A Critical Listener’s Guide to New Orleans: Gris-Gris as City, Guide, and Guidebook

Perplexingly, given the history of racism in New Orleans, never mind America at large, "racism", "racist", and "race" appear a total of 14 times over 256 pages in Rebennack's autobiography.
Foerster 1
Carolyn Foerster

A Critical Listener's Guide to New Orleans: Gris-Gris as City, Guide, and Guidebook

It was the late 1960s, and L.A. was bringing Mac Rebennack down. The New Orleans-born musician, having been tossed about by his own addictions, the police and penitentiary system, and his record label, was in exile, and he was miserable. Though he was working as a session musician for Mercury, he felt a fundamental dissatisfaction with the music he was making; it didn't sound like New Orleans, it didn't feel like New Orleans, and it frankly didn't measure up to New Orleans. Instead of returning to his home city, Rebennack created a microcosm of his city by creating and adopting the identity of Dr. John, "the last of the best gris-gris men", whom he first brought to being on the 1968 record Gris-Gris. As Dr. John, Rebennack manufactured a imaginary version of New Orleans that he populated, enchanted, and vivified according to his personal desire to bring New Orleans to the masses. Over eight tracks spanning around 36 minutes, he effectively built a second city aurally through explicit narratives and assertions in his lyrics, as well as through largely instrumental tracks that give a voice to the city even if that voice does not speak. Yet his creation was not born into a vacuum, nor was its conception immaculate by any means: the album and the city it produced joined both with narratives and behaviors associated with minstrelsy and the demonization of voodoo and ultimately with the literary tradition of guidebooks. Rebennack, along with the other musicians in his band, produced Gris-Gris. Gris-Gris in turn went on to produce, and reproduce. Not bad for 36 minutes—or, perhaps, worse than expected.
The New Orleans of Dr. John is a conjured city as Johair Jabir's Mahalia Jackson is a conjured presence. Jabir follows Theophus Smith's theory of conjuring culture, in which conjuring is "a form of magic intending to (1) 'invoke or summon (up) a spirit—in this case Mahalia Jackson's—as in sorcery; (2) to effect by the use of 'magical' arts; and (3) to summon up an image or idea as an act of imagination" (Jabir, 653). Jabir augments his understanding of Smith's conception of conjuring, adding "to Smith's emphasis on image and imagination the 'spirit' of sound and improvisation" (Jabir, 653). Mahalia's songs continue, even after she has died, to,
…[perform] a New Orleans musical sensibility that... [bears] witness to the black folk religious expressions of conjure and magic, both of which have thrived in New Orleans, and in their conjuring act, the songs reconstitute an African American community of resilience and hope in the face of the state's historic neglect of black lives (Jabir, 654).

