September 7, 2005
This Song Goes Out to You, Big Easy By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
When Nick Spitzer heard the order for everyone to evacuate New Orleans two Sundays ago, he left his wife and children long enough to drive to his radio studio in the city's French Quarter. There he grabbed several family snapshots, his Rolodex and the master recording of the next episode of his weekly show, "American Routes." Then, on impulse, he reached for a copy of the Fats Domino song
"Walking to New Orleans." As he headed back home, Mr. Spitzer saw the exodus. From the black neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward, all the way across Elysian Fields Avenue, and from the unimproved fringes of the French Quarter, people were pushing laundry carts and lugging suitcases, trudging toward the Superdome. Mr. Spitzer had a passing thought of Pompeii.
By the time he was driving his family from New Orleans toward a friend's house in the Cajun country safely west of the city, Mr. Spitzer was already choosing songs from the pile of CD's in his Nissan, trying to make sense of the inconceivable. He played "The Rivers of Babylon" by the Melodians, with its Old Testament resonance, and he played Louis Armstrong asking,
"Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" What it has meant to Mr. Spitzer is the necessity to bear witness to his city's suffering and resilience through the art of radio. For hundreds of thousands of listeners of about 225 public radio stations and XM Satellite Radio, Mr. Spitzer and "American Routes" have served since 1997 as the voice of New Orleans, right down to the theme music by Professor Longhair. Now, working with a patchwork staff from a borrowed studio in Lafayette, La., Mr. Spitzer is assembling this weekend's show, titled "After the Storm." (In the New York area, the show is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday at 5 p.m. on WFUV-FM, 90.7. A list of other stations is at
www.americanroutes.org) "I wanted it to be music of reflection and solace and also hope," Mr. Spitzer said in a telephone interview on Sunday, "an attempt to put some balm on this."
A native New Yorker, Mr. Spitzer, 54, has lived in New Orleans or Cajun country for 30 years, combining his training as a folklorist with his genre-jumping taste in music to develop "American Routes." In a typical week's show, he will explore a particular theme through songs and oral histories he has gathered.
This weekend's show, while typical in form, was to reflect epochal times. Having left New Orleans on the assumption that he would be able to return in three or four days, Mr. Spitzer, along with the rest of the city's displaced residents, has watched and been forced to reckon with the spectacle of flood, fire, rescue, rampage and death.
"This is a natural and cultural disaster," he said. "Maybe America's biggest cultural disaster - in the sense of the loss of New Orleans's cultural stuff, the loss of the communities there that interact and the lack of will to move as quickly as if these houses being flooded were on the coast of Kennebunkport. And even for those of us who got out, there's this grinding uncertainty of whether we'll ever get back and ever live the same again."
Separated from his library of music and interviews, Mr. Spitzer was welcomed by KRVS, a public radio station in Lafayette that broadcasts in English, Creole and Cajun French. He hired a local cultural historian who is also the host of a show on KRVS, Ryan Brasseau, to find music and research previous natural disasters, from the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. One of Mr. Spitzer's assistant producers, Jason Rhein, who had fled to relatives in Natchez, Miss., drove down to Lafayette. For his oral-history segment, Mr. Spitzer interviewed Dave Spizale, the station manager of KRVS, who described piloting his boat into New Orleans as part of a rescue flotilla of private vessels.
The most significant work, though, involved Mr. Spitzer's memory and aesthetic. For historical sweep, he chose
"Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman, and "When the Levee Breaks," by Memphis Minnie. For outrage, he selected Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" and Sam Cooke's
"Change Is Gonna Come." For perseverance, he used the Fats Domino song he had grabbed on his way out of the Quarter.
And for that mixture of mourning and pluck characteristic of New Orleans's jazz funerals, he turned to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for "The Lost Souls (of Southern Louisiana)" and to the Louis Armstrong elegy he had listened to in the car during his escape.
"There's a line in there that basically says, there's someone I miss even more than I miss New Orleans," Mr. Spitzer said, "meaning that New Orleans is more than the city, the region, the place. It's the personal relations. In another context, it could be schmaltzy. But when I hear that line now, the way it mingles the individual and the cultural, I just start to cry."
