(Feb. 28 online, March 2 print edition, by Quin) So, you see, there’s this wonderful story involving the late New Orleans musical impresario Allen Toussaint. A Wall Street Journal review mentioned it on Feb. 19, but not the way I heard it more than 30 years ago.
In the Journal, reviewer Larry Blumenfeld masterfully described and lauded a new album called “Southern Nights” by New Orleans native pianist Sullivan Fortner, whose first offering on the album is a reprise of the classic song of that name written by Toussaint. Yet Blumenfeld writes, not entirely accurately, that “for Toussaint… it was a mystical mediation on gazing up at the night sky over the Louisiana countryside during drives from his native New Orleans.”
Well, only sort of. So, gather around an old kerosene lantern and listen up.
Blumenfeld’s sentence sent my mind back to a Toussaint event in 1990 or 1991 which I’ve often recounted, but never before in print. It was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard. Toussaint was performing and taking questions in an installment of the weekly Trinity Artist Series that ran on Sunday evenings for nearly three decades at the Episcopal church of that name on Jackson Avenue.
At one point well into the performance, Toussaint began playing his famous song that, in a different arrangement, had become a chart-topping hit for Glen Campbell in 1977. Yet it wasn’t about the drive from New Orleans, but what happened after he reached his destination.
Toussaint began playing and singing softly, liltingly. “Southern nights: Have you ever felt a Southern night?”
But he stopped singing and, while continuing the soft, basic chord arrangement on the piano, Toussaint began talking.
He was recalling, he said, days from when he was a little boy. His family would have driven from New Orleans to a ramshackle, wide-porched house in the country, to visit relatives who spoke in a Creole-Cajun accent so strong that it seemed like a semi-foreign language. As darkness began to fall after the meal —Toussaint lovingly described the meal, piano still trilling in the background — an occasional wind would blow through the canopy.
“Free as a breeze,” Toussaint began to sing, “not to mention the trees, whistlin’ tunes that you know and love so.”
Then, speaking again instead of singing, but all the while tickling the keyboard, Toussaint said all the children would be sent down the hallway to bed while the grown-ups on the porch, lit only by the moon and a lantern, gathered to tell stories. Gossip turned to tall tales, and tall tales to ghost stories the relatives claimed were entirely true….. [The full column is here.]