Mahalia's performance "teaches us that there is more to that [New Orleans] sensibility than the often cited forms of music associated with the city's industry of pleasure" (Jabir, 654). Her music can conjure an image of New Orleans that departs from one that would focus solely on Bourbon Street and continue to constitute New Orleans as a place to visit, not a place to live. The image of New Orleans that Dr. John conjures on Gris-Gris is not quite so wholesome: his New Orleans is a city shot through with the supernatural and the uncanny over which he presides. Still, Mac Rebennack as Dr. John is a conjuror, and not just because he utters incantations. Over the course of the album, he performs a certain musical sensibility that recalls and evokes—that conjures—an image of New Orleans that represents the city as a hotbed of supernatural activity. Thus his 'imaginary city' is not by any means false, nor is it unique: it is a permutation of a certain conception of New Orleans and its connection to voodoo and magic that appears, and has appeared, for almost a century and a half.
Both creating and listening to Gris-Gris is an exercise in the production of aural space. When Rebennack lays down tracks, he is simultaneously laying the foundations of his city as constituted through music. It is not enough to bring the music of New Orleans to America. Rather, one must bring America to New Orleans through music, music that not only indexes New Orleans but also actively sustains and creates it. Gris-Gris provides one with a spatial experience aurally. The instrumental tracks constitute the voice of the city, which is simultaneously the city itself. Its identity is woven out of the exclamations, whispers, shouts, and sly remarks of each song. On "Danse Kalinda Ba Doom", flutes, tambourines, organs, bells, drums, repeated call and responses of nonsense syllables (or syllables that would be nonsense to the average English speaking listener) trip through one's ears. This city vibrates with life, but life made shrill and hurried, more a whirlwind than a breeze. "Croker Courtbullion", conversely, bounces along in a gritty haze. It introduces an electric guitar and jazz piano that present the most detailed account of this part of the cacophonous city. Voices hiss, cluck, howl, yowl, miaow, and repeat, "Ya Ya Ya Ya..." and another indecipherable phrase as flutes float above them. These voices are not human voices; they are uncanny, they invite shivers, they even assault the listener before ceding to the drums that conclude the song.
On "Danse Fambeaux," the voices that engage in call in response are largely unintelligible. Dr. John himself presides over the song, though what precisely he is saying, while his voice is completely discernable, is as yet inscrutable. At times phrases jump out: "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick," for instance. A chorus supports Dr. John at all times as he spits and moans through the song. At times they simply sing the syllable "Ah," at others seem to be saying, "Snake a la gris-gris, kalimbo kalimbo, snake a la gris-gris, kalimbo fambeaux". The lyrics themselves are more compelling for their illegibility than for what they might read. The citizens of the city speak an eerie dialect in which words are interspersed with hisses and growls, or perhaps the hisses and growls are punctuated by words. The number of voices, if not the number of singers, is clearly large; the populace joins together in support of Dr. John. Perhaps they are his followers who dog his footsteps as he weaves through the imaginary New Orleans he has conjured. He is never alone, his power constantly affirmed by the citizens who surround him.
The citizens, however, are not exactly people. They are rather instruments, instrumental in that they are both necessary to providing the walls of sound that construct the buildings and lay the streets, and in that Dr. John utilizes them as tools with which to conjure his city. An instrument "is simultaneously a material object, a sound, and a traveling symbol, and each of these dimensions can be interpreted in terms of voice," as it both articulates identity and subjectivity as well as the music it emits (Sakakeeny, 154; 157). In Gris-Gris, though there may be moments of polyphony, there are never actually that many voices. Multiplicity is manufactured. Dr. John's New Orleans has many mouths, but the same voice issues from every throat. The city itself has a personality and a voice that Dr. John gives voice to: as the music progresses, it sidles by all number of individuals and super- or sub- human entities. It seems almost overcrowded at times, teeming with sounds that index citizens. It is a question, then, of whose voice Dr. John gives to this New Orleans. He is the orchestrator, the enunciator, the conjuror—it is his voice that underlies all the sounds of the city, either as progenitor or master. If agency and subjectivity emerge from instruments, but it is ultimately Dr. John's agency and subjectivity to which his album attests, and, indeed, constitutes. This is his city, his story, his voice, and he advertises his power as much as he constructs it through his music and his explicit lyrical narratives.
