If you’re born in New Orleans, there’s music when you come into the world, music when you go out, and music all the time in between. My brother Artie once told me that when I was a baby in the crib, I would stand up and go “Aaaaaaaah” till I fell asleep. I guess I was trying to sing even then.
As for the going out, I remember I’d be in the park in the Calliope playing marbles or tops and we’d hear the drums of the second liners—the bands following funerals—and run toward the music. (The first line following the coffin is the family of mourners, and the second line is the musicians and the people following the music.) They’d play that slow dirge on the way to the graveyard, and then something cranked up on the way back to send them off right. We all knew the music, and we’d follow the second line and dance. That’s the only way to send someone off—mourn them, yes, but also celebrate their life.
Before we were born, Mommee and Uncle Jolly were the best song-and-dance team in New Orleans. They had a chance to go on the road with Louis Prima, but Maw Maw wouldn’t let them go because of the Jim Crow laws. She said they wouldn’t have been treated right, and it could be downright dangerous. Because of that, Mommee said she would never stop any of us from following our dreams—and she never did.
I remember sitting on the floor in our house in the Calliope watching Mommee and Uncle Jolly doing the lindy hop, with Uncle Jolly throwing Mommee between his legs and over his back. The music was probably something by Louis Jordan. When he and Mommee danced it looked like a lot of fun, so Mommee taught all us kids how to dance. Later, when I started going to parties, the guys used to stand around while the girls danced with each other. But I knew how to dance, so it was a whole different game for me.
Uncle Jolly had pretty teeth and an infectious smile. He had a ratty walk, kind of hipty dipty, that was real cool, and I used to try to imitate it.
My mother sang all the time around the house. She was a big fan of Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. My dad sang in a baritone in the bathtub—he loved this song called “Orange Colored Sky” that Nat King Cole recorded. But his real talent was that he could whistle like all the different birds. None of us could do it like he did. I wish now I could whistle like him, but it’s impossible. I remember sitting on Maw Maw’s lap when I was five or six while she listened to the gospel station on the radio: Dr. Daddyo was the DJ, and we’d listen to Mahalia Jackson, Brother Joe May, the Blind Boys. I liked to sing along, but it was some hard singing; it sounded to me almost like screaming. My mom and dad were big Nat King Cole fans, and I liked that better. Poppee had every record Nat King Cole made. He worked on the trains as a pullman porter for a time, so he loved the song “Route 66” because he kind of knew that route. I loved it when Nat King Cole sang “Mona Lisa.” He was so smooth, and his diction was so great. I used to pretend I
was him, walking around singing and holding my comb like it was a microphone.
I used to sing my way into the movies too. I’d go to the Gem Theater to see all the cowboy and Tarzan movies, and they’d say, “Sing for us, little Aaron.” I’d sing “Wheel of Fortune” or “Mona Lisa,” and they’d let me in for free. After I came home from the cowboy movies, I would come back to the projects and yodel all over the park. People heard that yodeling and they knew it was me. I used to call it vocal gymnastics.
My oldest brother, Artie, worked at Tickle’s Record Shop. He would bring home records by Sonny Til and the Orioles, the Clovers, the Swallows, Billy Ward and His Dominoes, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. They had songs that they wouldn’t play on the radio because they weren’t G-rated, like “Work with Me Annie,” “Annie Had a Baby,” and “I Love Your Sexy Ways.”
Guys used to hang out around the Calliope and sing. There was a group called the Del-Royals that included Calvin LeBlanc and Willie Harper, who became pretty famous. Years later, in 1960, I shared a split recording session with them for Minit Records. Artie had a doo-wop group that sang harmonies out on the park benches at night. They were around fifteen or sixteen then, and they called themselves the Notes. They would win all the talent shows and get all the prize money and the girls. Those harmonies sounded to me like the sweetest things on earth, so I wanted to sing with them, but they used to run me away because I was too little. But then one evening one of the guys—his name was Isacher Gordon and we called him Izzy Koo—he said to me, “Hey, Kevin, come here and sing this note.” I don’t know why he called me Kevin, but he could call me anything as long as they let me sing with them. I could hold those high notes, pure and sweet, and they finally let me in the group. I was maybe ten or eleven and I was thrilled. Artie and Izzy Koo showed me how to do all of the harmonies, and I was on a cloud. The first song I sang with them (I still remember it) was “Sunday Kind of Love” by the Harptones. It was on then. I was singing with the big boys—no turning back.
I couldn’t think of nothing else but singing. I was cool singing just to myself, thinking, “Wow, I can sing just like some of my heroes.” My voice would soothe me, so I started wanting to soothe other people with it as well. I can’t say why, but the high singing always touched me, and I wanted to touch people myself with those high notes.
