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He fooled around and played the blues - Playing the Blues |
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Written by Glenn BurnSilver
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Wednesday, 02 August 2006 |
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Page 4 of 4
STORM GAVE BLUESMAN THE BLUES
By Dan England
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 Almost two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Johnny Sansone sneaked back home to save his cat. What he saw made him never want to go back again.
Everything was coated in a white, disgusting sheen of water, destruction and eerie, creepy quiet. There were no birds, no animals, no flies, even.
“I was breaking down,” he said in a phone interview. “I thought there was no point in ever coming back here. Everything was dead.”
But now Sansone and a growing group of blues musicians want to bring it back to life.
Sansone, who will appear as a featured artist in the Greeley Blues Festival the first weekend of August, had to make his living outside of New Orleans for the first time in years. But he travels back there to put on free concerts in churches paid for by arts commissions and meant to give residents a reason to gather and forget, for at least a couple hours, about the sea of troubles facing them.
“It’s a bunch of little scattered gigs to try to bring people together,” Sansone said in a phone interview. “It helps to keep the area running.”
Sansone, of course, relates to the devastated souls who scratch out ways to rebuild. Katrina hit everyone hard, including him. Sansone, a harmonica and guitar player, was in Canada doing studio work when the storm hit, and for those two weeks before his return, Sansone could not reach his wife. Bands and musicians were scattered all over the country, if they made it out alive. Both his homes were severely damaged.
Then he visited the city, and it broke his heart to see it so scattered. In many ways, the city settled him down and pieced his own scattered life together. For years, really ever since he graduated from Colorado State University in the late 70s on a swimming scholarship (he still owns the school’s 100-meter breaststroke record) and went to Chicago, he devoted his life to the blues.
“I guess every kid wants to be in a band,” Sansone said. “I was having such a great time, and in college you could play at parties before I was even old enough to drink. I don’t even know if I should say that.”
His devotion took him cross-country, from flophouse to flophouse, from gig to gig, until Sansone came to New Orleans in 1989 because he had family there.
It took a long time — five, maybe six years — of sitting in with bands, playing on other’s records, playing in his own band, but eventually he created his niche. He would play corporate gigs and conventions, and you could earn as much in one of those gigs as you would in two weeks on the road. He still traveled, but he became settled. New Orleans became home.
After Katrina, Sansone knew that life was gone, at least for a year, and he frantically booked gigs all over. He took anything he could. He was pleasantly surprised at the responses he got from places. Oh, you’re from New Orleans? Come on down and play. Yes, we’ll pay you.
“Now I’m very busy doing all the things I booked to get them all in,” Sansone said. “All over the world, people have been great to New Orleans musicians and Gulf Coast musicians. We’re playing everywhere.”
The city is slowly coming back, Sansone said. In fact, the tourist area is open for business and safe. The city needs the tourist dollars. Come pay it a visit.
In other parts of the city, the slime that covered the city remains. Crime is rampant. It’s still dangerous.
And yet, in Sansone’s neighborhood, the power is back. There is no trash or telephones.
“But we still have neighbors, and we have a community,” Sansone said.
Sansone never wanted to return. Now, gigging all over the country, he loves to go back home.
“I’ve got everything at stake there,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
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