If
ADVOCATEADVOCATEADVOCATE
Sonny
Landreth missed one chance but took another
Slide guitarist Sonny Lan-
dreth learned decades ago to never take a gig for granted Landreth once suffered through an off night, only to spot Bob Dylan in the audience. Dylan was looking for a guitarist. Landreth didn’t get the job.
Music friends from England asked Landreth to record a home demo tape for their new label. He took a resonator guitar in an empty room and recorded a half-dozen songs. The tape landed in Eric Clapton’s personal collection.
“It wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone,” said Landreth a longtime Breaux Bridge resident who now lives in Lafayette. “The next thing I know, they gave it to Eric. They all knew each other “All they kept telling me is he’s got a copy of that tape. He kept it on the bus and played it from time to time.
“When I’d run into them, they’d say, ‘Man, he’s still got that tape. He’s still playing it.’” If I would have known that, I would have tried a little harder.”
That tape sparked Landreth’s longtime friendship with Clapton, the rock guitar idol who turns 80 years old March 30. Landreth will celebrate the occasion at an invitation-only birthday party March 29 at the Battersea Arts Center in London. With 18 Grammys and 100 million records sold, Clapton reigns as one of the most influential guitarists in rock history Songs like “Layla,” “Lay Down Sally,” “Wonderful Tonight” and “Tears in Heaven,” written following the death of his 4-yearold son Conor, have stirred generations across the globe.
As Landreth testifies, Clapton’s music exposed White kids in the suburbs to Muddy Waters, B.B. King and other blues godfathers who poured the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll. Clapton has also had high praise for Landreth, calling him “the most underestimated musician
ä See LANDRETH, page 2G
A HIGHER CALLING
Meet ‘The Duckman,’ a BR man who spends his days caring for ducks at LSU lakes
BY HUNTER ODOM
Contributing
writer
Realizing that John Newman is as much at home at the LSU lakes as the ducks he feeds there three times a day comes easy. The “Duckman,” as he is more commonly called around these parts, has spent the last several years devoted to serving Baton Rouge’s very own resident waterfowl.
Their beauty is obvious. You just have to look for them.”
JOHN
NEWMAN aka “The Duckman”
Driving around to several feeding grounds, Newman’s route starts at Campus Lake, where a group of Muscovy ducks immediately recognize his car as he pulls up. They start waddling toward him, tails wagging and mouths wide open, making a gentle hissing noise as they approach, resembling more a pet dog than a wild animal. Newman can hardly get out of the car before he is greeted by two of his favorites: Seymour and Goldie.
As he sets up his cardboard box to get out his usual treats — spinach, weevils and bread — pelicans, geese and other visitors fly in, anxiously awaiting.
The word is out: The Duckman has arrived.
When the feeding frenzy begins, even human passersby can’t help but be intrigued about the commotion. Newman draws a quick crowd, and he is quick to point out the different breeds he is feeding. He can even tell the names of each.
“That is Seymour,” he said. “You can tell by his beak.”
A safe harbor
Originally from Baton Rouge, Newman, 64, has moved all over the country throughout his career But it was his wife who chose to return to Baton Rouge when they retired. Shortly after returning, his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he acted as her primary caregiver for years.
In June 2022, when his wife decided to come back to their home in hospice care, he began to find solace and peace by walking from his home on Stanford Avenue to University Lake to feed the ducks on East Lakeshore Drive.
ä See ‘DUCKMAN’, page 2G
BY ANNETTE SISCO Staff writer
“It is a three-story building. There are a pair of alcoves, facing Toulouse Street. These alcove cubicles are separated by plywood. A curved staircase ascends from the rear of a dark narrow passageway from the street entrance to the kitchen area. From there it ascends to the third floor, or gabled attic with its mansard roof...” — from “Vieux Carré,” by Tennessee Williams
Margit Longbrake stands at the foot of the wooden staircase, which curves upward into darkness. Described by the playwright Tennessee Williams as the spiritual inspiration for the setting of his play “Vieux Carré,” 722 Toulouse St. is part of The Historic New Orleans Collection, where Longbrake works as a senior editor and expert in the collection’s Williams holdings. Scholars say 722 Toulouse inspired not just “Vieux Carré,” but the themes of many of Williams’ works, among the most famous of which are “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” His works, and his connections to New Orleans, are celebrated annually during the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, March 26-30
Herman Fuselier
STAFF
PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK
John Newman greets a pair of ducks Tuesday near University Lake in Baton Rouge.
