My New Orleans
05/17/2021
According to the legend, “the night was clear, and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down.” At this point Lloyd Price, a native of Kenner who was one of the top rhythm and blues performers of the ‘70s would wail that, “I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bark. He was looking at the two men who were gambling in the dark.” Price’s song would then reveal the defining moment of the dice match he witnessed. “It was Stagger Lee and Billy, two men who gambled late. Stagger Lee threw seven, Billy swore that he threw eight.”
Zydeco music combines Cajun and Creole traditions for unique sound
As the National Museum of African American Music opens its doors, journalists from the USA TODAY Network explore the stories, places and people who helped make music what it is today in our expansive series, Hallowed Sound.
The fan cooling off the zydeco band whirled right in front of Nathan Williams face. So close, he clipped his baseball cap on a blade. But nothing deterred Williams from seeing his zydeco idol, Clifton Chenier. I ve been around zydeco all my life. Matter of fact, when Clifton Chenier was playing I was a little bitty boy in St. Martinville, I was like eight, nine, ten years old he was playing at a club but I was too young so I couldn’t get in. So I had to stand on a washing machine to watch him through the window.
Zydeco music combines Cajun and Creole traditions for unique sound
Lafayette Daily Advertiser
As the National Museum of African American Music opens its doors, journalists from the USA TODAY Network explore the stories, places and people who helped make music what it is today in our expansive series, Hallowed Sound.
The fan cooling off the zydeco band whirled right in front of Nathan Williams face. So close, he clipped his baseball cap on a blade. But nothing deterred Williams from seeing his zydeco idol, Clifton Chenier. I ve been around zydeco all my life. Matter of fact, when Clifton Chenier was playing I was a little bitty boy in St. Martinville, I was like eight, nine, ten years old he was playing at a club but I was too young so I couldn’t get in. So I had to stand on a washing machine to watch him through the window.
Mon, 12/14/2020
LAWRENCE – Laura Hobson Herlihy is from New Orleans, where, she says, Caribbean creolized identities are common. So the mix of cultures she found on the Honduran island of Roatán during a study trip last year seemed familiar.
Now, she and the University of Kansas students she took down to Central America have co-written a book titled “The Peoples and Languages of Roatán,” published as open-source research by KU ScholarWorks.
Herlihy, a lecturer in the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, specializes in the language of the Miskitu people, whose ancestral home is on the Honduran and Nicaraguan mainland, in the area often called the Mosquito Coast. However, she noted, climate change, poverty and drug wars the invasion of their rainforest lands by colonists and narco-traffickers have motivated a few thousand Miskitu people to move to Roatán for jobs in the tourist industry. When the State Department in 2018 raised its travel warning for Nicarag