As a character, Dr. John begins his self-construction with the first track on the album, "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya." The song is, in a sense, a musical résumé simultaneously detailing and asserting Dr. John's magical abilities and authority. He himself refers to it as the band's "theme song" which "framed a mental picture of an imaginary New Orleans and put our main character, Dr. John, front and center" (Rebennack, 143). Lyrically, he informs his audience that he is "the last of the best" of the gris-gris men, that a great many people rely upon him, and that he can cure whatever ills one may suffer, be they physical ailments or romantic woes. Whether or not Dr. John is actually singing his laundry list of services is difficult to say; he barely changes pitch, and when he does the change is not dramatic. Rather, he mumbles and moans his way through the song, leaving the real singing to a chorus of women whom he engages in various calls and responses.
These women, along with the relatively minimal instrumentation, support him both musically and ideologically. Their voices also lend Dr. John a way to authenticate his claim to authority. They are essentially his instruments, both in the sense that they back him up musically and in that he uses their feminine voices to support his masculine magical power. What is a man who says he can control women without women? Without their voices in the song, with only Dr. John's voice moaning out his list of abilities, how does he substantiate his claims? His power lies in the susceptibility of women to his seductive gris-gris voodoo which the listener can hear in their ghostly voices responding to his music, his command. The women, although they sing, do not actually seem to have their own voices; they are not speaking or singing for themselves, but on behalf of Dr. John. Their singing is slurred, lugubrious even, and they only ever repeat, "Gris gris gumbo ya ya" or, toward the end, "Ah"s and "Ooh"s. Though he also sings/mumbles in the chorus, his role is almost that of a conductor or guide. He punctuates the women's "Gris-gris," with "Hey now," "Mm," and similar sentiments or sounds. It is almost as though he is conjuring up the women's voices, bringing them into the song, pulling forth their voices with a little encouragement, before returning to the verses where he continues to assert his power.
The women's voices constitute an aural posse, or, perhaps, harem. As Dr. John repeatedly asserts his control over women's emotions, and advertises his ability to bequeath upon you this particular power, the women's voice lend authenticity to his statement. The line "You've got love troubles / you've got a bad women you can't control," is particularly telling. Dr. John, if his song is to be believed, has no love troubles, and can control whatever "bad" women he might encounter.
Dr. John returns to his self-characterization and self-aggrandizement as a powerful and seductive force at the very end of his album, so as his personality effectively acts as the gate through which one enters and exits. In "Walk On Guilded Splinters" [sic], Dr. John testifies, even more strongly than in 'Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya', to his power, his willingness to be vicious, and the way in which he can enchant and curse the world around him. He asserts his power over the citizens of his New Orleans repeatedly: "Some people think they jive me, but I know they muse be crazy," and later, "Pride begins to fade, and y'all feel my malice". He pronounces, "J'suis le Grand Zombi, my yellow belt of choison, ain't afraid of no tom cat, fill my brains with poison," and later, "I rolled out my coffin, drink poison in my chalice". Though only semi-coherent, the sense of the verse is certain: I, Dr. John, am one powerful voodoo priest, witch doctor, root doctor, or whatever he is. He is not to be denied; else he warns he will "put gris-gris on your doorstep, soon you'll be in the gutter, melt your heart like butter, a-a-and I can make you stutter". Dr. John is the King of the Zulu and will suffer no enemies, whom he either curses or hangs. He concludes his monologue with an invitation to Coco Robichaux and her extended family, as well as "padre Diablo". The album ends with Dr. John leading his followers into a sonic bayou, traipsing across the guilded splinters, whatever those may be.
It is curious that Dr. John is the only man who appears across the entirety of the album. While male voices may engage in calls and responses and appear in the chants that punctuate the largely instrumental tracks, Dr. John is vocally unchallenged (thus essentially unchallenged) in his position as a masculine authority. In order to establish himself as a distinctly masculine authority, he bolsters his mumbling incantations with the voices and stories of women. Incidentally, the "real" Dr. John was "busted in the 1840s for having a voodoo operation and possibly a whorehouse" (Rebennack, 141). He may well be a pimp, or, as the historical Dr. John supposedly had "over 50 children and 15 wives," perhaps they are his wives. Regardless of their status as wives or employees (or both), they are subservient to him. He is in control of them because he is in control of their stories as well as the voices he gives to them in the stories; their subjective experiences are products of his agency as he asserts it in making music.
It is also necessary to consider that Mac Rebennack, even when he embodied Dr. John, is white, and that the power dynamic between him and the African American back up singers do not arise solely because of patriarchal gender norms. He objectifies them and utilizes their voices as instruments with which he might create and promote his imaginary city, voices made all the more exotic (hence alluring and powerful) because the women are black. As bell hooks says,
When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual preferences affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other (23).

