# Dr. John, legend of New Orleans, dead at 77: Photos, Videos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/06/07/dr-john-legend-of-new-orleans-dead-at-77-photos-videos/
- Published: 2019-06-07T14:17:55+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The music legend, guitarist, piano man, jive talker and psychedelic godfather 
Malcolm John Rebennack – better known as Dr. John – died “towards the break of day”
on Thursday, of a heart attack, a statement has confirmed. He was 77.**

That last bit of information was something only discovered, or at least disseminated,
late last year, in fact: in his fantastical 1994 autobiography “Under the Hoodoo
Moon,” Dr. John had declared his birth date as “just before Thanksgiving 1940.” 
But in a column for the _Times-Picayune__ _published in November 2018, author John
Wirt unearthed a birth announcement from the same paper 77 years earlier: Mac, as
he was colloquially known, was actually born November 21, 1941. The factual fluidity
was, in its way, appropriate to an artist who lived and worked in the shifting, 
hip space of the trickster, and also to one who was as iconic of New Orleans as 
Louis Armstrong, to whom his final album, 2014’s _Ske-Dat-De-Dat… (The Spirit of
Satch)_ was a tribute. (Armstrong’s real birthday was misrecorded for decades, too.)

Mac Rebennack started out in New Orleans as a teenage guitar slinger in the ’50s,
hanging around the Dew Drop Inn, a historic black nightclub (where he received hassle
more than once from police enforcing the Jim Crow laws that regulated interracial
gathering), and doing session work at engineer Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studios
in the French Quarter. He was a denizen of a strange and distinctive old New Orleans,
associating with the white-clad priestesses of the storefront spiritualist churches
in the Ninth Ward — which, he recalled during a live interview at the Country Music
Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2013, smelled overwhelmingly of roses — as well as 
with petty criminals, dopers and practitioners of witchcraft. The Dr. John character,
hoodoo mystery and cool, was originally developed for his bandmate and old Jesuit
High School classmate Ronnie Barron, with whom he played in the R&B group Ronnie&
The Delinquents. But Barron had a record contract that stopped him from taking on
the role, so Mac absorbed it; as the story goes, it was during a fight that broke
out after a dance he played with Barron that Mac was shot in the finger, prompting
his switch from guitar to piano.

[[

It was that altercation, plus a stretch in a Texas prison on drug charges in the
mid-’60s, that prompted Dr. John to join what had become a solid community of New
Orleans musicians, including Sonny & Cher musical director Harold Battiste and Wrecking
Crew drummer Earl Palmer out in L.A., where he appeared on sessions with artists
from the tripped-out girl group The Cake to a young Rickie Lee Jones (the latter
with whom he won his first Grammy, in 1989, for the duet “Makin’ Whoopee” on his
album _In A Sentimental Mood_). Also in the ’60s, of course, he introduced his cosmically
cool Night Tripper persona, draped in robes and feathers and gems. That coincided
with a run of enduring, original albums for the Atco label that combined swamp grooves
and psychedelic sparkle, starting with 1968’s _Gris-Gris _and running through 1974’
s _Desitively Bonnaroo_ — the title of which, a mix of old Creole slang and his 
own signature tongue-twisted hipster patois, gave the music festival in Manchester,
Tenn., its name. At Bonnaroo 2006, he revived the Night Tripper persona for an appreciative
crowd.

Dr. John’s influence was vast — among other things, it’s largely agreed-upon that
the Night Tripper served as the inspiration for the groovy Dr. Teeth, leader of 
the Muppets’ Electric Mayhem band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame in 2011, and was nominated for 15 Grammy Awards over the course of his career,
winning six. His recording of Randy Newman’s composition “Down In New Orleans,” 
for the 2009 Disney film _The Princess and the Frog_ — which was inspired by the
New Orleans chef and civil rights activist Leah Chase, who predeceased him by only
[a few days](https://www.nola.com/news/2019/06/leah-chase-new-orleans-matriarch-of-creole-cuisine-dead-at-96-family.html)—
was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate from
Tulane University in New Orleans, prompting many to make the obvious joke that he
was now Dr. Dr. John.

The rocker, whose first solo recording was the instrumental 1959 guitar rumble “
Storm Warning,” had his biggest hit with the crunchy 1973 groove “Right Place, Wrong
Time” — produced by Allen Toussaint, with the great New Orleans funk band The Meters
backing him up — which [cracked](https://www.billboard.com/music/dr-john/chart-history/hot-100)
the Billboard top 10. Dr. John spent his creative life making connections between
the deep and broad heritage of New Orleans — the fertile crescent of all American
music, arguably — and the electric progress of rock and funk. Songs like “Mama Roux”
and “Walk On Guilded Splinters” were slinky trips through a dreamy, goofer-dust 
glittered bayou; later tributes to greats like Johnny Mercer and Armstrong showed
his reverence for the long tradition of American songcraft. Throughout his career,
he hopped back and forth at his pleasure. In 2012, his Dan Auerbach-produced _Locked
Down_ was hailed as a return to _Gris Gris_ form, dripping with shadowy rock-and-
roll voodoo, and won the best blues album Grammy. But for his next and ultimately
final project, he pivoted back to Basin Street and recorded a loving paean to Satchmo.

Dr. John was politically galvanized by the devastating aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita in 2005, and became an outspoken advocate for his vulnerable city. With
his band the Lower 911, he released the meditative, elegiac EP _Sippiana Hericane_
just two months after the storm as a benefit for the New Orleans Musicians Clinic
and other local aid organizations, including blues guitarist Tab Benoit’s 2004-founded
Voice of the Wetlands organization, with which he remained active, recording as 
a member of the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars Band. _Sippiana Hericane_ was nominated
for a Grammy award, too, and 2008’s _City That Care Forgot_, another reckoning with
the ravaging of his city and the government’s seeming disdain for it, won him another.

With contemporaries that included Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Ernie K-Doe, Cosimo
Matassa, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Irma Thomas and Dave Bartholomew (all
but the latter two passed away at the end of the 20th century or the beginning of
the 21st) Dr. John was one of the last players standing of a New Orleans generation
that witnessed rock and roll taking on form — and indeed, carved it into a shape
of his own.

![Dr John, photographed in Glasgow, Scotland in 2005. The beloved fixture of New
Orleans music died June 6, 2019.](https://i0.wp.com/mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/
p/shared/npr/styles/placed_wide/nprshared/201906/730481820.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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