I'm home, it was great, and the world's longest blob entry starts here. I have my appointment pad from this trip, which has some but not all of the details, and I'm sure Tony will poke me if I get things wrong, since he actually kept a journal of the whole adventure!

My train journey from Los Angeles to Chicago on the Southwest Chief was uneventful, just the way I like it. It arrived an hour early (!) on Wednesday night at Chicago's Union Station, and John and Jeanine came to collect me after I gave my talk. It was snowing (brrrr!) as we walked from the place we parked the car to the Star of Siam Thai restaurant; we passed right by the front door of Bob Koester's Jazz Record Mart, but he wasn't there so I left him a brief hello note. Lovely dinner and catch-up with my "other son" John and his wife, and then back out into the snow and back to the train station. I might possibly have bragged a bit about my impending grandmotherhood.


My other son John Pickering and his wife Jeanine, on the street outside the Thai restaurant where we had dinner.

My next train, the City of New Orleans, arrived in Memphis at 6:30 the next morning (Thursday) and I was met by a slightly groggy Andy Cohen, who took me and my 150 pounds of luggage to breakfast at the Arcade, the oldest diner in Memphis, and then dropped me at the conference hotel, the Marriott Downtown, and went home and back to bed. I checked in and got settled, then found the Folk Alliance Conference registration center, got my badge (and picked up Tony's at the same time to save him the bother) and started wandering around the various music rooms. Ran into Renee Bodie almost immediately, and she invited me to sit in on the Far-West regional panel the next morning. Then took the Main Street trolley to Sun Records, where I bought a few souvenirs for friends, and went back to the hotel in time to go out for my first (but not last) barbecue of the trip, at the Cozy Corner, with my pal Robert Gordon, an amazing music writer and good friend.  Then it was back to the hotel, and music the rest of the day and night, including Roger McGuinn's wonderful keynote address (which you can check out online here and is really worth seeing/hearing), a banjo summit, and a late-night set by Charlie Louvin that was hilarious.


Charlie Louvin and band.



         
The banjo summit, and the back of Andy Cohen's head.

Friday morning I was up early, and off and running. After the Far-West meeting I went to lunch at Payne's Barbecue (the one on Lamar, because everyone knows that's better than the one on Elvis Presley Blvd.) with David Evans, an old friend from Ash Grove days, and we got caught up on many years' worth of news of each other's doings (and he gave me a copy of his most recent CD!). Before I go any further I should mention that Memphis locals are serious barbecue mavens, and there is a certain amount of scorn directed at you if you eat at a "tourist" establishment like the Rendezvous. After lunch it was back to the conference and a lot more music, including a great oral history of James Burton conducted by Colin Linden, at which I ran into my here-in-the-neighborhood buddy Jim Lauderdale. Heard Ginny Hawker & Tracy Schwarz, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Rosalie Sorrels and a lot more, until Tom Freeland and his daughter Sarah showed up from Oxford, MS for our dinner date. We took the trolley to a Thai place just off Beale Street, and by the time we got back to the hotel the music was going full blast. I wandered from room to room for a couple of hours soaking it all up, until it was nearly midnight and time to go down to the lobby to wait for my pal Tony Russell (another music writer - are we surprised by this?), who had flown in from London to meet me.

Now I must divert from the regular narrative to tell you the Tony and Mary Katherine story, because it's really very sweet. Tony and I met, by his calculation, thirty years ago, at a record store I was then running in Pasadena. He came into the store with the late Bob Pinson from the CMF, and we met and visited together for, as he tells it, about an hour. And then he went away, and we never saw each other again until this meeting in Memphis. We had stayed in touch during the intervening thirty years, first by regular and then by e mail; we had sent each other Christmas cards, had written articles for the same magazines and journals, and are members of several of the same music-related internet mailing lists.  So we have always been in communication in some way or another, but had never actually seen or spoken to each other since our initial one-hour meeting thirty years before!  Okay, back to the narrative.

When he walked into the lobby I recognized him immediately, with that unmistakable "click" that one feels when something falls into place and fits perfectly. While it wasn't exactly as though no time had passed (I am, after all, thirty years older, and look it), still it was completely comfortable. We went up to our room and he got unpacked and settled a bit, and then we went downstairs to the bar for a nightcap for him and some catching up for us both.

