The Red Stick Ramble

The plan was for John and Gayla to meet the first mate and me down at the Pig’s Arms to listen to the Saturday night live band.  It was a simple, robust plan, tried and true.  This week we anticipated enjoying the company (for one evening only) of the well-known Cajun group “The Red Stick Ramblers”.

Now to save you coming on all technical and objecting to the alleged notoriety of the band on the grounds that you’ve never heard of the Red Stick Ramblers, all you need to know is that they just dropped in on their way back to Louisiana from a sold-out gig at the Port Fairy Folk festival.

Folk ?  Pig’s Arms ! Ersatz moonshine liquor !  A potent and heady combination.  And the ever-present threat that John and Gayla might break into Western Swing or a Cajun two-step at any moment.  Worth witnessing at any entry price.

The crowd at the Pig’s Arms is “uninhibited” and when the band took the stage (well, took the five metre by four metre slightly raised wooden box), on time and significantly more sartorially splendid than the audience (the band was at least, shod), the first cross-examination question was “Why Red Stick Ramblers?”

The band ripped into their high-octane signature tune – the celebration of moonshine, “Made in the Shade”

“ You’ve heard of white lightnin’ and of mountain dew”.  We certainly had.

“So if you see me at a party on a Friday Night

Pickin’ and a grinnin’ and a feeling all right

Chance is my back pocket got a little thirst aid

“It comes from Appaloosa and it’s made in the shade.”

Yes, but “Why Red Stick Ramblers ?”

This is clearly THE question that the band fields all the time, and since it was clearly a great burden on crowd’s mind at the Pig’s Arms, Chas Justus, the guitarist, and Linzay Young, (50% of the fiddle section and the lead singer) indulged us and removed this great concern by translating back into the Louisiana patois (I hesitate to call it French, VoR)  “Red Stick” > “Baton Rouge” – where the band members met up – as freshmen at Louisiana State University, some ten years earlier.

Chas said that after eight years of the Bush Administration (and the Pig’s crowd knew he was using the term loosely), this sample of Southern white trash had never had it so good, despite having been bagged out by sophisticated Yankees.  Now that they’d hit the international stage they had gotten used to not only being despised as being Americans, but as being “Unspeakable” Americans post Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

I was wondering (Julius Sumner Miller-style) why it was so, but the band moved on and the matter was left to rise in the dark and warm space at the back of the brain until a few days later, when Don Watson filled in the dots.

I need to do a flashback and then fast forward you here.

I have intended to read Don Watson’s Book “American Journeys”, for ages, intensified by having read an excerpt speaking about the recent (and may I say joyous US election), published in an issue of “The Monthly”.  Now I know Don won’t be offended when I say that I’ve been damned slow on the uptake of an offer to purchase the hardback at $50.

So then, as a wild aside —- just hang on and give the old attention span a bit of a work out.—- it’ll come good, I promise —-.  Peter Cundall, on the Tuesday Book Club waxed lyrical, and passionate about Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize winning ‘Grapes of Wrath”.  I was weaned on Steinbeck four decades ago and I was determined to go and revisit this master work.  Steinbeck knew California the best, but he too, toured and wrote about the South.

Off to Bert Olbrecks Books and there, along with the Grapes, a half-priced paperback version of Don’s “American Journeys” found its way into my satchel by way of a commercial exchange.

Don’s prose is simply wonderful; luminous and echoing the clarity and simple elegance of the Steinbeck he quotes in his first chapter – Don’s 2005 trip into the Deep South, and New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina.  Instead of the dust that gets in every crevice, we smell the stench of saturated homes, drenched belongings, heat and damp, death and decay, neglect and callous Bush Administration indifference to the dire situation.  Don takes us with him and we sit stunned, staring out the window of the Lutheran Church van delivering basics to the few survivors who have chosen to remain.  If they had a choice.

Don recounts the dreadful statistics.  More than two thousand people died and hundreds of thousands were made homeless and in New Orleans.  But nobody really knows the true number because so many bodies were washed out to sea.  And the poor and homeless do not leave records or estates for relatives to fight over in court.

While the Bush Administration was pouring cash in the billions into Iraq, the task of helping the people of Louisiana fell mostly to the two cornerstones of contemporary America – the church volunteers and private enterprise.  There was a profit to be made in souls and hard cash.  We’d better put our bets on Haliburton having both feet in the federal cash trough before the local contractors get a sniff.

And we know that it was not only New Orleans that felt the wrath of Katrina.  Amongst so many other cities and towns Don reminds us that 26,000 of the people of Baton Rouge registered as being homeless – but the actual number was suspected to be a lot higher.

Back in the lounge bar the Ramblers’ wild, driving and wailing fiddle tune ‘Katrina” (you took my home) brings the howling wind and rain right into the Pig’s Arms.

The silent crowd looks stunned and then the band swings like Sweeny Todd into their syncopated, shambolic drunken and sinister “Main Street Blues”

–        “The butcher and the baker and the undertaker,

–        The butler and the barber too,

–        The indian giver and the boy without a liver,

–        They’ve all got the Main Street Blues.

–        The lovers and the lawyer and the self-employer

–        Were all in the foyer sniffin’ glue,

–        Discussin with a Russian, who was munchin on a muffin

–        About those awful Mainstreet Blues”

The crowd is rolling laughing and the band segues into a Western Swing number.  Gayla springs to her feet and heads towards the tiny dance floor.  The faintest look of a call to duty flits across John’s face.  He clears his throat, silently mouths a “Yee-Ha!”, takes his partner and joins the indomitable spirit of Louisiana; the good ol’ boys from Baton Rouge.

“And it’s Oh Lordy me

And it’s Oh Lordy my,

This little Pig’s Arms

Keeps bustlin’ on by”.

And I can still smell the delicious smell of jambalaya and fillet gumbo wafting out of Granny’s Kitchen.

Our huge thanks to the Red Stick Ramblers at  www.redstickramblers.com