A Closer Walk: Interactive New Orleans Music History Map

09/24/2026

The New Orleans City Council will use a $500,000 federal grant to design “a vibrant hub for culture-based commerce, public gathering and environmental innovation” on North Claiborne Avenue, according to Nola.com.

The plan will focus on the stretch between Orleans Avenue and Esplanade Avenue, home to several unmarked music heritage sites, including the spots where Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer Earl Palmer grew up.

Palmer's childhood homes were demolished to make way for an off-ramp of the elevated expressway that devastated this corridor in the 1960s.

When Palmer grew up on the 800 and 900 blocks of N. Claiborne in the 1930s and 40s, it was bustling with activity.

"This particular corner, Dumaine and Claiborne, is one of the famous corners in New Orleans. Dumaine and Claiborne, Dumaine and Robertson: these were swinging corners," the musician and historian Danny Barker said.

Palmer integrated the sounds of the neighborhood into his drumming, which became part of the DNA of popular music in the mid-20th century.

As a fixture in Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio, and then as a member of the vaunted Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles, Palmer helped popularize rock 'n' roll's signature backbeat, and played on countless hits, including Fats Domino's "The Fat Man," Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," and the theme from "Mission Impossible."

We'd love to see Palmer recognized in the designs for these blocks of N. Claiborne.

You can find more on him on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/earl-palmers-house/

📸 public domain

09/22/2026

The Louisiana Landmarks Society's list of New Orleans' most endangered sites released last week includes the Sandpiper Lounge on Louisiana Avenue, a building we've been monitoring for years.

News coverage of the list noted the Sandpiper's dire condition, but didn't explain why it has deteriorated.

The property has been in the same family for generations. The bar first opened in 1957, and Joseph Jones took over the operation in 1978. For decades before Hurricane Katrina, Jones made it a Central City institution—it served as a location for the Ray Charles biopic “Ray” in 2004.

The levee failures in 2005 displaced Jones, but his nephew Benny Simmons reopened the bar, making it a live music venue and, for several years, a base for the Golden Comanches Black Masking Indians.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the Sandpiper, and Louisiana Avenue was torn up and impassable for years afterward, crushing the business.

Still, the Simmons family engaged a contractor to renovate the building. They told A Closer Walk in 2024 that the contractor’s missteps left the structure heavily damaged.

You can find more about the Sandpiper’s history, including the story behind its iconic neon sign, on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/sandpiper-lounge/

📸 by Jordan Hirsch

09/17/2026

The Louisiana Landmarks Society just released its annual list of endangered sites in New Orleans, which includes Frank Early's Saloon at 1216 Bienville Street.

A Closer Walk has uncovered a trove of new information about the building, one of only three extant structures from Storyville, the city's legendary red light district.

The saloon's greatest claim to fame is as a venue for the influential pianist and singer Tony Jackson, the subject of our last post. We found that the man who likely brought Jackson here--Anthony Batistina--was also involved in one of the most notorious events in the district's history: a shootout on Easter Sunday in 1913 that claimed the lives of rival dance hall owners on the block.

Batistina, proprietor of what was then known as the White Rock Saloon, was arrested for the murder of Harry Parker, who ran the Tuxedo Dance Hall, but a grand jury declined to indict him.

Though Batistina was integral to the music scene here, he has been overlooked in histories of jazz in Storyville.

In the years after the Easter gunfight, he took over management of the 102 Ranch Dance Hall up the street, where hired bandleader Oscar "Papa" Celestin, whose Tuxedo Jazz Band became a fixture there. By one account, Batistina also hired the core group that became the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

A Closer Walk also found that, remarkably, Batistina was one of three proprietors of this business in the Storyville era to be arrested for murder. The other two, including the man whose name stuck to the building, Frank Early, were found guilty.

You can read about those cases, and more about Tony Jackson's legacy, on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/frank-earlys-place-saloon/

📸 by Jan Gilbert
📸 The William Russell Jazz Collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection, acquisition made possible by the Clarisse Claiborne Grima Fund

09/15/2026

Tony Jackson (1882 – 1921) was a virtuoso pianist, singer, and songwriter integral to the development of jazz. A guiding light to Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz pioneers, he's best known today as the composer of the standard “Pretty Baby,” the namesake of the controversial film set in Storyville starring an 11-year-old Brooke Shields.

Though Jackson was a fixture in New Orleans’ red light district, he lived Uptown with his parents and siblings. He was born in the 12th Ward on Amelia Street, between Tchoupitoulas and Annunciation, and stayed within a few blocks of that spot until he left New Orleans for Chicago in the 1910s.

This neighborhood doesn't get a lot of attention for its contributions to early jazz, but Jackson's story offers a glimpse of its musical life in the 1890s.

According to trumpeter Bunk Johnson, who grew up nearby and played with Jackson as a young man, Jackson taught himself to play the piano by practicing in a saloon on the corner of Amelia and Tchoupitoulas. The proprietor was a bandleader, Adam Oleavia, who lived two doors down from the Jackson family.

A map from the period shows a strip of empty land running down the center of the 700 block of Amelia Street. Historian Lynn Abbott wrote that it functioned as a park, with “a bandstand and an area paved for dancing.” Jackson performed here in his neighbor's band before making a name for himself as a pianist and singer in Storyville.

You can find more on Jackson on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/tony-jacksons-house/

📸 Tony Jackson, Hogan Archive Photograph Collection, Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, Tulane University Special Collections, New Orleans, LA.

