Louis Armstrong, 1952, World Telegraph staff photographer, Library of Congress, no copyright known. From Wikimedia Commons.

Stuff we forgot, stuff that didn’t work, stuff I lost, places we never got to, and music. 

My flies weren’t big enough for our guide, Bailey Short, so we used his.  My leader wasn’t heavy enough, Bailey wanted at least 20 pounds, but that was easy, we just cut off the 16 pound tippet. He wanted 10 weight rods.  Oddly I thought I took a 10 weight rod, but when I got there I’d grabbed a 12, so I fished with his Orvis Helios 3D.  It was hard, but somebody’s gotta do it. What a nice rod.  I never touched my 7 weight and shouldn’t have taken it.

I’d tied up the leader with a 5’ butt section of 20 pound hard Mason monofilament.  I really liked how the leader laid out.  There was about 2.5’ of 20 pound Rio Saltwater Flourocarbon after the butt, so that’s what we fished after the 16 pound tippet was cut. It was about a 7.5’ two-piece leader.

We took insect repellent but I didn’t put it on until too late.  I fished barefoot in the boat and by the end of the second day my feet were covered with horsefly bites.  I guess they caught me when I was napping. And I did nap, especially the second day when I was hung over.  Otherwise I wore long pants and shirt and a buff and had no problems.

As for places, I really meant to go to the WWII museum but didn’t get there. I wanted to go for jazz in the afternoon on Frenchman Street but never made it. I wanted to see the plantations up the river road, especially some of the newer exhibits that cover slave life. There are half-a-hundred places I still haven’t eaten. I’d like to catch a bass out of a john boat near New Iberia in the Bayou Teche. That’s what I get for reading too much James Lee Burke.

Instead we mostly fished.

Now for the playlist. There’s some great music out of Louisiana, or about Louisiana.

• Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Jerry Jeff Walker wrote Mr. Bojangles after a night in a New Orleans jail. I’d rather not spend a night in a New Orleans jail.
• Louis Armstrong, including Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Red Onion Jazz Babies, Louis Armstrong & His Hot Seven, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, Johnnie Dodd’s Black Bottom Stompers, and Lillie Delk Christian & Louis Armstrong. Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, is as good of a book about early 20th century New Orleans and the birth of jazz as is out there.  His Louis Armstrong’s Chicago is also pretty great, and most of the recordings I have are from Armstrong’s in the 20s in Chicago.  Maybe there are earlier recordings in New Orleans, but I’m not aware of any.
• Wynton Marsalis. I need to get some newer stuff by Marsalis.  What I’ve got is a bit lush. Hot House Flowers, from the late 80s.
• Branford Marsalis. Renaissance, again from the late 80s.This was something I really ended up liking, especially Peacock.
• Dr. John
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Louisiana Rain.
• Patti LaBelle, Lady Marmalade.
• The Animals. You can’t go to New Orleans without House of the Rising Sun. 
• The Rolling Stones. I don’t really like the Stones, and it’s mostly because of songs like Brown Sugar. I’m sorry, but that’s got to be the most reprehensible song ever written. Good riff though.
• Count Basie, Louisiana
• Buckwheat Zydeco
• Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans. Ok, it’s about a train, but it’s a good song. 

Heinrich Klaus, Fats Domino playing in Hamburg Germany, 1973. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.  His stuff on Flickr is brilliant.

• Fats Domino.
• Lucinda Williams. Williams gets all the small town stuff, Slidell, Lake Charles. Louisiana claims her, but I say Arkansas. Still, there are Louisiana songs. 
• Roy Orbison. Orbison was born in my home town, so he had an excuse for thinking bayous might be blue.  Linda Ronstadt is pretty great too. 
• The Neville Brothers.
• Randy Newman. Apparently Newman lived in New Orleans as a child. Who knew? Louisiana is the best song I know about cultural failure. I should have downloaded all of Good Ol’ Boys, especially Kingfish.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival. They actually sang a lot about Louisiana for a bunch of California kids. 
• Clifton Chenier.
• Doug Kershaw & Rusty Kershaw.
• Jean Knight. Everybody should hear Mr. Big Stuff one more time. 
• Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders, Eddie LeJeune, Johnnie Allan, Jo-El Sonnier. All of these have versions of Jolie Blon, which is one of the great songs.
• Tim McGraw. My only nod to the Baptist Louisiana north. It was kind of jarringly out of place.
• Paul Simon, Take me to the Mardi Gras.
• Steve Earle, After the Mardi Gras.
• Johnny Cash, Big River.
• Sting, Moon Over Bourbon Street.
• Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man (which also means The Byrds), and with the Band, Crash on the Levee. 
• Led Zeppelin, When the Levee Breaks.
• Beausoleil. I always thought Bayou Cadillac was Buy You a Cadillac.
• Allan Toussaint, Last Train.
• Santana, Toussaint l’ouverature.
• Benny Goodman, King Porter Stomp. Goodman famously feuded with Armstrong because he thought Armstrong a clown.
• Mahalia Jackson.

 

Mathew Brady, Portrait of Louis Gottschalk, c. 1855, Library of Congress.

Some of these, Fats Domino, Clifton Chenier, the Neville Brothers, and the others with no comments, had a lot of songs and are so essential that I’ve got nothing to add. I need to go back and add Jerry Lee Lewis, Louis Gottschalk, and more Jo-El Sonnier.

On the guitar I was  working on a transcription of the Bach Fugue in A minor for organ. It’s better than I am. As for lost, it was a pair of reading glasses.  It was a nice pair, too.