PROVIDED PHOTO
Slide guitarist Sonny Landreth
Lucky winner gets a bus ticket, but sisters get last laugh
BY ANDREW GATES BARRY Contributing writer
Two sisters once lived in a stately old home along Bayou Teche. By circumstances unique to each of them, both had returned to live in the family residence built many years before by their father, who owned a prosperous lumber company
The older sister who had previously lived in Cuba where her husband was in the sugar business before the Castro revolution, was quite outgoing. She was on the board of directors of a local bank, and her knowledge about many subjects and topics was extensive. I saw her shortly before entering law school, and when I told her my plans, she immediately informed me all about the program. She advised on which professors to get and which ones to avoid
LANDRETH
Continued from page 1G
on the planet, and also probably one of the most advanced.”
Landreth has been a regular performer at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festivals, including the original benefit concert in 1999 at Madison Square Garden in New York City
“He’s been so gracious and super down to earth,” said Landreth “He’s made everything so easy and really helped me out a lot. When he came in to play with us, it was natural.
“That kind of completes the circle for me. As my career has evolved, there’ve been certain significant figures in my life in the world of music. To come back, after all this time, and make this kind of connection and play together, that’s the greatest affirmation for me.”
At 74, Landreth entertains devoted followers with brilliant technique peppered with a strong zydeco flavor He continues to be part of centennial
which was spot-on advice, along with numerous other bits of information about the school. When I asked her how she knew all of this, she replied, “I just do.”
The younger sister (my god-
tributes to one of his first mentors, Grammy Hall of Famer and zydeco king Clifton Chenier, born June 25, 1925, in Opelousas. Besides 18 albums and two Grammy nominations, Landreth has shared the stage and studio with Jimmy Buffet, John Hiatt, Mark Knopfler, Gov’t Mule and many other stars. He plans to keep writing and recording.
“The only thing I’ve learned these decades, having survived disco and everything else, there’s nothing like live music.
People appreciate that on a very personal level.
“That’s what we do. We still sell CDs and vinyl at the shows. It’s important to keep the spontaneity factor and change it up some. As long as I can still come up with something creative, I’m still in it.”
Herman Fuselier is executive director of the St. Landry Parish Tourist Commission. A longtime journalist covering Louisiana music and culture, he lives in Opelousas. His “Zydeco Stomp” show airs at noon Saturdays on KRVS 88.7 FM.
Continued from page 1G
Call it divine or fate, but not long after his wife’s passing in October 2022, Newman awoke one morning to find that a group of 10 ducks had made their way to his front yard, looking for a home. He set up an inflatable pool and offered the ducks a safe harbor from the busy streets of Baton Rouge — until they were ready to move to University Lake
Two years later, when he found two abandoned unhatched eggs, he purchased an incubator A few weeks later on Oct. 4, 2024, Mr Duck and Baby Girl were born Now living around the LSU lakes, Mr. Duck and Baby Girl still find their way to Newman’s feeding grounds, quickly jumping into his arms like toddlers when they arrive.
Home for generations
Baton Rouge is located in a major bird migration route, the Mississippi Flyway The city is a permanent and transient home to a vast array of waterfowl and migratory birds. At any given time of year, one can walk the LSU lakes and see different winged species.
One in particular that has exploded in population is the blackbellied whistling duck. At dawn and dusk, the whistles of thousands overhead making their diurnal migration to and from the Mississippi River to feed or roost are hard to miss The sky
fills up with these birds, flapping their white wings and whistling through their pink-orange beaks while they dot the sky
PROVIDED PHOTO
In 2024, John Newman purchased an incubator to hatch duck eggs that were abandoned at the LSU lakes and two ducklings hatched in October of that year
Meanwhile, wood ducks forage through the common water hyacinth and native great egrets and great blue herons go about their day, often poised gracefully on logs for seemingly hours on end. The belted kingfisher, a small but defiant fluttering bird, is known for spearing down into the water for fish
For generations, these birds have called the LSU lakes home. With spring’s arrival comes courtship and mating for local waterfowl and wildlife, which is the reason for walkers and drivers near the lakes to exercise caution as ducklings, turtle hatchlings and others make their way — often on roads.