In the case of Gris-Gris, this alternative playground is both the imaginary city and the bodies of the female backup singers. Their bodies/voices are loci of intimate encounters mediated by Dr. John, both in that he is the mediator of their embodiment in sound and in that he brings the voices of the Other into his music and delivers them along with his version of New Orleans. Moreover, it is only certain Others who are conjured into Dr. John's city, for, as hooks says, "The acknowledged other must assume recognizable forms" and the women must be recognizable as performing distinct and limited roles (hooks, 26). The imaginary city's voice is a single voice, though the women contribute their mouths. They allure through the seduction of their voices—sirens of sorts—and through their evocation of the "primitivism" championed by imperial nostalgia (hooks, 25). These women, as Others, are objects in the "cultural marketplace" in which "the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive, as holding the secret that will allow those who venture and dare to break with the cultural anhedonia" (hooks, 26). They are the harbingers of supernatural pleasures, controlled by Dr. John, a pleasure which is the promise of an encounter with Otherness, which is "clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening" (hooks, 26). In his imaginary city, the voices of black women synechdocically symbolize the potential for extraordinary experiences. They are providers, employees, even whores—and this does not only apply to the backup singers, but to the voodoo queens as well.
Likewise, when he narrates the stories about the "voodoo queens" Mama Roux and Julia Jackson, the queens themselves do not speak. He is telling their stories, in control of the way in which he presents them and their exploits. They may be queens, but he is the one who interpolates them as such. Their power and status is contingent upon him just as they are dependent upon him to give them places in his imaginary city.
"Mama Roux" is a curious amalgamation of voodoo with second lining traditions. She demands recognition as a voodoo queen, "the queen of the little red, white, and blue". She references spy boys, the youngest members of Mardi Gras Indian tribes who were sent ahead of the band in order to perform reconnaissance as to the movements of rival tribes. However, it would seem that this spy boy announces her arrival: "Queen is comin'… better not get in the way, got the second line fever today". Thus she recalls to the listener's mind voodoo queens and their uncanny power as well as the tradition of second line brass bands. The spy boy is "a pheasant for the medicine man," which suggests he may be, as it were, broken down and sold for parts, specifically his bones. Is he the spy boy for another queen, another Indian tribe? Either way, Mama Roux admonishes him: "You know better than to mess with me".
She is simultaneously a voodoo queen and an Indian chief, as she shows in her aggression toward the "spy boy(s)" of her rivals. It would also seem that she is instructing subservient members of her tribe: "If you see a spy boy, sittin' in the bush, mess 'em on the head, give him a push, get out the dishes, get out the pans, oh he's a pheasant for the medicine man". In more a more conventional cliché, Mama Roux is saying that the spy boy's goose is cooked, but tying the threat to voodoo. Though she may be asserting her power on the streets of New Orleans as a queen and a chief, it is through Dr. John that she even walks the streets of the imaginary city to begin with.
Dr. John's second voodoo queen is Queen Julia Jackson, who appears on 'Jump Shady', which provides the most linear of the narratives that appear on Gris-Gris. Half folktale, half eulogy, the song is a reworking of one of Rebennack's grandfather's favorite tunes (Unterberger). It depicts a "treacherous lady," Jump Sturdy, who emerged from "the swamps like a crazy fool" and calls down lightning from the skies by raising her hands in the middle of the day at St. John's bayou. She achieves fame among the people who "say she used to dance with the fish," which might suggest she can breathe underwater, and "say she juggled fire in a dish". Jump Sturdy somehow "got tangled up with Queen Julia Jackson," whose very name indicates her power and bodes ill for Jump Sturdy. They encountered one another "Down on Melba, meeting near Rattle Street," whereupon "Queen Julia Jackson dropped a Zozola brick and Jump Sturdy died with her soul in defeat". Jump Sturdy's swan song provides the listener with another voodoo queen as well as a sense of directionality—out of the swamp, on the bayou of St. John, Melba Street, and Rattle Street all appear on one's map. It also deepens the sense that voodoo is a formidable and deadly force, used to assert territorial dominance and personal superiority.
The voodoo queens of Gris-Gris, Mama Roux and Julia Jackson, are instruments through which Dr. John can both define what voodoo is, especially with reference to its potential to do violent harm. Each of the women is powerful in her own right, but her own right own extends to other women and boys. They do not challenge the position of any male, never mind Dr. John, in his position as a great gris-gris man. If they murder, they murder other women who would usurp their territory or command; if they command, they direct their imperium toward spy boys. They do not address the listener directly, as Dr. John does, but rather appear on the streets of his imaginary city, their narratives consumed by his voice. Their bodies and voices are his.
Not only on the album itself but also during the tours that accompanied Gris-Gris did Dr. John manifest and perpetuate the power dynamic between himself and women, even powerful women. During the elaborate stage performances with which Dr. John accompanied his concerts, the bodies of black women occupied interstitial space between aural and embodied instrumentality. A woman named Kalinda, who performed a snake dance to the song "Danse Kalinda Ba Doom", was perhaps the primary occupant of this territory. Her performance hearkens back both to early sensationalist accounts of orgiastic dancing at voodoo rituals in the 1700-1800s and earlier to the snake-charming women of the sideshows of traveling minstrel shows who populate newspaper advertisements and articles from the 1890s.
Shane Bernard and Julia Girouard trace the evolution of the song "Colinda", a popular Cajun dance song, through its various permutations in various parts of the Americas. "Colinda", whence Kalinda derived her name, was not actually a girl's name: "Prior to the twentieth century… the word referred strictly to the black Creole dance, the song's inspiration. The lyrics "Allons danser, colinda" thus originally meant "Let's dance the Colinda" (a dance of African origin), not "Let's dance, Colinda" (a girl's name)" (Bernard and Girouard, 38). The dance to which they refer, while it still existed in the Caribbean when Kalinda danced onstage for Dr. John, "no longer exists in Louisiana, having disappeared, apparently, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century," as it had been outlawed in 1843 (Bernard and Girouard, 42; Sueiro, 3). Some sources from the 1700-1800s connected it with voodoo cults, others with zombiism in Haiti (Bernard and Girouard, 45). In some cases, a single woman danced; in others, there were two lines, one of men, one of women.
Regardless of the composition of the dancers, there was one constant: it was sensual to the point of sexual, and often sexual to the point of lasciviousness (Bernard and Girouard, 46). The dance of a single woman, later joined by a man, which seems to be the most similar to Kalinda's, was positively outrageous to Morea de Saint-Méry:
This dance has an air which is specially consecrated to it and wherein the measure is strongly marked. The proficiency of the dancer consists in the perfection with which she can move her his and the lower part of her back while preserving the rest of her body in a kind of immobility, that even the slightest movement of the arms that balance the two ends of a handkerchief or her petticoat does not make her lose. A dancer approaches her; all of a sudden he makes a leap into the air and lands in measured time so as almost to touch her. He draws back, he jumps again, and excites her by the most seductive play. The dance becomes enlivened and soon it represents a tableau, of which the entire action, at first voluptuous, afterwards becomes lascivious. (Nettel 1946:60, quoted in Bernard and Girourard, 45).

