louisiana

Anyone who has had the good fortune to be in Cajun country in Louisiana knows that the food is often spectacularly good. I've only spent too short a time there -- I have a chapter in Postcards From Elsewhere about the small town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana -- but I did ask around for recipes. On a napkin I had scribbled notes for a gumbo...
> recipes/1641/seafood-gumbo-cajun-style/

Many years ago Rhino Records -- a reissue label out of LA -- put out a booklet-cum-CD package of old soul and funk with an eating theme, specifically food for barbecues. Tracks on the CDs included Hot Barbecue by Brother Jack McDuff, Grits (James Brown), Chicken Strut (the Meters), Jambalaya on the Bayou (Fats Domino) and so on. You get the...
> recipes/1652/wicked-chicken-soul-funk-for-the-barbecue/

This seventysomething year old has earned to right to sing the blues: his father was lynched by the Klan back home in Alabama when he was boy; he was moved around staying with various relatives; played with John Lee Hooker for a while; has recorded for about as many blues labels as there are; lived in Europe for a while . . . He's...
> music/2543/louisiana-red-back-to-the-black-bayou-ruf-yellow-eye/

In 2005 smalltown Cameron in southwest Louisiana was washed away by Hurricane Rita and I suppose battered to hell again by Hurricane Katrina. It seemed tragic and . . . Well, let me tell you my memory of Cameron, a place we stayed in for one very long night while driving the Gulf Coast before heading up to Breaux Bridge then on to New Orleans....
> travelstories/275/cameron-louisiana-the-stink-of-shrimp-and-petroleum/

C.C. Adcock has done a lot of living in his 34 years, from playing in bands around his hometown of Lafayette in southern Louisiana when barely into his teens to making a glam-metal noise in LA, then backing the late Bo Diddley and Zydeco legend Clifton Chenier to hanging out with the undead . . . Yes, these days Adcock's music is used...
> absoluteelsewhere/3471/lil-band-of-gold-2010-the-journey-of-swamp-pop-from-past-to-present/

If he'd done nothing else other than his tough-edged swamp-rockabilly hit Suzy-Q, Dale Hawkins out of Louisiana would still have made the rock'n'roll history books: Suzy-Q was co-written with guitarist James Burton who plays the stinging and memorable solo, and it took Hawkins to the Apollo in Harlem where he was the first white...
> music/3813/dale-hawkins-oh-suzy-q-the-definitive-and-remastered-edition-hoodoo/

The bullet holes from the shoot-out are still there. It's a narrow corridor so you can imagine what the gunplay must have been like: shots echoing around, one man falling from his wounds and the other shot dead, the shouting and clack of heels resonating off the marble floor . . . Today of course all is quiet, just a few people getting in...
> travelstories/baton-rouge/