Hi folks - Continuing on with the experiment. Here is the next chapter of Music in Berlin. All comments welcomed.

New Orleans Late 1970s
Chapter One


My father drank himself to death on the streets of New Orleans the summer I turned ten years old. The exact mechanics of his death are still a mystery. Officially, he died of a blow to the back of the head, but nobody knew for certain whether he had stumbled and killed himself or if someone had helped him along the way with a quick unexpected thump. He hadn’t had a wallet for a long time, so the fact that he was found without one didn’t matter. His one prized possession, his fiddle, was found in its case by his side. If he was robbed, they didn’t get much, maybe a little cash that he had earned from playing on the street that night, nothing more. Robbery and murder or accidental death, the New Orleans Police didn’t seem to care either way, and my mother and I doubted we would ever find out what truly happened to him.

There were only two of us left then. With him gone, my mother and I didn’t know how to act; we were, to some extent, strangers both trying to adjust to a new life. We made the motions of being alive. We moved around the house as if things were normal. But our movements were not real. Everything we did felt like we were pretending. I did my homework. She made dinner and breakfast and went to work shortly before I left for school each day. We said our prayers together at night and then she tucked me in to bed, each and every evening. Even though I was old enough to tuck myself in, I was secretly glad that she still did it.

I think grief is different for children. Even today I’m still trying to figure out how I felt in those days and weeks and months immediately after his death. I know I missed him terribly in my own way. But it was a strange and distant feeling, not anything like the grief I’ve worked through in my adult life. I remember it instead like a feeling of dull vacancy and detachment from everything and everyone around me. I knew my mother was suffering, but I didn’t feel anything for her. I didn’t feel bad or upset. She was just there. It was probably for the best that I didn’t acknowledge her pain. She was trying to hide her grief and it might have made things worse if I felt sorry for her. She kept things moving – everything right on a schedule as if nothing had happened. But everything about her was hollow.

In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my mother would alternate between talking about him as a talented musician, a genius, a free spirit, and describing him as a street urchin, a beggar who made his living on the streets of New Orleans with a ratty old fiddle. But she must have loved him at one point because she married him when she wasn’t supposed to, and because after he was dead, she had a way of looking like she missed him when she talked about him.


My father was not always drunk, especially in the beginning. He was kind and soft-spoken – unless he was singing or playing the fiddle. Then he sparkled; then he was lithe and light and effervescent. The music brought out a very different side of him, as if that part of him lived on its own, separate from the rest of the things that animated him.

Our home was filled with the sounds of old Dixie jazz and Cajun waltzes. He played from the moment he woke up to the time he left the house, songs like Black Eyed Suzy and Orange Blossom Special. He never learned to read music, but he had lived his whole life with his fiddle, making his way from the deep bayous of Plaquemines Parish, down at the toe of the boot of Louisiana. It was a different world there, a world where things were mysterious and deliberate in ways unimaginable to my mother and me. It was down by Chawasha Indian land, where the sky and the gulf meet the swamp and the greens and blues go on forever beneath a warm breeze that smells faintly of mud and muck and crawfish.

My father was always saying how he was going to bring me back home to visit with his people, his mamma and her kin. He talked about how happy they would be to see me and that they’d want to show me the secrets of the bayou, the low lying islands thick with rogue persimmon and orange trees, left over and forgotten from the time when Plaquemines supplied the world with citrus fruit. He’d talk about alligators the size of pick up trucks lying in wait under the stillness of cypress trees and Spanish moss.

When he talked to me about his home, his accent would get so thick that I could hardly understand what he was saying. To this day I can still hear his words and the way his voice wrapped gently around the consonants and vowels, slurring into one another in something that sounded like a cross between a southern drawl and a French accent. If he rambled long enough he would sometimes even slip into the French Patois that he had spoken as a boy. But it never bothered me. I loved to listen to him.

If my mother were around she would rouse him out of his story telling. “Jerome,” she would say, her voice gentle in the early days, “don’t go telling him things like that.”

He would look up from me to her and shake his head. “And what should I tell this one about where he comes from, Na-na?” He was the only one who ever called my mother by that nickname. Everyone else called her Nan or even worse, her full name, Nanette. Na-na had been what her parents had called her, according to my father, and what he had called her when they were younger.

She would roll her eyes at him and say, “It’s not about where he’s from. It’s about where he’s going.”

He would look at me and say “Your Mama, she’s not proud of where we come from, here-”

“Where you come from,” she’d correct him. “I don’t come from the swamp.”


I used to listen to him play all the time and as soon as I was big enough to pick up a bow and fiddle, I grabbed his and tried to run that bow across those strings only to find that it made a horrible screech.

“Oh no,” my father laughed when he heard me do that. “Zach, you tee one, come see.” He meant for me to bring the fiddle to him so I did and he hoisted me up on his leg as he played and sang softly for me.

He always held the fiddle gently, as if he were lifting a carton of eggs out of a sack of gravel. Those hands, even after they began to shake from the booze, were sturdy and determined when handling the fiddle. He’d get a look of dead seriousness as he went about tuning the knobs on the end of the instrument, tightening the strings, plucking each one until it sounded precisely the way he wanted it to. Then he would draw back the bow and that look of seriousness on his face would melt into an expression of pure joy in the seconds before the music began. It was as if he were hearing the song in his head before he brought it to life on those strings. He and his fiddle were one and everything else in the world disappeared.