The dance, while it does not employ a snake as a prop, was at times performed to songs that referenced snakes. Lacfadio Hearn, whom Rebennack cites as one of his most influential sources, both witnessed and described songs about the Calinda. Commenting on his observation, Hearn says,
I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called "line of beauty" serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, some thing of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia? (Gould et al.,100).

Thus Kalinda's snake-like movements as she appeared in Dr. John's performance were indexical of black women dancing during the 1800s whose movements were sexual and subversive in a way that directly challenged the authority of white masters. She, as one of Dr. John's instruments, brings a sense of secure transgression to his performance. Her body continues to associate Dr. John with the control of black women's sexuality. She is the entertainment within his imaginary city, a spectacle, an object of fascination.
Kalinda's snake dancing connected her not only to the dance that was her namesake but also to minstrelsy. As the dancing and the music to which women danced the Calinda were considered irreverent, indecent, and potentially rebellious, Louisiana outlawed it in 1843, though serpentine dancing appeared on another stage: the sideshow. That snake-dancing women would only appear in the sideshow indicates that they were black, as a white band monopolized performance space in the main tent. N. J. Doris' sideshow boasted of a "Miss Julien, snake charmer," in 1895; Walter L. Main had "Rena Stillwell, snake charmer, with snakes, armadillos, and alligators" in 1892, as well as mention of a "den of fifty snakes" in1893, though without a hint as to whether Rena was present as well; "Princess Julia, snake charmer," was employed at the Great Wallace Show in 1893. (Abbott and Seroff, 373, 379). Curio museums also advertised their snake charmers, such as Kohl & Middleton's Clark Street Musee, which announced, "The curio feature this week will be Nancy Garrison, a negress with long hair… and a bevy of snake charmers" in 1895. On a more sobering, less theatrical note, W. W. Newell's 1889 "Reports of Voodoo Worship in Hayti and Louisiana" attests that the Devil "is endowed with the shape of a snake, because that form was supposed to be natural to African negroes" (44).
Snakes were creatures of evil, or at least of malicious potential—Garden of Eden, anyone?—and, when used as props in sideshows, came to associate the black women performers with hypersexuality and base morality, never mind with the horrifically lurid accounts of voodoo worship in the Caribbean and Louisiana. While snake dances or the appearance of serpents in voodoo rituals are attested to in newspaper reports dating back to the mid 19th century, they by no means died out as the decades ticked past. The connection between black women, snakes, and occultism or voodoo continues today along with the commodification of voodoo.
For instance, Lonely Planet's guidebook to New Orleans, capitalizing upon exotic representations of Spiritual churches, tourism, and interest in voodoo, provides the reader with an official voodoo tour that stops at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple. The Priestess Miriam is pictured in the guidebook "wearing traditional African dress and holding a large snake in front of her," and under her leadership the temple offers, among other things, "exotic snake dance rituals" (Jacobs, 325). Voodoofest, an annual event organized by the New Orleans company Voodoo Authentica, boasts of "handmade Voodoo dolls, potions, gris-gris, spiritual consultations, and an 'authentic ancestral Voodoo ritual and snake dance at dusk'" (Long, Perceptions of Voodoo, 95). The snake dance and Voodoo rite are ostensibly as genuine and true to tradition as are the voodoo dolls—that is, they are true to a tradition that sensationalizes, commodifies, and exoticises it.
Ironically, given their name, the New Orleans Saints also participated in strengthening the connection between voodoo, snake dances, and Spiritual churches that originated in its theatrical form in minstrelsy. They once hired a voodoo priestess, "'snake and all,'" to perform a ceremony intended to rid the Saints of their deplorable luck. The tradition of snake dances conducted in theatrical voodoo rituals that are for public consumption is exactly that—a tradition. Their appeal lies neither in their authenticity nor in any power they actually possess within voodoo but in the fact that they are literally spectacular and, at this point, expected. Rebennack and Kalinda were two more spectators and participants who reinforced the connection between snakes, minstrelsy, black women, sexuality, and voodoo.
The superiority of putting on a spectacular performance as opposed to factual or scholastic accuracy was typical not only of snake dancing within minstrelsy, but also within minstrelsy as a whole. Indeed, it was more toward minstrelsy and theatricality that Rebennack leaned when he conceived of his live performances:
I knew enough about the old minstrel shows that when I put together the original Dr. John act, I used a lot of the shtick they did. My entrance onstage with a puff of smoke was inspired by the minstrel magicians; I lifted their snake-handling routine by having one of the dancers, Kalinda, come out dancing with a snake wrapped around her body. Didimus choreographed the dance, but I came up with the snake idea from what I had heard from my grandfather and all the other old-timers. I also had Kalinda do a limbo under a limbo stick that was set afire, another old spectacle reborn. What I wanted was entertainment for the eyes as well as the ears, and I knew the minstrels were the best there was at laying down a show. It was a kick to bring back that idea of showmanship to the rock and roll era, where at the time there was little old-style show biz happening.
Along with minstrels, I had my other sources. When I did my first gigs with the Dr. John band, I looked up some of the older Indian cats in New Orleans and bought some of the stuff they didn't use no more. Smiling George of the Wild Squatoolas and a few other cats from the Creole Wild West sold me some Indian suits. One woman, Sadie Hayes, made me a suit of alligator, snake, and lizard skin with chamois in between to hook it all up. When I put on that uniform, I looked like Frankenstein coming down the street (145-46).

Likewise the props Rebennack uses as he physically embodies Dr. John that index his power and create an extension of his imaginary city in a concert venue. The clothes make the man, so to speak—and he made Dr. John out of alligator skin along with various other props. As Dr. John's official website presently attests,
The band members wore flowing robes, a dancer gyrated, incense burned, and Dr. John himself appeared in full regalia—face-paint, feathered headdress, and a kind of voodoo walking stick. It mattered little that few concertgoers at the time were hip to the fact that Rebennack's get-up drew from the elaborate costumes worn by the Mardi Gras Indian tribes. The visual impact matched the other-worldly effect of the music—loose, swaying jams that invited listeners to loose themselves in the magic of the second-line beat.

Berry, Foose, and Jones add,
Mac took the role seriously. Costuming became a backstage ritual. He burned candles and incense to set the mood and, like a warrior preparing for battle, suited up in stages. On his head he wore a turban or crown laced with plumes of red, orange, and aqua; he put yellow, blue, and red grease paint on his face, with sprinklings of glitter dust. He wore long robes with tassels, and around his neck hung necklaces, bones, crosses, and a small drum on a cord. He cut a striking figure in all those feathers and colors—throwing glitter dust into the audience (BFJ, 205).

Yet Rebennack's performance was not strictly limited to what he did on stage. His entire act, his persona, was constructed around sonic blackface, that is, his tendency and ability to produce what Berry, Foose, and Jones refer to as music that was "authentically black in sound and style," despite the fact that he is white (202). Berry et al. attest that, at the beginning of his musical career, "Rebennack developed a rapport with blacks; his easy-going manner had a soothing effect upon those around him, and he was always the first with a joke or kind word of encouragement. Their narrative maps onto hook's conception of imperialist nostalgia:
The desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it establishes, a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one's image but to become the Other" (hooks, 25).

Berry, Foose, and Jones play directly into this narrative in their description of Rebennack's relationships with black musicians in the time before he became Dr. John (202):
Through such associations [with black musicians] Mac Rebennack acquired a dialect infused by black slang; it was far removed from that of his family environment, yet a speech pattern not without eloquent rhythms. Singer Tommy Ridgley recalled: 'We usta always say that Mac acted like a black dude, his actions, his talk, 'cause he was a real hip talker.' But when he started picking up checks for session work at the black union, some musicians resented him. Mac called it 'race prejudice in reverse'. Harold Battiste viewed his situation sympathetically. 'He got treated really badly by some blacks. He paid a lot of dues to earn that amount of black image he wanted.'

