Dr. John, legend of New Orleans music, Dead At 77: NPR

The legend of the music, guitarist, piano man, talker and psychedelic godfather, Malcolm John Rebennack – better known as Dr. John – died "around the clock" on Thursday, from a crisis heart, confirmed a statement. He was 77 years old.

This last piece of information was just a discovery, or at least a broadcast, at the end of last year: In his fantastic autobiography of 1994 Under the hoodoo moonDr. John had declared his date of birth as "just before Thanksgiving 1940". But in a column for the Times-Picayune published in November 2018, author John Wirt discovered a birth announcement in the same newspaper 77 years earlier: Mac, as he was familiarly known, was born on November 21, 1941. Factual fluidity was, in his way , suitable for an artist lived and worked in the moving and trendy space of the trickster, and also for one who was as emblematic of New Orleans as Louis Armstrong, to whom his latest album, 2014 & # 39; s Ske-Dat-Of-Dat … (the spirit of Satch) was a tribute. (The true anniversary of Armstrong has also been poorly reported for decades.)

Mac Rebennack debuted in New Orleans as a teenager guitarist in the 1950s, hanging around the Dew Drop Inn, a historic black nightclub (where he was harassed more than once by the police for enforce Jim Crow laws governing interracial gathering), and works in the recording studios J & M of the Cosimo Matassa engineer in the French Quarter. Dr. John's character – hoodoo mystery and cool – was originally developed for his group mate and former classmate of high school Jesuit Ronnie Barron, with whom he played in the R & B group Ronnie & The Delinquents. Barron had a recording contract that prevented him from assuming the role, so Mac took it. The story goes that it was during a fight that broke out after a dance that he played with Barron that Mac was hit on the finger, which prompted him to to go from the guitar to the piano.

It was this altercation and long incarceration in a Texas prison for drug trafficking in the mid-1960s that prompted Dr. John to join what had become a strong community of New Orleans musicians, including the musical director of Sonny & Cher, Harold Battiste, and Wrecking. The team's drummer, Earl Palmer, in Los Angeles, where he appeared during a session with artists from the girls' group upset The Cake to a young Rickie Lee Jones. Also in the 60's, of course, he introduced his very cool character, Night Tripper, dressed in dresses, feathers and gems, and released a series of durable albums combining swamp furrows and psychedelic brilliance for the Atco label in the 60's and & # 39; 70, from 1968 Gris-gris and current 1974 Par excellence Bonnaroo, whose title, a mix of old Creole slang and its own twisted tongue hipster patois, gave its name to the Manchester Music Festival in Tennessee.