Saturday morning I ran into my pal Jennifer Cutting from the Library of Congress, and we had a good visit. In the afternoon Tony and Tom and I were supposed to be on a panel together called "Blacks, Whites and Blues" (the title of a book Tony wrote many years ago), but when we got there I found that Scott Barretta had come up from Oxford with Tom, and I was able to press-gang him into taking my seat on the panel, and I sat in the second row and threw metaphorical vegetables at them. I think it went much better with Scott than it would have with me, as he was able to bring a lot of on-the-ground knowledge to the discussion that I didn't have. Then we went through the exhibit hall, and I found my old friend Josh Dunson and visited a bit with him and with Si Kahn, while Tony reconnected with Ken Irwin of Rounder Records. We wandered around hearing music for a bit and then we (Tom, his wife Joyce, Scott, Tony and moi) went out to dinner at a place Tom had taken me a couple of years before and which I had very much enjoyed called the 1912 Cafe. Lovely food! (And a nice break from barbecue, which I am always enthusiastic about when I first arrive in Memphis, but which after about ten meals of nothing but meat I am totally over.) Then Scott drove back to Oxford and the rest of us went to the Center for Southern Folklore, Judy Peiser's oasis, where we heard a concert by the Ebony Hillbillies (with Andy Cohen as opening act!) and then Tom and Joyce went back to Oxford and Tony and I went back to the hotel, found Richard Flohil's Canadian music suite, and he and Tony had their promised reunion. Still later, around 1:00 a.m., Andy Cohen took us to his room at the hotel where he showed off and demonstrated one of his dulceolas.


      
(left) Andy Cohen at the Center for Southern Folklore. (right) Ebony Hillbillies ditto.

Sunday we took the trolley down Main Street and had lunch with Andy at Blues City BBQ - I was seriously overloaded on barbecue by then, so opted for a good plate of catfish and fries. The conference was winding down and people were checking out of the hotel; Tony went off to find a cigar store, I think - I'm not quite remembering everything we did on Sunday, but I think we just lazed around the hotel - oh, and we did laundry, and inspected, but did not become one with, the hotel's exercise room and swimming pool. We had dinner in our room and watched TV and were generally slothful. It was lovely!

Monday morning Tony and I had breakfast with Robert Gordon at the Arcade; then we checked out of the Marriott and rented a car and I drove, with Tony in charge of Maps and Navigation, to Oxford. With some directional help by cell phone from Tom Freeland we found our hotel and got checked in, then walked over to Square Books. After a quick walk around the Square and lunch at City Grocery, we went over to Tom's law office and he took us on a short tour of Oxford. William Faulkner's grave had on it, for some odd reason, half a quart of Jim Beam, some loose change and a dollar bill!



We walked through the grounds of Rowan Oak, and then we took Tom grocery shopping for that night's dinner, which he was hosting at his home as a party for us. Then to his house and a sit down dinner for twelve people, including Richard and Lisa Howorth (Richard is owner of Square Books and Mayor of Oxford); John T. Edge of Southern Foodways and his wife Blair Hobbs, who gave us some tips on restaurants for our visit to New Orleans, Scott Barretta again, Jake Fussell, and David Shirley. Tom made a fantastic gumbo z'herbes, a garlic pasta, and glazed carrots, and there was flan for dessert! One of the best home cooked meals I've ever had!

Tuesday (Mardi Gras) morning we walked over to the Bottletree Bakery for breakfast, where we were joined by Scott, and later by Brett Bonner (Scott is the former and Brett the current Editor of Living Blues Magazine). Then Tony patiently came along while I did some work-related visits to several venues in Oxford, including the Lyric Theater (Tom and Joyce had them open for us so I could check it out), the Power House, and the Gertrude Ford Center for the Performing Arts, after which Scott, Tom and Joyce joined us for lunch on the square at Ajax Diner, which had toothpicks stuck in the ceiling.


The toothpicks got there via a couple of generations of Ole Miss students, too much beer, and a mysterious ritual which involved blowing the toothpicks up at the ceiling through drinking straws. I knew I should have gone to college - look at all the culture I missed! After lunch Scott took Tony to the Ole Miss campus radio station and interviewed him on tape for a future show; then we checked out of the hotel and drove back to Memphis, turned in the rental car, and stayed overnight before catching a train at 6:30 the following morning for New Orleans.  We had both breakfast and lunch in the dining car, and watched out the window as the blues towns flew by. Look, we just passed Holly Springs!


 
Since we arrived in New Orleans the day after Mardi Gras, there were still some decorations up on balconies.

