Star Pages

The Smell of New Orleans

When the parade passes by, the musicians don’t stop playing; they march straight to Buster’s. By Tom Sancton

In the racially segregated 1960s it was rare, if not unheard-of, for a white teenager to play in one of New Orleans’ marching bands. But young clarinetist Tom Sancton was nonetheless invited to join the prestigious Olympia Brass Band. “I soon realized that marching with the Olympia could be hard and dangerous work,” he writes in his memoir Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White (Other Press, $24.95). But his rite of passage didn’t stop when a parade or funeral was over. He would learn more about music—and life—at a place called Buster’s.

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My dad always said racial harmony would begin when blacks and whites could eat and drink together. And there was no better example of that than Buster Holmes’s restaurant on Orleans and Burgundy. That was the place where musicians gathered to eat, drink, socialize, and womanize.

It was rare—and technically illegal—to see a white person in Buster’s before 1964. After that, as word about Buster’s great food and funky atmosphere got around town and into the guidebooks, the musicians and locals were joined by uptown folks, hippies, and tourists eager to soak up some local color along with their red beans, turnip greens, and cornbread. Buster welcomed them all.

His real name was Clarence but nobody ever called him that. He was a big, round-faced, cigar-chomping ex-longshoreman from Plaquemines Parish who had been serving up food in the French Quarter since the early 1940s. He didn’t play any music himself, but he loved having musicians around his place, especially when they pulled out their horns and played.

“Restaurant” was a big word for Buster’s place. It was really a one-room bar with some formica-topped tables, a concrete floor, and a big open kitchen next door with a lunch counter running around it. The main room had a ceiling fan and dingy walls covered with photos and yellowed newspaper clippings. There were a couple of fluorescent tube lights on the ceiling and a blue neon Pabst beer sign over the jukebox.

Behind the oak bar there was a smoky, pitted mirror flanked by shelves stocked with various brands of bourbon, Scotch, vodka, and L&J Sweet Vino, a syrupy concoction that was the cheapest way to get drunk—and the surest way to get a hangover. The walls behind the bar were plastered with pictures of musicians, including one of Louis Armstrong mugging over a heaping plate of Buster’s red beans.

The main man around Buster’s—apart from Buster himself—was the trumpet player Kid Sheik. He was one of the most popular guys I ever met; everybody just loved to be around him. When he wasn’t playing at the Hall [Preservation Hall], parading, or prowling for women, you could always find Sheik holding court at the bar. He would stand there for hours at a time, smoking his King Edward cigars, drinking Dixie beer, and filling the room with his rapid-fire chuckle. In the Musicians’ Union directory, Sheik had two numbers listed by his name: his home phone and Buster’s.

Buster wasn’t a fancy cook, but everything that came out of his kitchen was down home. His menu, which he posted on a chalk board each day, was likely to include such fare as garlic chicken, barbecue ribs, ham and turnip greens, and shrimp jambalaya. But his most popular dish was the most famous New Orleans staple, red beans and rice, which he sold for twenty-six cents a plate in those days. For sixty cents, he’d add his gut-scalding hot sausage.

The tables in the main room were always jammed at meal times, but the best place to eat was at the lunch counter next door in the kitchen. There were half a dozen big iron pots simmering on the stove, filled with mustard greens, cabbage and ham, gumbo, turtle soup, red beans, and shrimp. It all mixed together in a warm cloud of vapor that bathed the room in a pungent, spicy, meaty smell. Blown out onto the street by a big rickety window fan, the aroma of Buster’s kitchen filled the whole neighborhood.

It was the same smell that wafted out of all the splintery shotgun houses behind Congo Square, from the brick windows of the housing projects, from the shacks and shanties along the levee, from the sprawling black-and-white checkerboard of houses in the working-class Ninth Ward. It was a smell that was unmistakably New Orleans. And here, mixed with beer, fresh coffee, cigar smoke, sweat, and cheap perfume, it was unmistakably Buster’s.

