Louisiana
Jazz à la Creole
During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, ...
Creole Soul
Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of ...
Going Up the Country
At the height of the blues revival, Marina Bokelman and David Evans, young graduate students from California, made two trips to Louisiana and Mississippi and short trips in their home state to do fieldwork ...
Political Animal
During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco. Their relationship was an improbable love story that ...
Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers
In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving ...
Making Tracks
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, a golden era for southern roots music, producer and three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington recorded many of the period’s most iconic artists. Working primarily ...
Asian-Cajun Fusion
Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou ...
Mississippi Barking
On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around ...
Whiskey, Women, and War
Entering World War I in 1917, a burst of patriotism in New Orleans collided with civil liberties. The city, due to its French heritage, shared a strong cultural tie to the Allies, and French speakers ...
Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana
Parisian Pauline Guyot (1805–1886), who wrote under the nom de plume Camille Lebrun, published many novels, translations, collections of tales, and articles in French magazines of her day. Yet she has ...