Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy, and dazzling dance moves. Author Burt Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant—and sometimes controversial—change. Creole Soul draws us into conversations with zydeco musicians from Texas and Louisiana, most of them bandleaders, including Ed Poullard, Lawrence “Black” Ardoin, Step Rideau, Brian Jack, Jerome Batiste, Ruben Moreno, Nathan Williams Jr., Leroy Thomas, Corey Ledet, Sean Ardoin, and Dwayne Dopsie. Some of the interviewees represent the contemporary scene and are among today’s most popular performers along the Creole Corridor. Others are rooted in older French music forms and are especially well qualified to talk about zydeco’s origins. The musicians speak freely, whether discussing the death of a famed musician or describing a memorable performance, such as when Boozoo Chavis played the accordion while dripping blood on stage shortly after a freak barbeque-building accident that sliced off parts of two of his fingers. They address the influence of rap on today’s zydeco music and discuss how to pass music along to a younger generation—and how not to. They weigh the merits of the old-time zydeco clubs versus today’s casinos and African American trailrides, which come complete with horses and the loudest zydeco bands you can imagine. In Creole Soul, zydeco musicians give an unprecedented look into their lives, their music, and their culture.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of New Orleans regroup and put down roots elsewhere, many wonder what will become of one of the nation's most complex creole cultures. New Orleans emerged like Atlantis from under the sea, as the city in which some of the most important American vernacular arts took shape. Creativity fostered jazz music, made of old parts and put together in utterly new ways; architecture that commingled Norman rooflines, West African floor plans, and native materials of mud and moss; food that simmered African ingredients in French sauces with Native American delicacies. There is no more powerful celebration of this happy gumbo of life in New Orleans than Mardi Gras. In Carnival, music is celebrated along the city's spiderweb grid of streets, as all classes and cultures gather for a festival that is organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacred and profane. The authors, distinguished writers who have long engaged with pluralized forms of American culture, begin and end in New Orleans—the city that was, the city that is, and the city that will be—but traverse geographically to Mardi Gras in the Louisiana Parishes, the Carnival in the West Indies and beyond, to Rio, Buenos Aires, even Philadelphia and Albany. Mardi Gras, they argue, must be understood in terms of the Black Atlantic complex, demonstrating how the music, dance, and festive displays of Carnival in the Greater Caribbean follow the same patterns of performance through conflict, resistance, as well as open celebration. After the deluge and the finger pointing, how will Carnival be changed? Will the groups decamp to other Gulf Coast or Deep South locations? Or will they use the occasion to return to and express a revival of community life in New Orleans? Two things are certain: Katrina is sure to be satirized as villainess, bimbo, or symbol of mythological flood, and political leaders at all levels will undoubtedly be taken to task. The authors argue that the return of Mardi Gras will be a powerful symbol of the region's return to vitality and its ability to express and celebrate itself.

A travel guide for visitors on a short break or travelers who want quick information. Focuses on cities, islands and resort regions. This volume covers New Orleans.

Dive into the heart of New Orleans and whip up classic Cajun and Creole comfort food in your own kitchen and laissez les bons temps rouler. In Tremé, jazz is always in the air and something soulful is simmering on the stove. This gritty neighborhood celebrates a passion for love, laughter, friends, family and strangers in its rich musical traditions and mouth-watering Southern food. Infuse your own kitchen with a Taste of Tremé by serving up its down-home dishes and new twists on classic New Orleans favorites like: • Muffuletta Salad • Chargrilled Oysters • Crawfi sh and Corn Beignets • Shrimp and Okra Hushpuppies • Chicken and Andouille Gumbo • Roast Beef Po’ Boy • Creole Tomato Shrimp Jambalaya • Bananas Foster Including fascinating cultural facts about the music, architecture and dining that make up Tremé, this book will have your taste buds tapping to the beat of a big brass band.

In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music—a secular, drum-based tradition—captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island’s decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Aurality, Jérôme Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.

"New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories provides essays on the unparalleled recognition New Orleans has achieved as the Mecca of mealtime. Devoting each chapter to a signature cocktail, appetizer, sandwich, main course, staple, or dessert, contributors from the New Orleans Culinary Collective plate up the essence of the Big Easy through its number one export: great cooking. This book views the city's cuisine as a whole, forgetting none of its flavorful ethnic influences--French, African American, German, Italian, Spanish, and more"--Page 2 of cover.

“Rosie is my go-to when it comes to recipes.” —Angie Thomas, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up Rosie Mayes, author of I Heart Soul Food, and creator of I Heart Recipes, serves up 100+ amped-up, super soul food recipes—including fan favorites—guaranteed to bring her cousins joy! If I Heart Soul Food left you satisfied yet also hungry for more, you're going to love Super Soul Food with Cousin Rosie! Here, Rosie shares more of her comfort soul food dishes, starting with traditional southern and creole favorites and jazzing them up with her own "special sauce." Rosie organizes these recipes by type of meal and adds in side dishes, breads, drinks to sip on, as well as a chapter of over-the-top desserts that make her fans swoon! Included are some of her most sought-after fan favorites (only available online until now), including: Southern Baked Macaroni and Cheese Casserole Seafood Boil with Creole Garlic Sauce Red Velvet Biscuits This is Rosie at her best, putting satisfying, soulful spins on classic, comfort southern and creole dishes, and also including her best loved fan favorites guaranteed to please old and new fans alike.