On this 50th anniversary of Preservation Hall, the concert space created to preserve authentic New Orleans jazz, there is no better way to honor its history than to read Tom Sancton’s book, Song for my Fathers, A New Orleans Story in Black and White. Well, maybe one better way: read the book and then go down and listen to the music.

Sancton’s memoir teases out the strands that pull us into a matrix of kinship, a family, biological or otherwise, that anchors and defines our lives. Despite our tendency to ignore or rebel or become distracted, these strands tether us to our roots. His book focuses mostly on his teenage years as a White, middle-class boy in racially segregated Jim Crow New Orleans of the 50’s and 60’s negotiating two very different worlds. One was his milieu as a bright, curious uptown teen, well-liked by his peers despite his eccentric family. The other was his apprenticeship – encompassing music and what it means to be human – with legendary Black musicians who regularly played at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter.

One of his fathers was the White one who sired and raised him and possibly never quite forgave his son for pointing out the father’s failures as a writer and as a provider. This father introduced his son to radically progressive views of racial equality, to wild, imaginative flights of fantasy, and to the jazzmen, who called themselves “the mens,” and would set young Tom on an unlikely and passionate course for the rest of his life.

Then there were the Black “fathers,” anywhere from 60 to 90 years old, many of whom claimed a second lease on life musically and physically thanks to the opportunity to perform at Preservation Hall. They inspired and encouraged Tom. They taught him their music mixed with their courage, humor, and survival strategies in the face of poverty, prejudice, sickness, and death. This book is his song to all of them.

So what are the strands, the recurring melodies, chords played in different keys in different decades, at different tempos that create kinship and rootedness? Sancton allows us to discover this through poignant stories, snippets of dialogue, and vivid sensual descriptors. He brings us into his first encounter with George Lewis who announces “Burgundy Street Blues” as “This my OWN tune.”

I don’t know if I had ever felt passion before – that pulse-churning excitement that makes you want to possess a thing, to fuse with it and have it fuse with you, that makes that thing seem greater and more wonderful than any other thing in the world. That’s what I felt for the sound of George Lewis’s clarinet.

Lewis told him “You got music inside you.” That began Sancton’s life-long fascination with the clarinet, the musicians, and Preservation Hall. But it wasn’t just the music.

“Where else would a kid of my age have encountered such a colorful swath of humanity: writers, artists, pimps, hustlers, defrocked preachers, ruined heiresses, ex-cons, beautiful women, and exotic foreign travelers?” Sancton describes them all in the course of his narrative, matter-of-factly, with hardly ever a trace of judgment.

Sancton takes us through the history of his teenage years. In 1963 President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald who had “attended our public schools, walked our streets, heard our jazz, eaten our food.” He was “linked to a whole New Orleans-based network of plotters, freaks and criminals.” Consequently, Sancton considered the city somehow complicit in murderous guilt. In 1964 the Beatles appeared in City Park; and for a time, it looked like Tom might be seduced away from the traditional music of his elders.

About this time, Tom’s father suggested that he do a high school research project on Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court Case that in 1892 ushered in “separate but equal” as the law of the land. Homer Plessy was a Tremé Creole. So was George Guesnon, one of Tom’s music teachers and a world class tenor banjo player. Guesnon proceeded to educate Tom about Creoles:

“We’re a race within a race, a mixture of French, Spanish, and Negro. See, in the slavery times, the Creoles were free people. They weren’t no slaves. They owned slaves, some of ‘em. Among them were some of the richest, best-educated people in the city – doctors, lawyers, musicians, artisans, cigar-makers, plasterers. They didn’t teach you that in your Jim Crow school, did they?”

“But, like I say,” George continued, “every time you got something’ good goin’, look like somebody got to (ruin it). See, it was the envy on the part of the Whites that wound up pushin’ the Creoles into the same ghettos with the Blacks.”

Tom found out more about the devastating reversal suffered by the Creoles when his father sent him to interview prominent civil rights lawyer A. P. Tureaud and Judge John Minor Wisdom, a liberal jurist who was head of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They explained the organized fight which included local Black newspapers, Northern allies, and a committee of citizen activists to head off “separate but equal” at the end of the 19th century, a fight that was lost. And yet there was one auspicious result: the Creole European musical tradition mingled with the visceral, rhythmic, African tradition and became a powerful catalyst for the birth of New Orleans jazz.

The ways “the mens” related to slavery, loss, and death time and again provide sign posts for how a soul can negotiate horrors that by all rights should have crushed it. Jim Robinson, one of the mens, born in 1892, lost his mother when he was young.

“I was so sorry I could hardly make it. I was just little, about six or seven. People worried about me. They were sayin’, ‘Jim you got to stop crying’. Then one evening I saw my mama coming down the road to the house and she saw me in the front and she said, ‘Go around to the back by the kitchen, son, I want to talk to you.’ So I went to the back and she met me there. And she said, ‘Jim, I be a spirit but I ain’t gonna hurt you. I want you to try to feel better. I want you to know I love you and I’m gonna stay with you. And Tom, I come out of it and I never worried about her being a spirit again. She straighten me out.”

So these are the strands of kinship, the recurring melodies of the song: music, memory, history, relation to place, and a willingness to laugh and to love. They aren’t an inert something, idealized or frozen in time. Under Sancton’s clear, honest, and penetrating scrutiny, the strands of connection evolve. They can’t be used or manipulated or cast aside in deference to a momentary convenience. They finally brought him back to New Orleans after Katrina, from decades of living abroad, back to music after laying his clarinet aside, back to his aged parents refusing to budge from a house that had all but burned up beneath them, and back to Preservation Hall.

Sancton’s curiosity is infectious. Song leaves the reader with personal questions that invite an exploration of our own relationship to our parents and siblings, to civil rights, to New Orleans, to the artistic passions expressed in our city, to the exile and rebirth we experienced with Hurricane Katrina and the flood, and to our own notion of who has embraced us and why.

Sancton notes, “If the old men embraced me as an aspiring musician, it was not just to humor a young White boy. They were preparing a succession, someone to carry on the tradition when they were gone.”

It worked.

Orissa Arend is a psychotherapist, community organizer, mediator, and writer. You can reach her at arendsaxer@bellsouth.net.