Visit the book's website at www.otherpress.com/songformyfathers.
Tulane Reading Project 2006
Former Time Paris Bureau Chief and bestselling author Tom Sancton
returns to the New Orleans of his youth and the music that shaped
and guided his life.
Song for my Fathers is the story of a young white boy driven by a
consuming passion to learn the music and ways of a group of aging
black jazzmen in the twilight years of the segregation era.
Contemporaries of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local
obscurity until Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of
interest in traditional jazz. They called themselves "the mens."
And they welcomed the young apprentice into their ranks.
The boy was introduced into this remarkable fellowship by his
father, an eccentric Southern liberal and failed novelist whose
powerful articles on race had made him one of the most effective
polemicists of the early Civil Rights movement. Nurtured on his
father's belief in racial equality, the aspiring clarinetist
embraced the old musicians with a boundless love and admiration. In
a sense, they became his spiritual fathers and role models.
Meanwhile his real father, who had first led the boy to the "mens"
and shared his reverence for them, later recoiled in horror at the
idea that his son might lose his way in the world of late-night
jazz joints, French Quarter bar rooms, and a precarious life on the
margins of society. The tension between the father's determination
to control the boy's destiny and his son's abiding passion for the
music is a major theme of the book.
The narrative unfolds against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans in
the 1950s and '60s. But that magical town is more than decor; it is
perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken
place in any other city in the world. Written several years before
Katrina crashed into New Orleans and changed its face forever, Song
for My Fathers seems all the more moving in the wake of that
cataclysm.
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