Cajun Music at The Columns

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NEW ORLEANS — It is two days before New Year’s Eve, the weather here finally cooling down to what passes for winter in the Big Easy, after a couple sultry days. My Beautiful Mystery Companion, daughter Abbie and I have taken a quick vacation here, thanks to a generous friend who loaned us her condo in the Warehouse District. On our last night before making the 400-mile trek back to East Texas, we have settled down in chairs of a parlor in the historic The Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in the upper Garden District. We await the arrival of two of the city’s best known Cajun musicians, who play for a modest crowd every Monday night.

Before David Doucet and Al Tharp arrive, I wander around the hotel, admiring the gilded ceilings, the floor-to-nearly ceiling windows, the intricately carved woodwork and mahogany stairwell. The Columns hotel began as a fancy Italiante house designed by famed New Orleans architect Thomas Sully in 1883. Besides its historic significance, wonderful front porch and great location —the St. Charles streetcar line runs through the “neutral ground” of the median just yards away — The Columns is noted for being home to three “gentle spirits,” or ghosts, according to a couple of websites I browsed.

One site surmises that a trio of ghosts, “with impeccable southern manners” haunt The Columns: a well-dressed gentleman serves as a spectral host, while a woman floats around in white attire, and a child who possibly died in the hotel wanders around the third floor near the balcony.

I saw no ghosts during our brief visit.

The Columns also guest-starred in the controversial 1978 Brooke Shields movie “Pretty Baby,” which was her breakout role as a 12-year-old prostitute in turn of the 20^th century New Orleans. The Columns is portrayed as the brothel where Shields and her mother, Susan Sarandon, ply their trade. In real life, the hotel served as a boarding house for the rich after passing out of the hands of the tobacco magnate’s family.

Doucet, who plays guitar and accordion, and Tharp, mainly on fiddle but also playing what his partner calls the first Cajun banjo, amble into the parlor, lugging their own equipment. It takes three forays for these two guys — like me both eligible for the senior discount, judging from their white hair, Tharp’s touching his shoulders — to bring in everything: speakers, stands and a couple amps, two mikes, a guitar, fiddle, banjo and accordion. As they work to set up, they talk to each other as old friends do, about holiday plans, who is in the hospital, what they’re doing for New Year’s. Doucet pulls up a small table on which a flower bouquet sits, and grabs an empty plastic pitcher from the bar to serve as the tip jar.

Tonight they’re playing for tips. That is not unusual, of course. Across America, in cities with vibrant music scenes such as New Orleans, or Austin, unknown but often talented singers and songwriters ply their trade dependent each night on the generosity of the audience. What is a bit unusual tonight is the pedigree of these musicians. In 1975 — 40 years ago — Doucet and his brother, Micheal, founded the roots Cajun band BeauSoleil. The band, with a varying case of members over the years including Tharp, appears regularly on public radio’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and has performed on “Austin City Limits” and “Late Night with Conan O’ Brien.” BeauSoleil became the first Cajun band to win a Grammy in 1997, and then won again in 2009. And tonight two of its members are playing for tips, with perhaps 40 people crowded into the parlor.

The songs are mesmerizing, the musicianship impeccable, even if I can’t understand a single word since nearly all the songs tonight are in French. Doucet explains what each song is about before they launch into it, clearly enjoying his role as Cajun musicologist. Tharp uses a cloth napkin from the bar to protect his whiskered face from the pad of the fiddle. Doucet closes his eyes as he sings in French and plays intricate licks on an acoustic guitar with an amp pickup.

In the narrow hall, a couple dances, the man in his stocking feet gliding along the hardwood floor. If that floor could talk, I think. The stories it could tell over 132 years.

Two hours passes much too quickly, and soon Tharp and Doucet are packing up their equipment. The tip jar is full, folks coming forward after Doucet reminded us the music business is tough these days. I felt blessed to listen and would have bought a CD, but Doucet says that he and Tharp haven’t gotten around to making one yet. Soon, he said. A massive heart attack in 2013 slowed him down for a while.

Outside, Christmas lights still twinkle on the grand old houses along St. Charles Avenue. The streetcar lumbers past, its bell ringing. And a new year beckons, with its promise. As Doucet said toward the close, here’s hoping the new year is an improvement on the one just ended. As for him and Tharp, they will be back at The Columns next Monday night.

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