I grew up in Abbeville, Louisiana in the 1940's and 1950's. I lived in the heart of Acadiana, as the Cajun area of Louisiana is known, among the tall oaks laden with Spanish moss, the pecan trees, rice and sugar cane fields, marshes, swamps with beautiful cypress coves and bayous lined with pirogues. We gathered oysters and shrimp from the coastal bays. We fished for catfish, redfish, crawfish, sac-à-lait and choupique. We hunted ducks, geese, poule d'eau, deer, rabbits, squirrels, alligators and frogs. The foods we ate had names like filé gumbo, jambalaya, boudin, graton, couche-couche, courtboullion, shrimp fricassée, macque choux, crawfish étouffée, sauce piquant, pintade and Oreilles de Cochon.
         Cajun French was the language of my grandparents and my parents. They listened to the news in French on radio station KROF. Most of my more than two hundred aunts, uncles and cousins lived in or near Abbeville. Their names were: Clodise, Enolia, Loria, Lovelace, Lucien, Olita, Ursin, Ursule, and Zulma. Their family names became Boudreaux, Chauvin, Dubois, Hebert, LeBlanc, LeBouef, Melebeck, Primeaux, and Reaux. My role models were the carpenters, painters, plumbers, farmers, fishermen, fur trappers, and other hard-working Cajuns. They taught me to have pride in my work, and they gave me that wonderful joie de vivre with which to enjoy all that life has to offer.
         Abbeville was still part of the segregated South. The blacks had separate churches, schools, swimming pools, rest rooms and drinking fountains. The Cajuns had their fais-do-do where they played their fiddles and accordions and sang songs like La Jolie Blonde, La Valse de Basile, and Allons à Grand Gueydan. The French speaking blacks in the area had zydeco (the name derives from les haricots in the song Les Haricots sont pas salá), a blues based form of Cajun music played in nearby clubs that whites would not attend. Words like Creole and jazz were still way off into my future. Way off in New Orleans.
         For most Cajuns at that time, New Orleans didn't even have a name. It was known to me simply as "en ville" (in the city), and people from outside Acadiana were known as "les Américains". Because of politics and politicians like the Governor Earl K. Long, and Abbeville's Dudley J. Leblanc (better known as "Cousin Dud," the inventor of the patent medicine Hadacol), the state capital of Baton Rouge was better known to me than New Orleans.
         In the early 1960's, I moved to New Orleans for the first time. Integration was beginning to change the city and the South. The signs for separate rest rooms and water fountains for the "colored" were coming down. The public schools were in the early, violent stages of integration. At the Absinthe House Bar, the racist cabaret comedy "Nobody Likes a Smart Ass" was adding new lines with each federal court ruling. The restaurants and bars were facing the inevitability of white waiters having to serve black customers.
         I would take my daughter Carolyn fishing at the Lake Pontchartrain levee. My son Patrick was born at Touro Infirmary. The Bourbon House was alive with an assortment of artists, writers, poets, and alcoholics. Tennessee Williams drank and socialized there. I drank there. The sidewalk artists from Jackson Square kept warm in the bar in the winter. Leo Meiersdorff, the great painter of jazz scenes, arrived in New Orleans, shared my house, and produced many of his paintings on my living room floor.
         New Orleans was like a giant decadent magnet that kept drawing me back. I had to get back there every so often, simply to loosen the screws in my head (creatively speaking, of course). The city and the French Quarter have always stimulated me in my work and in my life, but I knew if I stayed there too long, I'd lose those screws permanently.
         In 1965, I became a photographer. I worked as a photojournalist in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world before returning to New Orleans in 1968. The movie, Live and Let Die, which included a jazz funeral scene, popularized the jazz funerals and started attracting tourists and television coverage. The attention changed the nature of the traditional funerals and turned them into "happenings."
         I photographed the people on the streets of New Orleans, as a free-lance photojournalist for LifeThe New York Times and other publications. I was teamed up with great reporters such as David Chandler, Roy Reed and Martin "Moe" Waldron. We covered the antiwar/free-love society and social activism along with the changes brought on by the movement. We documented the Jim Garrison versus Clay Shaw conspiracy trial, in which, we all felt, Garrison ruined the life of a perfectly innocent friend of ours. We reported on the environmental damage to the Atchafalaya Swamp caused by the U.S. Corp of Engineers. The Atchafalaya Basin Swamp, home to the Louisiana Heron, the Snowy Egret, the Louisiana Iris, and some of the best bass and sac-à-lait fishing in the world, is the the largest river basin swamp in the United States.
         We also covered Mardi Gras and the Southern Republican Conference, where the GOP's "southern strategy" was born. We documented the integrations of the schools in the South, the "Rap" Brown trial at the old Federal Courthouse in the French Quarter, the black power movement, and the police raids of Black Panther operations in New Orleans.
         Lydia, my wife at the time, and I lived in a shotgun apartment on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter. Our apartment was like a restaurant...always somebody coming to dinner...people like the great photographer and story teller Lyle Bongé, the playright and writer James Kirkwood, and the writer James Leo Herlihy. I met Vernel Bagneris while he was a college student working as a waiter at the Vaucresson Restaurant on Bourbon Street. I learned about the Creole culture and particularly its cuisine. Allan Jaffee and his wife were running Preservation Hall, where some of the old musicians, well into their eighties and nineties, were still playing. I learned about New Orleans Dixieland jazz.
         We lived about two blocks from Buster's Place, where a hungry body could get a plate of red beans and rice for 35 cents (75 cents with sausage). Twice a week Buster Holmes would make some of his whiskey-laden bread pudding, which was almost a meal in itself. The musicians and grand marshals with the different bands would meet at Buster's Place before going to play a funeral. After I'd photographed a few funerals, friends would phone to let me know when another musician had died, which meant another jazz funeral.
         These photographs, all taken between 1968 and 1970, are from several funerals, including those of George Lewis, Alcide "Slowdrag" Pavageau, Paul "T-Boy" Barbarin, and Leon "Nooney-Boy" Shelly (a member of one of the many second-line and social clubs). Some friends introduced me to the jazz funerals, and I began photographing them simply because they were a part of the life of New Orleans, with all their sadness and dignity, their pride and humility, their stillness and motion, their silence, and their rejoicing.
         Someone asked me recently why I waited so long to publish this collection of photographs. Well, there's one answer. Like any good stock, the ideas for this book have been simmering for years, but the right combination of ingredients wasn't there. The time wasn't ripe.

The gumbo just wasn't ready 'til now.