Battiste frames Rebennack's "situation" in economic terms: he paid this much in indignities, experience, time, effort, et cetera, and in return he received a "black image" that he consciously sought. Rebennack was not there to reinforce racism intentionally, as Eddie Hynes attests, for "[Rebennack] didn't bother what color you were; he was going to talk to you in front of everybody… he was always willing to listen" (Berry et al., 202). In short, over time he acquired the ability to perform in sonic blackface and the required endorsement to continue his performances. Without it, he would not be able to adopt the personal of Dr. John, a black man. That he sounded black, and was heard to be black, was necessary for the success of his imaginary city.
Rebennack's performances as Dr. John and as a white musician who sounded black implicate him in the minstrelsy tradition, as does his concern with the way he sounds or appears over the verifiable accuracy of his claims. Indeed, he was not making music nor operating within a genre that called for factual accuracy, but rather one that demanded theatricality. When he conjures the city, he is interested in conjuring his version of New Orleans, not a blueprint on an urban planner's desk. John Blair dismisses accuracy as an unremunerative manner in which to approach the shows:
One frequent basis for assessing minstrels, 'reality', offers little explanatory credibility, despite the eagerness of Hans Nathan and others to assess blackface characters in relation to actual American blacks. The shows were above all stage creations whose primary motivation was to entertain successfully while drawing on only the most sketchy and distant evocations of life under slavery (Blair 56).

Indeed, Blair argues, "blackface minstrels were created in the USA to entertain white audiences with little or no direct knowledge of the blacks who were being portrayed in performance. Hence their racial stereotypes both exploited and encouraged white self-congratulation wherever blackface was performed" (Blair, 61). Likewise, Dr. John emerged in the USA to entertain the "California kids," as Harold Battiste referred to them (Berry et al., 203):
The California kids, they're always looking for something to believe in. So we'll make Dr. John the new guru. We'll make him this mysterious character, and these people out here will go crazy for him. And they'll be ready to worship him. We had a big plan to sell gris-gris in stores, and all the paraphernalia that went with practicing the art of witchcraft.

Dr. John's performances, character, and act were explicitly aimed at entertainment and commodification, not education. On the whole, Rebennack's performances as Dr. John, both on the record and at actual shows, were stage creations meant to entertain, not necessarily to educate in a way that would receive approbation in a classroom. Generically, Gris-Gris belongs not to a tradition of scholarship but rather one of journalism or tourist literature specific to New Orleans.
One of Rebennack's largest influences and sources of information was Lafcadio Hearn, a journalist from whom we have already heard concerning the Calinda dance (cf. Gordon, Thompson). Thompson presents a rather innocuous portrait of Hearn: he was "five foot three, a one-eye Greek who spent most of his life being terrified by ghosts. [He] spent a decade in New Orleans, 1878—1888, and so peopled his period writings and journalism with his impressions of the spectral city that, to his readership, those impressions became reality, sinking so deep into the national subconscious that, long after Hearn was dead and forgotten, his descriptions lingered on" (102). Gordon, however, reveals the darker side of Hearn's narrative and the narrative he propagated. It was most likely Hearn who visited Lake Pontchartrain in 1884 in the name of journalistic rigor seeking the repulsive yet fascinating experience of witnessing Voodoo rites on St. John's Eve. He depicts the celebrants as "Negroes romping like children" who received from the torchlight "a grotesqueness to their figures as curious as it was entertaining… Their shadows stretched out over the rushes and reeds of the swamp, and their faces… in effect looked wild enough to satisfy any lover of the wild and mysterious'" (quoted in Gordon, 767, 2012).
To Hearn, Rebennack's Dr. John was known as Jean Montanée. Hearn was scandalized by Montanée's net worth of at least $50,000 and especially his 15 wives, one of whom was white. He "positions this white woman as Montanée's ultimate accomplishment, [but] his narrative seeks to restrict miscegenation—at least involving white women—to the South's 'lowest class'" (ibid., 779). Hearn's Montanée was a rebel, a powerful man sexually and financially; coupled with his alleged status as a Senegalese prince, he cut an impressive figure. Add in some voodoo and a possible family connection to the Rebennacks, and Dr. John began to come into being (Gordon, 776; Rebennack, 140-141).
As for his knowledge about voodoo, hoodoo, and gris-gris, Rebennack recalls, "I first picked up some knowledge about gris-gris from my sister, Bobbie, who was into it from a distance—she had an expert's library on the subject—and from David Lastie who worked at the Bop Shop Record Store" (160). It seems that, even beyond his immediate circle of family and acquaintances, Rebennack is in good company. Rod Davis, in his discussion of a woman named Pam who shares Rebennack's affinity for voodoo, explains:
Yet [Pam] knew very little more about the religion that did her peers, or at that time did I, and for good reason: voodoo had been driven so far underground you couldn't find much about it even if you wanted to expend the energy. Only the most esoteric of African Studies scholars had written about it seriously. In the popular culture virtually nothing was available, and what was, was wrong. Most books purporting to be about American voodoo were either luridly racist, such as Robert Tallant's Voodoo in New Orleans, a ubiquitous and unfortunate presence in French Quarter bookstores, or poorly researched compendia of alleged hexes and rites (x-xi).