When we got to the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter late Wednesday afternoon we checked in and I did some preliminary calls to friends to set up lunches and dinners. Ben Sandmel, another music writer pal, came by and got us and took us to Liuzza's (not Liuzza's By The Track, but the original one on Bienville in Mid-City, which everyone knows is better! And yes, there are food snobs in New Orleans too) for dinner, and I had my first (but not last!) shrimp remoulade of this visit, and Tony had his first (but not last!) Sazerac. On the way back to the hotel Ben took us past various points of interest for Tony's benefit, but as it was quite dark by then we couldn't really see much.  He also took us by Rock'N'Bowl so that I could buy a promised souvenir t-shirt for a friend. While he was driving us around, he played us an advance copy of the forthcoming release by Allen Toussaint, Bright Mississippi, which we both enjoyed very much.

Thursday morning we had breakfast at the Coffee Pot on St. Peter and then walked around some.  Tony had been to New Orleans once before, but it was 30+ years ago, so I got to play tour guide a little bit. We were booked to have lunch with Tom Piazza (another music writer pal -- and yes, there does seem to be a pattern here) at the Palace Cafe on Canal St., but in the meantime I had gotten a call on my cell from John Sinclair that he was in town and on the loose for lunch, so we added him to the party, and John then gave me a terrific surprise by bringing his daughter Celia along too. So we all had a wonderful visit together, followed by Tony and me doing more walking around the Quarter, where I pointed out a couple of cigar stores. He was a happy guy. We also did, every day we were there, a certain amount of hotel-spotting, trying to locate the place where Tony had stayed three decades before. He remembered the name of the hotel, but it had evidently changed its name since he stayed there, as it was no hotel that I had ever heard of and I know the Quarter pretty well; he didn't remember what street it was on, but had a general idea of the layout. So every day we'd walk into and out of the courtyards of possible candidates as we came across them, trying to find the one he remembered.

Friday was a day of funerals, which in this town means a day of parties. The great New Orleans R&B musician Snooks Eaglin had died the week before we arrived, and the funeral was held on this day.

   

We had a hasty breakfast at Cafe Beignet before Ben came and picked us up at our hotel, and we heard more of that not-yet-released Toussaint album on the way over to the service; were lucky to get there in time to get seats, as it was jammed to the rafters.

 
(left) The wreaths at Snooks' funeral. (Right) the second line gets underway

The funeral was held at a music club called Howlin' Wolf; I had been to their old place, but this was my first visit to their new location in the Warehouse District.  Snooks was laid out in an open coffin at the foot of the stage, while Allen Toussaint, Deacon John, John Blancher (owner of Rock'N'Bowl) and Quint Davis (producer of Jazz Fest) all spoke about their old friend, Snooks' two granddaughters read heartfelt poems they had written, and Irma Thomas talked abut Snooks and sang up a storm as usual.

     

(left) John Blancher of Rock'N'Bowl speaks at the funeral. (right) Irma Thomas.

Then the second line left to go to the cemetery, and a bunch of us music writer types (me, Tony, Ben S., Tom P. and his partner Mary Howell, Hammond Scott, Jeff Hannusch, and Michael Tisserand) made the short walk to Rio Mar, where we had lunch tapas-style amid much hilarity. (A writers bloc? I know, I'm just so clever!) Back at Howlin' Wolf an all star jam session was going on (Walter Wolfman Washington, Dr. Michael White, Allen Toussaint, Deacon John, Charmaine Neville and others) which we saw some of, and then I found my old friend Harold Battiste and we had a brief visit before Ben took us along to the NEXT funeral.

Antoinette K-Doe, widow of R&B legend Ernie K-Doe and proprietress of The Mother-in-Law Lounge, had died on Mardi Gras morning, and her visitation was right after Snooks' funeral. She was laid out in her coffin, under glass, in the front room of the Mother-In-Law Lounge (this is New Orleans, folks, things are different here. Get over it.) Outside in the yard behind the club was a huge get together (Harold was there, as were Allen T. and Charmaine N.)  and there was a big table full of food. Tony, bless him, scored me a bottle of water, which I really needed.

                  
 (above) The outside of the Mother-In-Law Lounge.


 
(left) Allen Toussaint and (right) Charmaine Neville at Antoinette K-Doe's visitation.


  


 
(above) Antoinette's unique use of old bathroom fixtures as plant holders, in the back yard of the Mother-in-Law Lounge.

Then it was back to the hotel and then Tony and I walked along Chartres to have dinner with my friend Bill Morgan at a new place called Stella. Very ritzy, very expensive, and all the dishes on the menu had about fourteen words in the name. Think I'm kidding? Check out these items, which are *not* made up, but are actually from their menu:
Tandoori-Roasted Wild Tasmanian King Salmon and Coconut Shrimp Basmati Fried Rice with Crisp Vegetable Spring Rolls, Indian Flatbread and Spicy Mango Cashew Butter
Porcini Crusted Rack of Australian Lamb and Lamb Ribeye with Potato Galette, Sweet Red Onion Confit, Caramelized Baby Shiitake Mushrooms and Petite Root Vegetables
A Trio of Crème Brûlée ~ Cinnamon Star Anise, Japanese Green Tea, and Ginger Grand Marnier Bananas Foster French Toast with Tahitian Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, Spicy Candied Walnuts and Crisp Plantains

Valrhona Xocopili? WTF? And a chocolate grilled cheese sandwich? Get outta here! Though Tony did get another Sazerac...

