Under a Hoodoo Moon

I loved this book because the language is sheer music!

Because that for all we know, we may never meet again But before you go, make this moment sweet again. We won't say goodnight, until the last minute. I'll hold out my hand, and my heart will be in it.

... The Funk of a thousand swamp dives. Like its African predecessors, New Orleans music has always been built from the bottom up: drums first, bass second, followed by the guitar, horns, and other goodies. As the New Orleans showman and pianist Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack wrote in his autobiography, “In New Orleans roots music, the drummer is crucial, chronic to our thing because he lays down the foundation of what New Orleans music is all about: The Funk.‎

One of the first of my serious contacts with the reverend mothers happened a bit before I did the Gris-Gris album. I ran into Mother Shannon, a well-known reverend mother, and told her I wanted to cut some voodoo songs. She said, "Oh, no, you can't do that.‎"

One of the gangs was made up of all the whores and pimps from Perdido Street; their parade was called Gangster Molls and Baby Dolls. Everyone in this group dressed as outlandishly as possible: The women wore eye-popping dresses; the ones who looked highest-priced wore ultra-sharp women's suits, but with see-through bras underneath.‎

In New Orleans, everything — food, music, religion, even the way people talk and act — has deep, deep roots; and, like the tangled veins of cypress roots that meander this way and that in the swamp, everything in New Orleans in interrelated, wrapped around itself in ways that aren't always obvious.‎

The closest thing I could ever find to his style among the earlier cats was a guy named Joseph Spence, who was a guitar player from the Bahamas who played rhythms like Fess.‎

One of the reasons those highs were so tremendous was that the stuff that came through New Orleans was real, 100 percent Corsican junk that came straight off the boats from Cuba uncut.‎

I was twixted and tweened and jacked up

What the owners did was rotate the customers so that at least one club was always packed with some kind of action. The nature of the action was dictated by the time of day.‎
-Dr. John, Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper
by Dr. John, aka John Mac Rebennack with Jack Rummel