In this installment of Hallowed Sound, USA TODAY journalists read about the state of race in country music, the South in search of new stories, and became unconcerned with an eclectic new generation of black artists.
NEW ORLEANS – Curtis Doucette Jr. has opened the front door to a long-vacant building in new Orleans’ Central City community, covered with plywood and cruxed brick veneer, resembled many other constructions in this community away from the French Quarter and the prominent St. Only a faded panel on the outside will know it was once the Dew Drop Inn.
Inside, Doucette walked past a reception table and into hotel rooms that gave the impression of not having been hit since Hurricane Katrina filled them with a meter of water in 2005. a segregated America. . . Doucette plans to convert those rooms into a boutique hotel that will open in the summer of 2022.
“I’ve been making genuine progress for a long time,” said Doucette, who has built her career creating affordable housing in New Orleans. “And I fall in love with this construction like I’ve never done before. “
Doucette bent the corner and ran his arm through an open space. Near the entrance, he said, will be the bar. And here, in the back corner, will be the stage. After decades of silence, music will once again be one. of the maximum stops at the Chitlin’ Circuit, the network of clubs and theatres that hosted black musicians from the 1930s to the 1960s.
New Orleans City Councilman Jay Banks, who represents the Dew Drop Inn neighborhood, is too young to have visited Dew Drop in its heyday, but he stopped by once a week to go to the street church. .
“Everybody in the global Apollo,” he said. But the dewdrop was, in essence, the Apollo of New Orleans. “
The Dew Drop Inn has booked Bobby “Blue” Bland, Big Joe Turner, Solomon Burke, Earl King, Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke and James Brown.
The Dew Drop where New Orleans pianist and manufacturer Allen Toussaint received his first main concert in 1956 playing with the space band. Toussaint wrote “Fortune Teller”, “Lipstick Traces”, “Mother-in-Law”, “Working in a Coal”. Mine” and “Southern Nights” and worked with The Meters, Dr. John, Paul McCartney and The Bande.
The Dew Drop Inn was the place where Ray Charles lived for months in 1947 and 1948, soaking up the New Orleans rhythm that would be a permanent component of his sound.
The Dew Drop Inn where Roy Brown sang his songwriting “Good Rocking Tonight”, which some call the first rock ‘n’ roll record, on a phone and got a contract with DeLuxe Records.
After a boring morning in the recording studio, this is where Little Richard went to take a break. He saw the piano and the audience, jumped to the level and sang a cheerful ode to the sexual encounter called “Tutti Frutti”. Richard’s producer, Robert ” Bumps ” Blackwell, knew that with blank lyrics, the song could be a hit.
“You can simply say that the dewdrop is where the birth of rock ‘n’ roll took place,” said Preston Lauterbach, writer of “The Chitlin Circuit’ and the Road to Rock’ n’ Roll” (WWNorton). The culture of New Orleans combined with the traveling artists that were arriving, that is what made it a special place.
Before it had rocking chairs and rhythms, the Dew Drop Inn had barber chairs. Frank Painia, born in the small town of Plaquemine, moved to New Orleans around 1935 and began cutting his hair on LaSalle Street. Magnolia Street Housing Project, a federally funded appropriation for African Americans, moved across the street and eventually purchased a construction site for its hair salon.
Little by little, their businesses have grown. Her brother Paul opened a place to eat 24 hours a day, Painia added a hotel that broke out in World War II, began cheering up teams in the hotel lobby and at the end of the war expanded next door and added the Groove Room, which would soon be known as “the most chic nightclub in New Orleans. “
“That was the fundamental concept of what it meant to be a black entrepreneur at the time. If you had a smart business sense, you might just run a lot of businesses,” said Candacy Taylor of “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America” (Abrams).
Other Chitlin’ circuits have music reserved. The Dew Drop Inn did the show.
An evening began with “trembling dancers”, women who leveled up not wearing much. Then he would be a ventriloquist or snake charmer. Iron Jaw can simply faint and lift someone in a chair with their teeth. Then the music began, presented through Patsy Vidalia, a drag queen from Painia discovered at the Desire Club in the Lower 9th Ward. she sang, joked and modeled fashion worthy of a fashion show. Vidalia’s gay Halloween dance at Dew Drop was legendary.
At the end of the official show, the musicians piled up on the level of jams that lasted until dawn.
“It was the position to be in terms of entertainment. This was the position to approve if you enjoyed the nightlife,” said New Orleans soul singer Irma Thomas, who directed at the Dew Drop Inn.