Rebennack, like Pam, encountered materials that established and perpetuated an exoticized, sensationalized, and racist narrative concerning New Orleanean voodoo.
Rebennack's other sources of information were David Lastie and Lastie's mother. From them Rebennack learned the history of Mother Catherine Seals, a reverend mother who assisted women in dire circumstances and who practiced a curious syncretism that Rebennack interprets as "half evangelical Christian, half New Orleans Indian…and of course she mixed a lot of Catholic saint worship in there. Mother Seals healed people in her church through the laying on of hands, and by a mystical extraction of objects from people's bodies" (Rebennack, 161). Rebennack, while he shows a deep respect for Mother Seals and other reverend mothers, was inclined more toward making and using goofer dust, "a combination of dirt from a graveyard, gunpower, and grease from them bells [of the St. Roch cemetery]" which one could use to blind or curse one's enemies (Rebennack, 162). He was also fascinated by "another kind of spiritual-church faith healer," Prophet Greene, who "wasn't the genuine spiritual article; what he did represent was a hustling offshoot of the real thing," and ran a lucrative show that combined elements of minstrelsy, straight up fraud, and a religious revival (Rebennack, 163). Rebennack was impressed by the spectacle of the man himself—he wore gigantic diamonds—and by the show he put on, which was entertaining if still fraudulent (ibid.).
Rebennack's education would continue in the early 1970s. He, along with Boots Toups, his wife Oneida, Jack Richardson, and two reverend mothers, opened a temple named Dr. John's Temple of Voodoo in New Orleans. Other reverend mothers in the community approached Rebennack as the decade progressed and insisted on educating him in what the spiritual church and voodoo were really about. He admits, "I had known only a little about the tradition before the reverend mothers began to school me," ostensibly what he had gleaned from his sister's library and interactions with the Lasties (Rebennack, 160). The type of information he received from his sister's library and the reverend mothers, then, would seem to be of different genres.
As Rebennack's education by the reverend mothers of New Orleans did not begin until the early '70s, at least two years too late to have an impact upon Gris-Gris. Thus it did not reproduce knowledge about voodoo or New Orleans and disseminate it, but instead reconstituted a particular version of New Orleans haunted by a particular brand of entertainment that was heavily indebted to inaccurate, racist, and stereotypical depictions of the city and African Americans. It is interesting that Rebennack is quick to defend his use of what may be seen as voodoo imagery by appealing to the authority of reverend mothers. His performance "was done in the spirit of respect, he said, not merely as a show-biz gimmick. 'I'd even talked to the reverend mothers and some of those old gris-gris scientists in New Orleans about whether it was cool to do this,' he said. 'I'm too superstitious to be doing something that would jeopardize anyone. Music is too much of a spiritual thing to have bad come of it'" (Lichtenstein and Danker, 148). His concern is for voodoo, not the potential for perpetuating racism that would seem to accompany reviving acts derived directly from minstrelsy.
Rebennack's access to journalistic sources and his use of minstrelsy as a large component of his performance locate Gris-Gris in what would seem to be very odd company for a "voodoo rock" album, the company of guidebooks. Gris-Gris, while it may be unique sonically, is closely connected to a peculiar subspecies of literature: the guidebook, specifically a guidebook to New Orleans. The album acts as a guidebook to the listener, both constituting the location in which one finds oneself and leading one through it, song by song, measure by measure. Dr. John is one's guide, one's informant, one's questionably reliable narrator. He leads his listeners through an uncanny realm, guiding them by their ears. He mediates and interprets the mythical landscape one explores with him and through him, just as a guidebook mediates one's experience of a destination and regulates one's spatial movements.
Guidebooks to New Orleans boast of a litany of generic conventions specific to the area, and have since the first ones were published. Though Gris-Gris occupies a different medium, it is implicated in the tradition, which began with the Federal Writer's Project during the Great Depression. Lyle Saxon, the writer in charge of Louisiana's contribution to the Federal Writers' Project, oversaw the creation of the Louisiana Guide, the City Guide to New Orleans, and Gumbo Ya-Ya, which was not a guidebook but an exposition of Louisianan folklore. Gumbo Ya-Ya, says Jacobs, "portrays the antebellum period as Louisiana's golden age, the plantation as paradise, and Blacks as buffoons" (316). In the City Guide to New Orleans, Spiritual churches constitute "folk culture and local color… the leaders and members represent a type of folk religion, portrayed as 'exotic,' a 'quaint amusement,' and, in some instances, even 'outlandish'" (Jacobs, 316, quoting Hirsch 1990).
The guide contains specific descriptions of worship at the churches of Mother Kate Francis, Mother Hyde, and Father Dupont which continually belittle and exoticise the Masses, especially through the exaggerated use of Black dialect, emphasis on emotionalism, and depiction of certain unorthodox (to say the least) rituals. Mother Francis feeds off of and exploits the emotional involvement of the crowd, which intensifies with the singing of hymns, clapping of hands, and stomping of feet (Jacobs, 317). Mother Hyde's "movements are seen as eerie… the worship includes rituals such as prophecy that fall outside most mainstream churches" (Jacobs, 317). She is a "'ghostlike figure'" who weaves through the crowd, preaching and eventually prophesying, and it is suggested that she is particularly interested in the monetary gains she might make, as she bestows a special blessing upon a donator (Jacobs, 317).