📸 Buildings: Amelia Inn, Hogan Archive Photograph Collection, Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, Tulane University Special Collections, New Orleans, LA.

📸 Sanborn map of the 700 block of Amelia Street with the Jackson home outlined in orange.

09/10/2026

09/08/2026

This weekend, the Times-Picayune reported that one-of-a-kind handwritten lyrics by Lil Wayne, discovered by happenstance, are on sale for $5 million. “The phone number for Club Whispers, the New Orleans East nightclub popular with rappers, is scrawled on a page,” according to the article.

Cash Money Records, Wayne’s label, had a long association with Whispers. It was there in 1995, that a 14-year-old Turk made his first live appearance for Cash Money; he joined Wayne, BG, and Juvenile in the Hot Boys. In 1997, Cash Money co-founder Bryan Williams, known as Baby and Birdman, rapped about being “in Club Whispers with a $10,000 bar tab.”

Master P’s No Limit Records—regarded as a rival in the 90s but now on tour with Birdman and Cash Money—worked at Whispers, too. Establishing No Limit there in 1995 was part of P’s strategy to shift his operation to New Orleans from the Bay Area.

There’s more on Whispers on A Closer Walk, including personal recollections from Mista Meana of Partners N Crime, and an explanation of what any of this has to do with The Jokers, the white R&B band from the 1950s: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/club-whispers/

📸 public domain.

09/03/2026

Join A Closer Walk editor Jordan Hirsch on Monday, September 14th at 6pm central for a talk on Zoom covering some new archival findings about early jazz in Storyville, New Orleans' legendary red light district.

The presentation will offer a fresh look at a single block of Franklin (now Crozat) Street in the heart of the district, which was a hotbed of music before, during, and after the Storyville era.

The event is a production of the Potomac River Jazz Club. You can find details and get a Zoom link from them at this address:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jazz-talk-shrieks-dances-and-revels-early-jazz-venues-in-storyville-tickets-1992722862725?aff=oddtdtcreator

See you then!

📸 Buildings: Basin Street "Down the Line," Hogan Archive Photograph Collection, Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, Tulane University Special Collections, New Orleans, LA.

08/31/2026

New Orleans' hip hop community is mourning Damon Grison, better known as Wacko, who passed away last week, just days before his 47th birthday.

Wacko will forever be associated with "Nolia Clap," the 2004 hit that was perhaps the last great record to shout out New Orleans' public housing developments before Hurricane Katrina.

While the origins of the Nolia Clap are disputed, we know that, at a minimum, Wacko helped bring to life this piece of the city's, and the South's, hip hip canon.

Since facts about Wacko are hard to pin down online, we recommend anyone interested in learning more watch his interview with Video Wayne on the YouTube channel Rare Reports to hear directly from the man himself.

Born Damon Grison, he grew up in the same courtyard of the Magnolia project as his friend Soulja Slim. The two attended Booker T. Washington High School together.

By the late 1990s, Wacko had moved to the Lower Ninth Ward, on the same block as Ronald Lewis' House of Dance and Feathers.

The partial demolition of the Magnolia had begun before Katrina, as you can glean from the cover of the "Nolia Clap" single, which shows one its brick buildings boarded up. After the flood, of course, the city bulldozed it entirely. But its legacy lives on in the name of the Nolia Clap.

08/27/2026

We're saddened by the loss of Elliott "Stackman" Callier, longtime saxophonist with Fats Domino, Johnny Adams, the Treme Brass Band, the Olympia Brass Band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and many others. He died last week at age 83.

Callier played with Johnny Adams at Mason's Las Vegas Strip in the 1970s, though this photo, in which he sits directly to the right of Adams, may have been taken a little later. He joined Fats Domino's band in 1988, and played with him until Domino's retirement.

While Callier was at home playing R&B, he was also a fixture of the brass band community. He was a founding member of the Treme Brass Band, and can be seen singing next to a casket on the cover of their album "Gimme My Money Back!" For years he could also be found performing in Jackson Square, lending his expertise to younger musicians. Later in his career, he appeared at Preservation Hall.

Callier could be sly, quoting Coltrane in the middle of brass band solo, or tweaking the lyrics of old standards.

He referred to his many friends and fans as his "Little Stackies." If you have any stories about Stackman, we'd love to hear them.

His family is accepting donations to help with funeral expenses: https://www.giveinkind.com/inkinds/W8M5D3T/elliott-stackman-callier-new-orleans-musician

📸 Close-up of Callier in 2006 by Edgar Mata © Edgar Mata

08/25/2026

"The album was 'almost like a joke,' Harold Battiste recalled in a 2007 interview with the arranger and journalist Richard Niles: 'I asked Mac if he had any ideas of what we could do under my Progress Records deal, and he came up with the voodoo thing. He’s a prolific student and he knew about this legendary cat Dr. John, an old voodoo man. So that album was crafted mixing voodoo with the psychedelic thing—a kind of spoof on the West Coast obsession with underground music. Neither of us thought it would be taken seriously.'"

👀 Read more: https://archive.ph/1PTBY

👀 Take the "Walk On Guilded Splinters" Dr. John tour on A Closer Walk: Interactive New Orleans Music History Map: acloserwalknola.com/tours/walk-on-guilded-splinters-dr-john-tour

📷 Dr. John mural at 3223 Dryades. Art by MTO, photo by Eli Mergel.