her. There are a lot of us out here who feel the same way and WE WILL NEVER GET KATRINA FATIGUE. NOLA LIVES!!!!!!
by
memary (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 70 comments)
on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 3:07:19 PM
Through your reporting, perhaps the tragedy of New Orleans won't fade from our short-term memories. Thank you for reminding us of not only the resiliency of the people of Nola, but also that the suffering continues and must be addressed.
by
Jan Baumgartner (52 articles, 136 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 249 comments)
on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 4:03:08 PM
No "Katrina Fatigue" among those who really understand
I too have loved N'Awlins for many years, and have been outspoken about what happened in 2005 and how it continues to add insult to genocide. You may not see it, but there ARE people around the world who are grieving and seething still, along with those who suffered unbearable losses. And I have found out that those who are removed from the issue -- ie not poor, not musicians, not Southern, not Black -- are only tired of hearing about it because they don't UNDERSTAND what actually happened AND they haven't HEARD most of what really happened.
I perform a piece about the Houston school bus drivers who drove to N.O. the first Saturday after the storm to rescue people yet were taken over by the military to drive troops and supplies around, and eventually sent home with no one on their buses. While people were still trying to find someplace safe to go. People always ask about the story afterwards, and are often shocked to hear it is true.
Here in Chicago, the jazz community mourned and mourned as fellow musicians shared stories of what they lost "at home" and as we made new friends in the many artists relocating here. The local jam sessions have many Katrina survivors, and our friends' homes now include Katrina dogs and cats.
New Orleans was, and is, all of us that have felt the boot of America on our neck. It is all of us who have the sinking feeling in our hearts that we too would have been among the abandoned. Those who are tired of hearing of it are either the very, very priviledged or those fooling themselves by pretending this could only happen to someone else. In 2007, that is as foolish as it ever was. For anyone.
by
Mars Caulton (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 82 comments)
on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 9:43:51 PM
5 comments
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