The Olympia Brass Band would often go to Buster’s after a parade or funeral to drink, eat, and sometimes play more music. I remember one parade that wound up there and turned into a marathon jam session. When we got there, horns blaring and drums pounding, there was bedlam at the front door. The rhythm-drunk second-liners [those who danced behind bands in parades] were trying to jam into the barroom along with the band, but the swinging butts and shoulders and umbrellas and bass horns just couldn’t make it through the narrow entrance at the same time. Blowing furiously on his silver whistle, Fats Houston [Olympia’s grand marshall] started grabbing people by the scruff of their necks and throwing them out of the doorway. “Get outta there, you!” he shouted. “Let them musicianers in there!”

Buster’s was jammed. Dozens of second-liners had followed the musicians inside expecting to hear some more music. But the band had scattered, some drinking and schmoozing with women at the bar, some sitting around the tables, some back in the kitchen eating Buster’s red beans.

Fats was sitting next to me with his eyes closed and his head tilted back. Big drops of sweat formed on his forehead, rolled down his cheeks and dropped in little puddles on the concrete floor. He was still wearing his black derby and had his plumed, sequined umbrella propped up against his chair. The harsh lights that came in from the doorway glistened on his dark, sweat-slick face.

Louis Armstrong’s “Bye and Bye” was playing on the jukebox, barely audible over the laughter and chatter. Manuel Paul, the tenor sax player, had a buxom woman sitting on his lap. “Aw, baby, I been waitin’ for you to come by me all afternoon,” he said, grinning under the close-cropped white mustache that made him look like an otter when he played his horn.

Sheik stood at the bar with his parade hat cocked on the back of his head. Booker T [Glass, Olympia’s drummer] was sitting in a corner by the jukebox sipping Scotch. He looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes and smiled.

“Get your horn out, junior,” he said. “You and me gonna play some music.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Me?” he said. “I’m only eighty-five, and I ain’t countin’ the years I went barefooted, neither.”

I was still exhausted from marching in the hot sun, but before I could say so a woman in a tight pink dress sauntered over and grabbed my arm. “Oh bay-bee! Ain’t you gonna play some more music for us?”

Other voices chimed in from every corner of the room.

“Give us some second-line music, baby, second-line!”

The old man stood up and began to strap on his bass drum. Harold [Dejan, head of Olympia] had left and Book was running the show now. “Papa! [Booker T’s son, Nowell] Oh, Papa, come on over here, boy.” Papa picked up his snare drum and stood next to his father. Sheik pulled his trumpet out of its purple velvet carrying bag.

“Manuel!” Book shouted. “Get your horn.” Someone handed Mannie his tenor. He reluctantly let his ladyfriend slide off his lap as he attached his neck strap and blew a deep-throated note—Tzonk!—that triggered a volley of whoops from the crowd.

“All right, Book,” said Sheik. “We’ll give ’em ‘Joe Avery’.” Booker T thumped out the intro—Boom! Ba-doom-boom! Ba-doom-boom-boom!—and the whole room erupted with sound and movement. Shrieks and shouts. Clapping hands. Twirling umbrellas.

The walls throbbed with the lashing syncopation of the music. Even though there were only five of us playing, the reverberation of the small barroom with its hard walls and concrete floor made it sound like a whole brass band.

People were coming in off the streets in threes and fours—off-duty maids in their crisp white uniforms, shoeshine boys, quarter-hustling tap dancers, toothless old men in straw hats, and fine young girls with tight jeans.

Fats was leaning up against the wall, chewing gum and cooling himself with his feathered grand marshall’s fan. A short, skinny woman slinked up and began to dance belly-to-belly with him.

After about ten choruses, Sheik signaled the end and we brought the tune to a delirious climax. I plopped down in a chair, unable to play another note.

Book was standing next to me, still strapped to his bass drum. “Heh-heh-heh. You tired, ain’t you? Get that horn again, boy, you gonna work now. Come on, me and you. Let’s go!”

Before I could protest, I was besieged by women begging me to “play just one more, baby, just one more.” Book hit the drum and off we went for another number, then another, then another.

Suddenly Booker T announced that the show was over because he had to keep “a very special appointment.” No amount of sweet-talking was going to keep him there. “Papa!” he called out as he unstrapped his drum. “Go get your truck and drive by here for me.”

Papa shook his head and grinned at the old man as he disappeared through the front door. No doubt who the papa bear was in that family.