Quotes from Gary Krist

New Orleans' rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place- its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity- are likely to live on.

It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.

New Orleans, it was often observed, was the first American metropolis to build an opera house, but the last to build a sewage system.

This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who.

Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.

It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans. —REVEREND J. CHANDLER GREGG

But there's fear and there's panic, y'know. Calm is what matters to the bees. Calm without fear is a peril, and fear without calm doubly so. But the man who can hold both at once within his breast will not be harmed.

Steel Arm Johnny, Mary Meathouse, Gold Tooth Gussie, Bird Leg Nora, Titanic, Coke-Eyed Laura, Scratch, Bull Frog Sonny, Snaggle Mouf Mary, Stack O. Dollars, Charlie Bow Wow, Good Lord the Lifter, and many more.

In the cab of the locomotive it was the swaggering hotshot known as the engineer who was boss. This "engine runner" (also called a "hoghead" or "hogger" or even "throttle jockey") was the object of the most intense popular fascination—it's been said that even Sigmund Freud dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer.

banana handler.

And thus did Storyville become history.

So much, it would seem, for the music that would eventually be regarded as the first truly American art form.

This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values.

As one Victorian minister put it in 1868, "It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.