You Can Go Home Again

As soulful as a jazz riff, Tom Sancton’s coming-of-age memoir resurrects a lost New Orleans and his musical mentors.

I miss their presence. I miss their voices. I miss their talk. I miss their humor. I miss their personalities. I miss hearing them . . . seeing their faces, and the way that George Lewis would put his hands on the clarinet.” Writer and musician Tom Sancton wistfully recalls the group of aging black jazzmen, Lewis in particular, who shaped his life and inspired his memoir Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White (Other Press, $24.95).

They are long gone, now, these early practitioners of traditional New Orleans jazz whose heyday spanned the early decades of the 20th century. Theirs was a style of music that evolved from their communities. “When they learned it, it was the music of the streets. It was popular music,” explains Sancton. But in time, the music stopped for “the mens,” as they called themselves, and they lived on the periphery, many of them poor, ill, forgotten.

That is, until Preservation Hall opened in 1961. The venue revived the careers of the musicians, who began to play regularly for tourists, foreign devotees of the genre—“jazz pilgrims” Sancton calls them—and locals. Among those locals: a newspaperman named Tom Sancton, his wife and their teenage son Tom, the present-day writer. Listening to the soulful, elegant notes from Lewis’ instrument, young Sancton literally heard his calling, and found in the dignified clarinetist a musical hero and mentor.

Sancton the elder was a Southern liberal and radical, and a longtime friend of the jazzmen. One of the fathers of the book’s title, he figures as prominently as the old men, “not least,” says Sancton the younger, “because he introduced me to that world, and encouraged me to pursue it in the beginning.”

“That world” is a now-distant New Orleans. A world of music and life lessons from assorted characters, of late-night concerts and jam sessions, raucous parades and barroom carousing—atypical for a suburban white teenager in the waning days of segregation.

And it is a world far removed from the one that greeted Sancton in 2005, when he visited his hometown. Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, some of his old haunts, such as Preservation Hall, are virtually unchanged, while others resemble a veritable ghost town. But the music survives. Though crippled after the storm, New Orleans’ music industry, says Sancton, has returned with the tourist trade, “not totally, but sufficiently” for those who make a living playing it.

And even those who don’t. “I’m getting lots of gigs,” Sancton observes. He lives full time in New Orleans now, after leaving 40-some years ago for college and a career in journalism. He frequents Preservation Hall, often with the “jazz pilgrims” from various countries, and with a younger generation of black musicians, some of them directly descended from “the mens.” Their sound isn’t quite the same as those early pioneers’, but close—“almost like a dialect,” as Sancton describes it.

Music lovers can hear that dialect when Sancton and his band of pilgrims, The New Orleans Serenaders, take the stage at The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that opens this month. And he’s enthusiastic about another festival performance: a tribute to George Lewis alongside Dr. Michael White and, he hopes, Sammy Remington, who gave Sancton his first clarinet. He will play the song of his fathers on the clarinet, as he has with his pen, demonstrating that one can go home again . . . not that Tom Sancton ever really left.

—Nancy Oakley

FOR AN EXCERPT FROM SONG FOR MY FATHERS: A NEW ORLEANS STORY IN BLACK AND WHITE, SEE “STAR PAGES”.