Tipitina's of Napoleon Avenue looks rather like a large version of Whelans of Wexford Street. The mood is similar too - especially on one of those nights when the latter might be hosting a traditional music gig. You know those evenings where everybody seems to know everybody, a certain local knowledge is assumed, and there are as many musicians at the bar as there are on the stage?
Such easy-going evenings are common enough in places like Whelans, but are rarely on offer in famous American night-clubs. The usual system is for visitors to be ushered in for one set, and herded out before the next one starts, long before their eyes have even grown accustomed to the light. Not so in Tipitina's, however - a friendly big barn of a place where the traditional music of choice just happens to be New Orleans rhythm and blues. On this particular sweltering August night, visitors like myself seem to be in the minority. This is a local crowd - black and white - for whom the music is a natural part of a night out. This, after all, is music grown up with rather than discovered. These people have always known that Irma Thomas recorded Time Is On My Side long before the Stones lovingly ran with it into the American charts. And so, in a place like this, the music has nothing whatsoever to do with books and sleeve-notes - it is, in fact, the actual music of the place.
Certainly there are fans in the house too, but this is more than just a spectacle for the eager - no t-shirts here from wet, European blues festivals, no tense completists trying to dance, and no historians drawing conclusions at the bar. And if this kind of music back home serves to fill the European void, here in New Orleans it means something else entirely.
Tommy Ridgley had just died. The veteran singer and bandleader had been ill for some time and tonight's gig was to be a benefit to help him with his medical expenses. In the event it was a benefit to help with funeral expenses - and so it turned into a tribute to one of the early figures of New Orleans r'n'b. There was every chance that the Soul Queen herself, Irma Thomas, would show up. Allen Toussaint was already wandering through the crowd, George Porter of The Meters was leading the house band and Ernie K-Doe was fixing his wig. It was looking good.
For a city justifiably famous for its jazz, New Orleans's record in rhythm and blues is a rather impressive one too. Of course, the two forms are not unconnected in the Crescent City, where each relies heavily on the "second line" - a reference to those who marched behind the musicians clapping and shouting rhythmically to complement the musicians. And so, in both New Orleans jazz and r'n'b, that syncopated drive of the rhythm section kicks along, complementing the melody and giving the music its immediately recognisable New Orleans feel. Local musicians treat it as an entirely natural thing, unavailable anywhere beyond the city limits.
New Orleans rhythm and blues really hit its stride in the late 1940s. Blues shouter Roy Brown was one of the first with his proto-rock'n'roll hit, Good Rockin' Tonight, which was later covered by Presley. Professor Longhair, whose bust greets visitors to Tipitina's, recorded for Atlantic Records and did his very particular piano-based thing on hits like Bald Head and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Piano was the also the driving pulse behind the likes of Smiley Lewis, whose Blue Monday was later a smash for the first New Orleans act with serious crossover success, Fats Domino. Incredibly, his first hit, The Fat Man, arrived before the 1950s had even begun.
Behind it all were the great producers and arrangers like Dave Bartholomew, and the priceless New Orleans session men such as drummer Earl Palmer, who played on everything from Fats to Little Richard. Another important figure was Cosimo Matassa, who owned the J&M studio in the French Quarter, where just about everything was recorded. And Matassa himself is still around, now involved in the family grocery business.
Fats Domino was by far the most successful, but there were many more - Lloyd Price, Larry Williams, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Huey "Piano" Smith, Shirley and Lee head a list that might go on for ever. And as the 1950s became the 1960s and the r'n'b/rock'n'roll sounds began to get a little more soulful, New Orleans moved along with Allen Toussaint at the controls. As producer, writer and arranger Toussaint was the man behind Benny Spellman, Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey and Irma Thomas. It was a sound which had an incalculable effect on pop music - and in particular on the sound and success of the Rolling Stones. Their loyal version of Irma Thomas' Time Is On My Side was their first American top 10 hit.
Irma doesn't particularly like singing that particular song these days. She is still stung by what happened - and as much by the fact that when the Stones first toured the US, Tina Turner and not Irma Thomas was the opening act. She might have done well on the back of the Stones, but it didn't happen. She'll joke about it now, but the hurt was a real one. She's happy enough tonight though - she's singing It's Raining for Tommy Ridgley and her voice is as clear and as beautiful as it always was. Toussaint appears to play piano. Everyone is smiling at her. Everyone is in love with her. She is entirely beautiful.
Ernie K-Doe is next. Arriving like a cross between James Brown and Liberace, he wears a bright blue suit, a long black curly wig, a hundredweight of jewellery and his manicured fingernails present a real danger to the people in the front row. Toussaint wisely keeps the lid on things, as K-Doe pounds his way though his best known songs Mother-in-Law and Certain Girl. He still has it and it's a surreal moment as The Emperor of the World (as he is still known) is led regally off stage by his wife and, quite possibly, the famous mother-in-law - who must be a fair old age by now.
And to think that, while all of this is happening on Napoleon Avenue, I might just as easily have been wandering lost on Bourbon Street. Visitors take note. There is more to the Big Easy than the endless stag night on Bourbon - an entertaining spot in it own way - but a place where the music is just poured down the drains with the dregs of Hurricanes and the broken vials of brightly coloured rocket fuel. But behind all that baloney there is plenty of real Crescent City music in the air - and it's there in abundance. Step out of Bourbon and you'll find that the good times are still rolling, Irma Thomas is still the Queen and, underneath that wig, Ernie K-Doe is still the Emperor of the World.