Blues for New Orleans

Roger D. Abrahams is Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of many books, including After Africa (with John F. Szwed), African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World, and Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practice, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Nick Spitzer is Professor of Folklore and Cultural Conservation at the University of New Orleans and host of NPR's American Routes. John F. Szwed is John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. Among his numerous books are So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, and Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Robert Farris Thompson is Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author of Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy and Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas.

"As a battle cry for summoning up our collective will to save our Creole city, Blues for New Orleans is clear and strong." (The Times-Picayune) "Blues for New Orleans is a generous study of Mardi Gras, but it is also a creative intervention, a passionate explanation (and defense) of creolization, a cultural rescue operation. It is a furious, blues-tinged, erudite hymn to our greatest vernacular city. Read it and weep; read it and rejoice!" (Edward Hirsch, President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation) "Will New Orleans become a memory and a myth? Will the bon temps ever roulette again? I took for granted many of the things in this book as I experienced them every day. As residents, we never imagined a day when we would be called on to plead for recognition of our worth to our city. But, like the old folks said: 'It goes to show, you never can tell.' Without an awareness of the many contributions to the city's culture inherent in the make up of the neighborhoods, the planners can't begin to plan realistically. The information in this historic work is much needed by those who are rebuilding New Orleans. I thank the authors for their deep and clear insight on New Orleans culture and what goes into making an artistic American city." (Charles Neville) "If there was ever any question about the resilience of this endlessly fascinating city, this imaginative book should lay it to rest. In the land of dreamy dreams, where order is a doubloon's throw from disorder, and paradox reigns with pleasure, the carnival spirit has always held New Orleans together even when its civic culture seemed broken beyond repair. Blues for New Orleans is more than a study of Mardi Gras' origins in the polyglot order of Atlantic World Creoles; it is a wonderful meditation on what it would mean to lose New Orleans." (Lawrence N. Powell, author of Troubled Memory and other works on Louisiana)