Sitting there listening to him, I let the music fill me up. I let it bring me out to the bayous that he came from.

Even though I’d never been down to the fringes of Plaquemines Parish, I could see it all crystal clear in my mind, just as he’d described it, when he played. Green marshes and rugged islands, ragged fingers reaching out into the shallow blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, coming to life in the music.

His music was a mélange of sounds, the product of hundreds of years of people handing songs down generation after generation – a great conglomeration of French ballads, Irish jigs and Indian chants. He couldn’t read music and I think that was better, because there was no way to capture on sheet music what he played – it was free, it had a life of its own that sprung from him. I learned only a fraction of what he knew but even now, if I were to pick up a violin – or fiddle –my first inclination would be to draw back the bow to the sliding, fluid notes of my early days.


But my mother was not pleased to see how much I had taken to the fiddle. To her there was too much of the swamp in that instrument. Unlike my father, she did not come from the bayous. She had grown up in New Orleans’ Garden District, raised in a great big brick mansion, the kind of home with floor-to-ceiling windows and a front porch that seemed to roll on forever, surrounded by banana trees and soft, tropical flowers. Her father was a professor of classical music at Tulane and she was brought up on a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms.

I found out later in life that she had fought her parents tirelessly in her pursuit of my father. She was rebellious and a romantic when she was younger – two things that she fought tirelessly to hide from me. When my father was young, I guess he was handsome with a vague flavor of danger about him. But my mother’s parents had a specific life in mind for her, and it did not include marrying a fiddle player from the swamp. They made that clear through endless threats and over a series of yelling matches that were the talk of the Garden District gossips for months. Finally she left home and married her fiddle player and never looked back. Whatever words had passed between her and her parents were set in stone. She never spoke to them again after she married and I never met them. But years later, with a son of her own, their values re-emerged in her and she was determined that I should have some balance in my musical tastes.

So they’d made a deal, those two. My mother would take me to the orchestra and the ballet as often as she could afford it and my father could teach me the fiddle. She had tried to get him to teach me different kinds of music, but of course he couldn’t – or he wouldn’t. He was stubborn through and through, and he only taught me the songs he knew and loved, and my mother never wanted to hear me play them.


Learning from him was like listening to stories; his lessons were easy and playful. Most days he would go and sit out on the deck with his chicory coffee at whatever time he woke up, and I would grab the fiddle and stand just inside the screen door, waiting for his eyes to open up full.

“That you there, tee Zach?” He’d smile and look out into the street.

“Yeah Papa,” I’d say, still inside the door.

“Well, come out here, see.” He’d look back at me as I pushed the creaky screen door open. “I see you got that fiddle today. Well, let me see that. What are we gonna play, eh?”

He pulled me close to him on the bench and placed the fiddle in my hands, leaning behind me to position my fingers on the neck of the instrument, and with his right hand he would help me draw down the bow.

“See here,” he said. “Hear that long slow soft sound, that’s the journey down from way up north. When our folks were still trying to find a place to call home. They were still finding their way to the bayous.” He would laugh.

“Don’t the songs have any words, Papa?” I would ask.

“Oh yeah, Zach.” He would laugh. “Sure some of them do.” Then he moved his fiddle, down from under his chin, tucking it into his shoulder, and he drew back and started another song, this time singing the words along with the music.

Those lessons would go on and on for hours. In my mind’s eye, I could see the ragged clutch of men and women searching for some place to call home, and at last coming up the great big Mississippi river. Finally, his coffee cup long since empty and sitting on the porch beside the bench, we would get up to go out to the Quarter to play. When I was four and a half years old he came home one day with a second fiddle for me. It instantly became my most treasured item. It’s still the most important thing I own.


As much as I loved my father’s music, my mother’s influence was at work in my young brain as well. My father had taught me to pick up songs by ear, so while he was out I would practice the songs I had heard at the orchestra and the ballet. It wasn’t that I was a virtuoso – far from it. But I could figure out the basics of what I had heard and what I couldn’t quite get, I improvised on my own, combining some of the bits and pieces of my father’s music in with what I could remember of, say, a Bach piece.

One time I played one of those loosely reconstructed classical songs for my Papa when we were sitting out on the porch and my Mama wasn’t home. I drew the bow across my fiddle as if I was going to launch into some fast two-step, but then I surprised him. He sat up as he listened and he got a very serious look in his eyes as he watched me.

When I was done he said, “Zach, where did you learn that one, child?”

“I heard it at the symphony, out with Mama.”

He took my face in his hands and kissed my forehead. “You have a gift, tee one. Do you know that? A gift.”

“Should I play it for Mama?” I asked him.

He thought for a minute, then shook his head slowly. “Some day, Zach. But I don’t think today.”

“Does it need more work?”

“It’s perfect, tee one, perfect.” He put an arm around me and drew me to his chest and pulled me tight. “Just like you.”

“Then why won’t she like it?”

He sighed deeply as he let me go. “You know what? I’m sure she would love to hear it.” He forced a brighter look onto his face. “Let’s arrange a little concert for you out here on the porch tonight? What do you say?”

“Really? A concert?”

“Absolutely. I’ll talk to your Mama when she gets home and we can set it all up.”

But the concert never happened. My mama had to work late that night. Papa waited later than usual before he headed out for the evening. But before long it was too late and he had to go. I tried to stay up for my Mama that night by myself, but I fell asleep before she came home. I woke up the next day tucked into my own bed with my fiddle put away in its case.