Father Dupont is perhaps the most luridly, and seemingly inaccurately, portrayed. His service contains a variety of "worship so emotional that some gestures appear 'indecent,'" and provides the tourist-reader with a glimpse of "the hallmark of Louisiana folk culture: voodoo and hoodoo" (Jacobs, 317). The guide quotes Fr. Dupont thus: "Y'all know Friday is our hoodoo night! Amen! Sunday is prayer night, when y'all come jes to pray. Ya also come heah on Wednesday night to pray, but Monday and Friday is the hoodoo days" (Jacobs, 318). Such days consist of prayer for one's enemies, though the language is couched in such thick dialect that it appears that he exhorts his congregation to pray for the destruction of their enemies, who "'ain't prayin' fo nuthin' good 'bout ya,'" instead of praying for one's enemies as one would given Matthew 5:43-48 or Luke 6:27-28.
Though some of the racism has died down, tour guides to New Orleans have retained their emphasis on the supernatural as a primary draw to the city. Barreling forward in time to the present day, the introduction to the Lonely Planet Guide to New Orleans reads, in part, almost like Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya: "New Orleans seduces its visitors. It casts its spell Uptown in the spotted shade of a live oak tree and again downtown within the worn stucco of a Creole courtyard, slipping voodoo potions into sweet tasting cocktails, casually dropping anecdotes about the past" (Downs and Edge 2000:11, quoted Jacobs, 325). Is this not what Dr. John does—cast spells, slip potions, hearken back to a mythical past? And is this not a form of seduction, a pleasurable tugging at one's sleeve that promises inclusion on the playground of an imaginary city in which one can encounter the Other?
Guidebooks to New Orleans shape the city in the mind of their readers just as Gris-Gris shapes New Orleans in the mind of its listeners. Rebennack's New Orleans—perhaps it is properly Dr. John's New Orleans—as he constructs it on Gris-Gris is, above all, a mythicohistorical city. Gris-Gris acts as a guidebook to the listener, both constituting the location in which one finds oneself and leading one through it, song by song, measure by measure. Dr. John is one's guide, one's informant, one's questionably reliable narrator. He leads one through his world, and in the leading, creates the way through an uncanny realm, guiding them by their ears. Like the guidebooks, Rebennack shows his listeners and concert-goers phenomena that render African Americans who are associated with voodoo one way or another ridiculous, fraudulent, and sinful. For the early guidebooks, this took the form of a church service conceived of as a spectacular event at which the spiritual director seemingly encouraged his congregation to indulge in the horrors of paganism. For Rebennack, the snake dance, with its connection to minstrelsy and the exoticization and even demonization of black women accomplishes a similar task. Likewise, as the guidebook writers reproduce inaccurate information about New Orleans or voodoo as a religion while leading their readers through the city, it is likely that Rebennack himself only had access to terribly skewed representations of the history of New Orleans and voodoo. Guidebooks lead; but they also lead on. Gris-Gris is no exception.
If Rebennack's intention was to bring his New Orleans into the American consciousness in a manner that rivaled the influence of Lacfadio Hearn's, reviews of Gris-Gris written in the half century since the album was released would suggest that he accomplished just that. His imaginary city, conjured musically and through his stage performances, came to constitute an aural exposition of an exotic and thoroughly enchanted New Orleans. Reviewers positively gush about it. When David Cavanaugh listens to Gris-Gris to write his review for Uncut, he hears an aural artifact that takes "the researcher on an odyssey that leads to figures like Père Antoine, an 18th century Louisiana priest with links to the Spanish Inquisition, and Robert Tallant… [who] find their way into Gris-Gris somehow, pollinating it with their superstitions, their lore, their magnificent dubiousness". Richie Unterberger, too, frames his review in terms of spatial transport: "You could be forgiven for suspecting it of having been surreptitiously recorded in some afterhours den of black magic, the perpetuators of this misdeed risking life-threatening curses for having exposed these secret soundtracks to the public at large". Esoterica and location again become primary points for praise. Though the album was recorded in L.A., he avers it "nonetheless sounded as authentically New Orleans as a midnight Mardi Gras stroll though the French Quarter," which, some might argue, is only as authentic as the tourism industry is.
Likewise, Tom Moon's review for Rolling Stone suggests that Rebennack succeeded in creating an immersive soundscape that constituted Dr. John's world. He says, "Put on Dr. John's 1968 debut, Gris-Gris, and no matter where you are, it becomes nighttime on a lonely bayou and you are the unwelcome, painfully out-of-place tourist". This is not altogether true; you are a welcome tourist within the music itself, a voyeur perhaps, but nevertheless you may play witness to exotic and esoteric rituals, a guest in a haunted house you wander through audibly instead of visually. It is "a spacey glass-bottom-boat tour of the myths and legends of the city's midnight realm" (Moon).
It is not only a glass-bottom-boat tour that Gris-Gris offers, but an entire guidebook to an imaginary city aurally constructed. Dr. John's New Orleans, a conjured playground of New Orleanean Otherness that aligns itself generically with narratives and performances derived from minstrelsy and guidebooks, is a spectacle for an audience etymologically speaking. That is, it is a sight for listeners, for ears, rather than eyes. Its power lies in its ability to call a city into imagination; and what a power it is. Yet I do wonder if this power is absolute, or if the listener can transgress their position as an active creator and perpetuator of the racist if melodic image of New Orleans Rebennack constructs on Gris-Gris. While voices on the album itself may be fixed in their wavelengths, the voices of the listeners who interact with the soundscape are not. One can hear one thing and say another. Indeed, Dr. John's voice as expressed on Gris-Gris need not be a monologue composed of polyphonic voices, human and instrumental alike. Instead, it may be one voice in a conversation about the images of New Orleans that persist and subsist alongside and within one another, some hundreds of years old, some newly audible.







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