Ah Louie Lou-eye
O-oh No
Me gotta go
Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi

Audience participation in a concert setting may not be quite the same as joining a choir or participating in a song circle, but it can be a great opportunity to sing wholeheartedly, at full volume, with a large number of fellow enthusiasts.

And whether "Louie Louie" can be characterized as "folk music" is problematic, to say the least. Certainly, back in the 60s during the folk boom (or, if you will, "folk scare"), I would have offered the opinion that it epitomized everything that true folk music is NOT ~ it's a rock 'n' roll record made by a singer who didn't bother to learn the lyrics. However, it IS a song with a chorus that just about everyone knows how to sing, and my current opinion is that it certainly is folk music, at least for the community of folk among whom I live.

That said, I just want to report how absolutely wonderful it was to sing along with Toots Hibbert and the Maytals at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Saturday afternoon. Toots is quite a song leader ~ almost a sort of Rastfarian Pete Seeger ~ and he got a large and remarkably talented "congregation" to sing some fairly complex responses, harmonies and counterpoints on any number of songs, including his own band's classics ("Pressure Drop," "Funky Kingston," "True Love is Hard To Find," etc., and of course "Country Roads"). But the most successful and most transcendant instance of group singing came on that old garage-band chestnut "Louie Louie." I thought I was about to levitate ~ Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!

Jazzfest management introduced a new feature last year, live CDs of festival performances available onsite within a hour or so of the end of each selected set and also (later) via the Internet. I can't vouch for the sound quality of any of these recordings, but friends who bought the 2-CD-set of last week's Meters Reunion gig tell me the sound on that recording, anyway, is great. The Toots & the Maytals CD may or not prove to be a masterpiece of audio engineering, but I can promise you that it showcases one of the finest bits of mass audience singing ever heard, even here in the town once described (by Smokey Robinson, no less) as "the world's capitol of audience participation."

Well, maybe the magic of the moment will come through, to some extent, on the CD ~ or maybe you just "had to be there." I'm not making any promises, but I figure some of you might be interested in this source of live recordings (if not Toots, maybe another selection).

For a complete list of the 2005 and 2004 NOJHF performances recorded and available on CD:

JazzFest LIVE CD order form

(Toots & the Maytals, Congo Square Stage, Saturday 4/30, is #7 on the list.)