Poem: Remembering Right

A Tribute to Oscar “Papa” Celestin and Other Early Jazz Artists from the Thibodaux, La., Area This poem was commissioned for the Thibodaux Jubilee celebration in 2002 and published in Fall 2003 in Jazz Beat magazine. Reprinted by kind permission of the GHB Jazz Foundation.   Legend has it that one place alone gave birth to jazz, as if a busy city on the river was surrounded by ramparts and levees that kept all others from musical comings and goings until its natives left their homes to sing jazz to the world. Legend has it that the improvisers, the brass bands, the social aid and lodge and helping hand bands, the free-spirited city folk who marched to the beat of drummers that John Philip Sousa never heard— legend says these bands walked only down narrow urban streets and grand avenues that trace the crescent of the river. Legend has it wrong. New Orleans was, yes, the hub, the circle’s center but the wheel of invention ranged widely and well into the byways and bayous and beyond. Remembered right, who were the outlanders in this conspiracy of creation? Sons and daughters of the countryside— the fraternal and marching and military bands, the folk who heard the field hollers and work songs and throbbing backwoods gospel sounds, too many of them anonymous, except to scholars who rescue names from the cleavage of obscure archives.