"The narrative dictates how they're treated by law"

Cary Baker has once again agreed to let me share an excerpt from his book, Down on the Corner; Adventures in Busking and Street Music.

This comes from the book’s most political section, interviewing a member of Tuba Skinny, a New Orleans jazz band, the director of the Music And Culture Coalition Of New Orleans and a Civil Rights attorney who has frequently sued the city on behalf of street performers.

 If you’d like to get your own copy, you can buy yours on Amazon — or, better yet, google it to support your local indie bookstore.

‘As a group, we don’t busk as often as we used to,’ says Rapuzzi. ‘But, we’ve been fighting it in City Council, having discussions with, like, the district police who run the French Quarter — police captains and chiefs change every year.

‘We play inside clubs in New Orleans more than we busk these days,’ he's quick to clarify. ‘That’s partly due to the city shutting down the Royal Street pedestrian mall for so long. Royal Street has not always been available to street performers, even though it's a part of the municipal code. So, myself and some bandmates, along with other members of our street performing community, have had to have meetings with the city council members and the police, as well as MaCCNO.

‘MaCCNO has been creating a lot of these meetings between the street performers in the city. Now Royal Street is open again. And they even have some signs out there; they do not say that it's open to street performing, but they do say that it's a pedestrian mall. So that's better than nothing.’

The MaCCNO to which Rapuzzi refers is the Music And Culture Coalition Of New Orleans, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, which, according to its website, is wholly devoted to ‘organizing, empowering, and advocating with New Orleans's musicians, artists, traditional culture bearers, and other members and allies of the cultural community.’ Though the word ‘busking' is not in its mission statement, advocating for and empowering buskers constitutes a good portion of its work. Its Guide To New Orleans Street Performance, for instance, informs street musicians of their rights:

Good citizenship, of course, is a two-way street. The organization also publishes a ‘New Orleans Street Performers Code Of Etiquette’ for musicians, which includes these guidelines, among others:

MaCCNO executive director Ethan Ellestad, whose vocational background combines nonprofit work, urban planning, and community development, cites the ultimate dichotomy between enforcement and embracement. ‘We were in a meeting, and there was a picture of Tuba Skinny in the official tourism marketing of the city. The headline banner was Tuba Skinny Performing On Royal Street. That was the headline image of the tourism — while they were being shut down for performing on Royal Street by the police.

‘So there's a police car, paid for by New Orleans & Company. The same people doing the advertising were paying for the law enforcement agency that was shutting them down from performing. This is a mismatch that can be pretty common. Everybody loves to talk about how much they support music, but then when it comes down to, like, changing the policy or actually doing anything about it, well, then it’s a different story. We try to [point out] that hypocrisy.

‘A lot of times, we find that performers get lumped into kind of the nuisance category, with street performers seen as vagrants,’ he adds. ‘And so we really are working hard to try to change that narrative, because that dictates how they’re treated by law enforcement from my policy.

‘The city markets performers. They absolutely market that as part of the sale of New Orleans — visit New Orleans where music is on every street corner, like Doreen Ketchens playing in front of the houses on Royal Street. It's the images they use.’

Along with nearly everyone you're apt to talk to about New Orleans busking rights, Ellestad eventually mentions civil rights attorney Mary Howell. ‘We base our work on her work,’ he says. ‘She’s the star of the work that we do. We follow her lead. She’s defended a lot of these folks.’

Take, for instance, Grammy-winner Trombone Shorty, né Troy Andrews, who in the 1990s was detained by law enforcement for playing music. He was ten years old and already playing alongside his musical family: elder brother James Andrews III and cousins Glenn David Andrews and Travis Hill, aka Trumpet Black. (To further illustrate the musicians’ tender ages, Hill reportedly lost a baby tooth during the arrest.) Trumpet Black died in 2015, while the rest went on to carve their own legacies.

‘In the 90s, they [were enforcing] the noise ordinance in the French Quarter, Trombone Shorty told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2023. Some of the older musicians hipped us to it, like, If we see the police, bring the volume down. But this particular day, we were playing in front of the Cabildo. Police approached with a decibel meter, and they said that we were playing too loud. They put us in the back of the police car and drove us downtown. By the time we got there, [attorney] Mary [Howell] was there, so we didn't spend too much time there. We walked in and walked out; they had to call it a protection arrest because we were so young. Our parents were there to pick us up.’

‘It was a public-relations disaster, as it fully deserved to be,’ opines musician and DJ Marc Stone, who's lived in town for more than thirty years. ‘[Troy's] always been a very poised, graceful person.’

Mary Howell has defended the rights of musicians like Andrews for more than forty-five years. A native of southeast Missouri, Howell began as a musician herself, playing guitar in a folk band. But she came to New Orleans for college.

‘When I first became aware of the street performance culture in New Orleans was in the 1960s,’ she says. ‘I was at LSU, and we would come down to the French Quarter and Babe [Stovall) was playing.’

Germane to her future practice in civil rights and musicians’ rights, Howell worked early on with a noted attorney in the city, Ben Smith. ‘Smith, his law partner Bruce Waltzer, and long-time civil rights activist Jim Dombrowski were arrested for sedition by the State of Louisiana in 1963 for advocating integration. The arrest led to a famous US Supreme Court decision, Dombrowski v. Pfister, where the court threw out the state court prosecution for having a chilling effect on speech in violation of the First Amendment.

‘In addition to his civil rights work, Ben was president of the Louisiana ACLU. Ben always saw the fundamental connection between civil rights and civil liberties. The First Amendment was an important part of Ben's practice, as it has been for mine,’ she says. ‘It was a whole different scene in the late 60s and early 70s. There was no Royal Street pedestrian mall. Chartres Street in front of the St. Louis Cathedral was still open to traffic. Babe Stovall, sometimes joined by other players, would sit on a bench inside Jackson Square, and it was just magic-the thought that you could walk into that public place and sit or stand in that beautiful park and hear this amazing music was just sort of astonishing. It was one of the few great places where families with children could hear live music since children couldn't go inside bars where alcohol is served. Also, back then, bars with live music were really smoky. And on the street, of course, there is no cover charge. The whole situation, in these beautiful outdoor settings, was really a wonderful experience... and still is.’

Howell is part of an ad hoc group of local attorneys who provide pro-bono legal assistance to street musicians, as well as for traditional New Orleans culture bearers in the second line and Black Masking Mardi Gras Indian community, all of which takes place on the public streets of the city.

‘I'm not aware of any other city in the US that has such a vibrant live music street culture as we have in New Orleans, and street music in the Quarter is an important part of that. A unique feature of the New Orleans busker scene is that permits are not required for musicians and street performers in the French Quarter. While there are specific ordinances governing decibel levels and a questionable 8pm curfew on Bourbon Street, a street performer doesn't need a permit in the Quarter. They are also not confined to specific locations.

‘We always say about New Orleans that we don't have garage bands, because we don't have garages. So the streets are really important,’ she concludes. ‘And in street performance, if you're not any good, you don't last.’

Again, If you’d like to get your own copy of Down on the Corner, you can buy yours on Amazon.

If you’d like to send us your photo, hold a sign saying #buskingisnotacrime, and tag us on Instagram (@buskingproject), or just email it to me here.

I’m afraid no Closing my Tabs this week! I’ve been so busy with things, I haven’t had time to comb through all the news stories that have been piling up.

I’ll put out a bunch next time,

Nick