“I sang ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,’ and that was it. I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And my father being a jazz musician and my mother an opera singer and Fats Domino living next door and Al Hirt living down the street, oh my goodness . . . This is what I was supposed to do.” Charmaine Neville backstage at Snug Harbor between sets at her regular Monday night gig. Photo by Michael Urban.
"'I think that everyone who lives here and plays music feels honored in some way, you know. It's a real privilege to be able to live in New Orleans and play music.'"
The term “New Orleans musician” refers to a highly valorized, historically rooted identity shared by a select community in the Crescent City. However, it concerns more than a place, a celebrated past, or even the style of music performed. Above all, a New Orleans musician is someone recognized by others as such because he or she engages in specific practices and abides by certain norms of the city’s musical community. This much I have learned from the musicians themselves—and from knowledgeable others, such as music journalists and audio recording engineers—over the course of some fifty-one open-ended interviews conducted with them between October and December 2013. I never used the term in my questions, but they frequently introduced it in their responses, tossing it around as a matter of fact not much different from, say, the chairs on which we sat.