The white musicians, after betting in the French Quarter, joined those jams and Painia has welcomed the white customers.
“It was normal,” Thomas said. Of course, we knew it was by law (in Jim Crow South). We didn’t see anything with it. “
Painia has been arrested for the crime of allowing blacks and whites to drink in combination when Jim Crow legislation explicitly prohibits it.
Finally tired, he sued the city in 1964 on behalf of “all black bar owners. “His lawyers were civil rights leader APTureaud and Dutch Morial, who in 1978 became the city’s first black mayor. The Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.
The end of segregation also helped Dew Drop Inn become a concert hall. Black consumers can simply move on to restaurants and movie theaters that were once banned. in racism, to reject them.
“It’s not an unusual saying after integration that ‘white man’s ice cream is colder,'” Doucette said.
Painia’s physical condition also decreased in the last 60 years; he died in 1972 and the exhibitions stopped.
Not even a decade after the Dew Drop Inn went silent, New Orleans was already nostalgic for the club. In 1978, the Center for Contemporary Art organized “Dew Drop Inn II,” a series of impromptu sessions from 6 a. m. “Displays of revival would follow. In 1980, Neville brothers saxophonist Charles Neville teamed up with New Orleans playwright Dalt Wonk to write “Shangri-la,” a musical that was loosely founded at the Dew Drop Inn.
Painia’s family, initially in a position to get rid of the hotel and club, in 1976 indexed it in the classified segment of the Times-Picayune newspaper:
FAMOUS “POSADA DE LA GOTA DE ROCÍO”
By the end of the year, classified ads were more direct: “You have to sell to liquidate the property. “
The family, however, stayed with the Dew Drop Inn; they continued to rent rooms at the hotel and intermittently hire the bar, until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
More than once since the hurricane, the circle of relatives has tried to repair the hotel and club, or locate a customer who could, however, it has been a struggle to get the cash to bring back the dewdrop. The same forces that provoked the community. the decline also hindered the recovery.
“Across the street is the first subdivision for African Americans, which ensured it would be a Red Line neighborhood,” Doucette said. a low-income census tract’.
Doucette, however, believes he has the pleasure of reliving the Dew Drop. An investment of $7. 8 million was secured for the allocation of local, state and federal sources. The National Park Service has decided that the Dew Drop Inn is eligible for the National Register, which will provide Doucette with significant tax credits for its restoration.
“When we discovered Curtis’ involvement in the design and his preference for redeveloped it and all of his plans, we were on the moon,” said Danielle Del Sol, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans. just a fantastic developer, and has a vision for the property. “
Gabrielle Begue, a historic preservation representative for MacRostie Historic Advisors who works with Doucette, said the National Park Service historically values buildings for their physical distribution than for their less tangible cultural price to a community.
“This disproportionately affected historic houses related to black history, as those owners did not have the same access to financing and equipment, resulting in less than pristine historic buildings. “
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Only a few sites on the National Register of Historic Places are similar to African-American experiences. In 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation introduced the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at more sites that are significant to African Americans.
For Kenneth Jackson, recovery from the Dew Drop Inn is personal, even if it will be done through someone else. Jackson is the grandson of Frank Painia. Il is the member of the circle of relatives who did their best to keep the building strong and sealed. as it had been vacant since 2005.
When Jackson was a young child, his grandmother took care of him after school. Every day they went to the Dew Drop Inn.
“My kindergarten the dewdrop,” he said.
When he grew up, he worked there until his grandfather died when Jackson was 17.
“Mr. Jackson is a smart manager of this place,” Doucette said. “He told me that this construction was like a member of his circle of relatives to him. “
For Jackson and his family, it mattered that Doucette’s uncle ran the Nite Cap, the medium of New Orleans’ funk scene in 1970. It mattered that Doucette had some other relative who probably played at the Dew Drop Inn and actually stayed there. It mattered that the new black owner.
“It’s a tragic irony that we fought for integration and that integration killed things like that,” Doucette said. “We’re going to see how we do it again and see how we do with this company. I think this time we will pass the control. “
Current advice?Any story ideas? If you have any questions, call journalist Todd Price at 504-421-1542 or he taprice@gannett. com. Subscribe to the South American newsletter. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Meet the eclectic new generation of African-American country, roots, and American artists who are erasing genre barriers and forcing replacement within the music industry.
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