Porter Shreve

With so much lost in New Orleans, any book that brings the city vividly back to life should be a welcome event. Journalist Tom Sancton wrote his memoir of growing up under the tutelage of some of the jazz legends of Preservation Hall before Hurricane Katrina hit, but his book of nostalgia for a place and time that might never be recovered could not be more timely. The son of a New Orleans journalist-turned-failed-novelist and a Mississippi socialite, Sancton seems at first an unlikely devotee of traditional jazz, but he follows his Civil Rights championing father into the French Quarter where he befriends once renowned players such as Punch Miller, George Guesnon, and in particular the great clarinetist George Lewis, who becomes his mentor. As a teenager Sancton becomes good enough to play with Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass band, and the experience gives him more than a glimpse into the racial and class divisions, the violence and source of the blues in the lives of the city’s Creoles and African Americans. Combining memoir, social history and a parade of wonderful characters, Song for my Fathers is a paean to New Orleans and its homegrown music told with reverence and wonder.