Saturday we decided not to go to Antoinette's funeral, since we had paid our respects at the visitation the day before. Instead we had an early breakfast at Cafe Beignet and then took a morning ride on the St. Charles streetcar so that Tony could see some of the Garden District, followed by lunch at Napoleon House, where they seated us outside in the coutyard. It was cloudy and overcast, which made me nervous, but Tony cast an eye upwards and said confidently, "It won't rain," and he was right! We were still asking anyone who seemed old enough to have been working in the Quarter three decades previously whether they had ever heard of his mystery hotel, but continued to get nowhere. Finally someone suggested we try the Williams Research Center on Chartres, and sure enough, they had old New Orleans city directories, and he was able to find it. Coincidentally, it was on the site of what is now called the Best Western Landmark on Rampart Street, which was the first hotel I ever stayed in in New Orleans, and I think I was there within a very short time after his visit; they must have just changed the name between his stay and mine. So he went off to see the place, and I think to buy cigars, while I went to the in-store at the Louisiana Music Factory (Guitar Lightnin' Lee and Jeerry Jumonville) and picked out some CDs for friends who had given me a wish list. I also bought a mailing box, and stuffed it full of things I no longer needed on the trip, some swag I had collected at Folk Alliance, plus some of the newly-bought souvenirs, all wrapped up neatly in my dirty laundry (go ahead and laugh, it makes good packing!) and Tony heroically toted it over to the postal center where we stuck stamps all over it and sent it winging its way back to L.A. That night we got dressed up in our best and had dinner a deux at Galatoire's (my favorite restaurant in the world) because I wanted us to do something special on our own; Mr. John, who has become "my" waiter there since I was introduced to him many years ago by Tom Freeland, took good care of us as always. Tony's nifty white shoes were pronounced "very rock and roll" by another of the waiters, and he managed not to stare too hard at the table of lovely young women seated next to us, evidently a group celebrating a bridal shower. This day marked my all time personal best on my pedometer: over 15,000 steps!

Sunday was our last day, and it was a full one. Tony had been booked to do an interview on the morning bluegrass show on WWOZ, so we walked over to their new offices on North Peters (behind the French Market), and while he was on the air I went off to breakfast at Elizabeth's (oh my Lord, the praline bacon!) with my friend Polly Waring, who is the mother of my goddaughter Nell Palfi; we listened to part of Tony's show on her car radio, and when we got to the restaurant they had it playing on the PA so I heard more of it then. When Tony's interview was over we went off to lunch with Nick Spitzer and his associate producer on American Routes, Maureen Loughran, at -- Elizabeth's again! (They were so excited about taking us there that I didn't have the heart to tell them I had just had breakfast at the same place). After lunch Nick dropped us off at the French Market and we shopped our way back through the Quarter to the hotel, buying souvenirs for friends and each other; Tony bore it manfully when I dragged him into Central Grocery and said, "Just stand still and inhale! Isn't that a GREAT smell?" Then I changed into my fancy duds and went out to dinner with my darling Nell (at Galatoire's again) while Tony had drinks at the Carousel Bar in our hotel and then dinner at the Gumbo Shop with Snoozer Quinn's granddaughter.


(above) my goddaughter, Nell Palfi, at Galatoire's.

And all of a sudden it was Monday morning, and time to leave. We went for a last walk through the Quarter together, mailed another box back to L.A., and strolled along the Moonwalk so he could see the Mississippi River up close. (Although the view of it from our hotel room window was pretty darn cool too). I bought an apron to wear while cooking at Saturday's shindig (and why on earth did I schedule a party for 30 people for three days after I get home from a major trip out of town?) and he bought me a postcard of Cafe Beignet, where we had had several breakfasts and he had made friends with the resident cats, and I bought some pralines, and there it was. He took the City of New Orleans back to Memphis (with John Sinclair, who was on his way to a conference in Chicago) and flew home from there to London, while I got on the Sunset Limited and came back to L.A. It was very hard to say goodbye, but a wonderful old/new friendship has been firmly grounded and will last the rest of our lives, and we will somehow someday see each other again.