I started singing for the company when my parents had people over. Anyone who wanted to hear me sing was good enough for me. The Notes would sit out on a bench in the Calliope and sing just about every evening. Half the projects would gather around us, listening. At the time I was liking this girl named Jeanie who lived next door. She had the most beautiful dark chocolate skin, smooth as silk, and I would show off for her, hitting the high notes. We called each other boyfriend and girlfriend (I didn’t even know what sex was at that age) and it was just a great feeling knowing that she liked me.
When I was in school, my mind and my heart were preoccupied with the music I was hearing. I always had a song going through my head. I remember when I rode the bus to school, the driver always had the radio on. I heard “Rhapsody in Blue,” I heard “The Wheel of Fortune”—all kinds of things. Back then I could learn a song after hearing it just a few times; it would get stuck in my head. Sometimes I’d get kept after school for singing and beating on my desk. My sister Athelgra was my singing partner at home. We sang all the time—while washing and drying the dishes or hanging up the clothes outside on the line. One time, after we moved uptown, we were doing our chores and harmonizing, and our aunt who lived next door knocked on the wall and said, “Y’all turn that radio down!”
Athelgra used to sing with a bunch of her friends in high school: Barbara Ann and Rosa Lee Hawkins, who were sisters, plus their cousin Joan Marie Johnson. They eventually formed a group called the Dixie Cups. She didn’t decide to start her professional singing career until much later and now, when she’s all grown up (and then some), she’s a member of the Dixie Cups. They sang backup on my album Bring It on Home.
I remember when Charlie got his first saxophone. Auntie Cat, my dad’s mother’s sister, bought it for him when he was eleven—a real pretty one named Selmer (that was the maker). The first time he started blowing, there were no honks or squeaks, just clear notes. He was a natural. When the nuns at St. Monica’s Catholic School told him he couldn’t be a scientist, that really put his head somewhere else and turned him back to his horn. Four years later, when he was just fifteen, he left home to play with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrel Show. Mommee had to sign a paper to let him go. He was billed as the boy wonder on the sax, and he played blues clubs with people like B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and Bobby Blue Bland. He got a head start learning his horn with these hard hitters. Later on, Charles joined the navy and was stationed in Memphis, so he got to play on Beale Street with all the blues guys.
Cyril ended up being an amazing singer, percussionist, and funkster extraordinaire. Since he was seven years younger than me, me and Cyril really started our jam after we moved out of the projects. All this time Cyril would sit by the door and watch and listen when Artie and his band rehearsed, absorbing it all. He got started drumming by beating on hubcaps and park benches with a stick. When he did jump out, he was like dynamite. In junior high school he started to sing and play the drums in talent shows. He and our friend Howard Guidry (a.k.a. Pitty Pat) used to go up against each other. (Me and Pitty Pat still talk all the time.) Pitty Pat would do Jackie Wilson and Cyril would do James Brown asgood or better than the original. He could do the dance, the split—everything.
A lot of people in the Calliope played instruments, and they would sit outside and make great music. Red Tyler, the great sax player, lived next door to us, and he and Charles used to hang out and play together. Red was already married and had a daughter named Jernelle. I was in love with his wife, Leona. One day his wife went to visit his mother, and she just dropped dead on the front porch. His mother came out and died as well. It was a deep time—he lost his wife and his mother on the same day. I was about eleven then, and I didn’t know what to think. I saw everybody had tears, and I was sad too, but I’m not sure I really understood what had happened.
It was like that again when Maw Maw died when I was thirteen. She lived with us then, and me and my sister found her dead in her bed with her rosary in her hand and a smile on her face. That was the closest to us that death had come.
When we moved uptown, the great drummer Clarence Brown (a.k.a. Junie Boy) lived next door, and Cyril used to play with him. When Clarence grew up, he became the drummer for Fats Domino. We all went to school with Leo Morris, who later became a famous drummer and changed his name to Idris Muhammad, and Cyril used to play with him too.
At St. Monica’s we had a drum-and-bugle corps, and I played both. The pastor showed me how to play the instruments, and I just picked them up. Me and Art started playing the piano, too, just by jumping on whenever we were at somebody’s house who had one. Auntie Lealah had a piano, so we could go there and play. They had an organ at Trinity Church over in the Thirteenth Ward where my great-aunts went, and that’s where Artie fell in love with the sound of the Hammond B3. I remember the first time he touched the organ, it made such a big sound that it scared him. But it was on then, and he just took to it after that.
Uncle Jolly was also a piano player and showed us a couple of things. Art showed me a couple of things too, but I never did take any piano lessons or learn how to read music. I can read chord changes, but I played by ear then and I still do. It’s a style my Uncle Jolly called funky knuckle. Mostly, we all just figured it out on our own.
Nobody in the family could read music except Charles. We learned by listening and watching and playing. Music was in our blood. It was in our hearts. It was in our souls. It was in our family.
Excerpted from Tell It Like It Is: My Story by Aaron Neville. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
