Lone busker still singing in New Orleans

From the NY Times:
Singing Into the New Orleans Night -- by David Carr

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 20 - "There are five of us left," said Marguerite Smith, who was playing her Ovation Celebrity guitar in the gloom outside Johnny White's Sports Bar here. It was nearly midnight and she said she was sure there were five remaining New Orleans musical holdouts. Almost sure, anyway. "Jake, Casey, Grandpa - he plays the blues like you read about - Jacob and..." Ms. Smith paused, moving from foot to foot, her battery-powered sandals lighting up with each shuffle as she tried to remember. It was about the only light on Bourbon Street. "And Robin, that little dude who plays the harmonica," she finally concluded.

She can't be far off. With the Olympia Brass Band relocated to Phoenix, the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins in nearby Lafayette, the brass bands and Indians scattered to the four corners of the continent, and Wynton Marsalis and a cast of thousands up in New York for a big benefit, New Orleans is about the only place where New Orleans music has gone silent.

Framed on this dark night by the gothic spire of St. Louis Cathedral, where regular Mass has been suspended and where she goes to say the rosary with others still here, she raged against the circumstances that had laid her city low. "I heard the mayor announced another evacuation today," she said, rearing back and displaying her crawfish festival T-shirt, which read, "Pinch me, peel me, eat me." "He didn't run us out the first time and he will not run us out the second."

Playing on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans Streets in the French Quarter, in front of a bar that never closes - Johnny White's stayed open during the last hurricane and will stay open during the next - seems a forlorn act, although a noble one. "I'm stuck here doing time, doing yours and doing mine," she sang in an urgent, not unpleasant voice. "Somebody had to lay it on the line."

Ms. White was less nuanced in conversation. She was angry, mighty angry, about things, a lot of things: about the dogs that have been abandoned; about a mayor who, she said, was good for talking and not much else; about a president who, in her view, let the city down. She says her most requested song post-hurricane, post-flood is sung to the tune of the Band's "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." By her lights, the chorus now runs, "the night George Bush let old Dixie drown."

Ms. Smith said she was an Apache and a Catholic, that she was 44, and had nine children and 15 grandchildren: "All gutter punks and bikers," she said. "See what a good mother I am?" Gesturing to the dim club with tiny televisions on the bar, she added, "Just ask my son Squirrel, he's tending bar in there."

"She is not my mother," said the bartender, Greg Rogers, known to some as Squirrel. "She is one of those street people who thinks that she is mother to everyone. But she is a good person."

The police cruised by and whooped their siren, but lamely, as if to say they knew that neither she nor the hardies who keep this bar open will move. Not now. They are kindred, lonely spirits, ghosts conjuring a Bourbon Street that seems, for the moment, bygone.

Michael Mosner, an Airborne Ranger who said he had come down from New Jersey to help and had previously served in Somalia, was one of the ghosts. "Do you want a beer, sweetheart?" he asked Ms. White. "I'd do anything to hear you sing." She smiled a little. "I love playing right now," she said as Mr. Mosner walked into the bar. The pay is no good, she said, "but the benefits are wonderful."

She had no amp, no backing band. There was only the persistent darkness in the French Quarter and a beer, which Mr. Mosner returned with. She sang and he joined in, on key and in tempo, an old song by the Guess Who, "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature."

"It's the new Mother Nature taking over," they sang together, leaning into the chorus. "She's gettin' us all. She's gettin' us all."