It is two days before New Year’s Eve, the weather in New Orleans finally cooling down to what passes for winter in the Big Easy, after a couple sultry days. We have taken a quick vacation here, thanks to a generous friend who loaned us her condo in the Warehouse District. On our last night before making the 400-mile trek back to East Texas, we settled down in chairs of a parlor in the historic The Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in the upper Garden District. We await the arrival of two of the city’s best known Cajun musicians, who play for a modest crowd every Monday night.
Before David Doucet and Al Tharp arrive, I wander around the hotel, admiring the gilded ceilings, the floor-to-nearly ceiling windows, the intricately carved woodwork and mahogany stairwell. The Columns hotel began as a fancy mansion designed by famed New Orleans architect Thomas Sully in 1883. Besides its historic significance, wonderful front porch and great location, The Columns is noted for being home to three “gentle spirits,” or ghosts, according to a couple of websites I browsed.
One site surmises that a trio of ghosts, “with impeccable southern manners” haunt The Columns: a well-dressed gentleman serves as a spectral host, while a woman floats around in white attire, and a child who possibly died in the hotel wanders around the third floor near the balcony.
I saw no ghosts during our brief visit.
Doucet, who plays guitar and accordion, and Tharp, mainly on fiddle but also playing what his partner calls the first Cajun banjo, amble into the parlor, lugging their own equipment. As they work to set up, they talk to each other as old friends do, about holiday plans, who is in the hospital, what they’re doing for New Year’s. Doucet pulls up a small table on which a flower bouquet sits, and grabs an empty plastic pitcher from the bar to serve as the tip jar.
On this night they’re playing for tips. That is not unusual, of course. Across America unknown but often talented singers and songwriters ply their trade dependent each night on the generosity of the audience. What is unusual is the pedigree of these musicians. In 1975 — 40 years ago — Doucet and his brother, Michael, founded the roots Cajun band BeauSoleil. The band, with a varying cast of members over the years including Tharp, appears regularly on public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” They have performed on “Austin City Limits” and “Late Night with Conan O’ Brien.” BeauSoleil became the first Cajun band to win a Grammy in 1997, and then won again in 2009. And tonight two of its members are playing for tips, with perhaps 40 people crowded into the parlor.
The songs are mesmerizing, the musicianship impeccable, even if I can’t understand a single word since nearly all the songs are in French. Doucet explains what each song is about before they launch into it, clearly enjoying his role as Cajun musicologist. Tharp uses a cloth napkin from the bar to protect his whiskered face from the pad of the fiddle. Doucet closes his eyes as he sings in French and plays intricate licks on an acoustic guitar with an amp pickup.
In the narrow hall, a couple dances, the man in his stocking feet gliding along the hardwood floor. If that floor could talk, I think. The stories it could tell over 132 years.
Two hours passes much too quickly, and soon Tharp and Doucet are packing up. The tip jar is full, folks coming forward after Doucet reminded us the music business is tough these days.
Outside, Christmas lights still twinkle on the grand old houses along St. Charles Avenue. The streetcar lumbers past, its bell ringing. And a new year beckons, with its promise.