“Their beauty is obvious,” Newman said. “You just have to look for them.”
mother) traveled extensively and sometimes very spontaneously Once when she heard a song about Kalamazoo, she called her travel agent to book a trip there so she could see what the town
CURIOUS
Continued from page 1G
Midwestern upbringing,” Longbrake said Tuesday In New Orleans, Williams met painters and photographers, fellow gay men, barflies and others in the bohemian French Quarter
“I’m crazy about the city,” Williams wrote to his mother on Jan. 2, 1939, just days after he moved in to 722 Toulouse. “I walk continually, there is so much to see food is amazingly cheap, and the cooking is the best I have encountered,” adding diplomatically, “since I left home.”
The one-time garret and the wooden stairs are not open to the public, but it’s easy to imagine Williams, a 28-year-old writer from Missouri, trudging to the top floor of the derelict rooming house. From his “alcove cubicle,” he would lean out the window overlooking Toulouse Street, watching neighbors, tourists and “handsome sailors,” Longbrake said.
“The boarding house remained a fixture in his imagination for decades, a creative well from which he would draw one-acts, stories, poems,” wrote Robert Bray, founding editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, in 2000. 1014 Dumaine St.
Fast-forward 25 years. Williams bought this compound of six apartments, with a lush patio and pool, after he became successful in the 1960s. He took over a twobedroom, two-bath apartment with a balcony on the second floor
In 1981, Drs. Brobson Lutz and Ken Combs moved in next door and discovered they had a famous neighbor
“The first Saturday night we were here, we heard all this commotion over across the courtyard fence,” Lutz recalled recently “Music, big party going on. Sunday we got a little ladder and looked over the fence. There was all this debris from what had been a huge party, with six or seven bodies lying around.
“That’s when we found out that Tennessee Williams owned the property next door.”
“We got to know him casually,” Lutz said.
When Williams decided to put the property up for sale in summer 1983, Lutz and Combs offered to buy it.
“We crafted a contract with an agreement that he would keep his apartment on the second floor for as long as he lived, for $100 a month,” Lutz said. “That was very appealing to him because he had a lot of junk up there, and he didn’t want to move it.”
The playwright died just months later, at the Hotel Elysée in New York. He was 71.
Within hours, a Pinkerton guard appeared at the Dumaine Street compound and set up shop on the second-floor landing to guard the apartment, Lutz said. Williams’ estate sent a moving van to New Orleans after three or four weeks. “They completely cleared out the apartment, except for some hidden pill bottles they didn’t find,” Lutz said.
“He was jovial, a pleasant drunk most of the time,” Lutz said. “He always had on something with a vintage flair to it. Our old friend Dan Mosley who knew him before we knew him, talked about how every day, regardless of the time of year, he would go out and jump in the swimming pool. He would walk out in his fur coat, hand it to his manservant, or boy, and jump into the pool.”
The six apartments are mostly unchanged, with green tile bathrooms dating back to Williams’ time, Lutz said. Apartment B,
was all about. She also loved trains, and one year for her birthday, the older sister acquired a caboose and had it shipped by barge up the bayou and delivered by crane into the backyard. Amazon Prime and other modern-day delivery services take note!
One summer, the sisters planned to host a dinner party for a special occasion. They furthermore announced that a “nice” door prize would be awarded to one of the lucky attendees. That in and of itself piqued a lot of interest among the invited guests. In fact, curiosity reached such a level that the sisters decided to divulge a clue the prize involved “travel.”
The appointed evening arrived and guests enjoyed cocktails followed by a formal dinner It was good fellowship and conversation, but what was probably on everybody’s mind was the door prize. Travel. Where might the lucky
winner be going? Perhaps the Grand Canyon or an exotic cruise. The possibilities seemed endless. For dessert and coffee, the guests eventually were led into the living room where everyone got a ticket along with a matching stub to throw into a large bowl. From this bowl, the winning ticket would be drawn.
The anticipation was almost too much, so finally the older sister mixed up all of the stubs and pulled one from the bowl. She then awarded the lucky winner with the prize a bus ticket to Delcambre — 10 miles down the road — on the local line. Barry lives in Baton Rouge
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The timeworn steps to the thirdfloor attic of 722 Toulouse St., the first place Tennessee Williams settled in New Orleans in 1939, are not open to the public. The building is part of The Historic New Orleans Collection.
where Williams lived, is occupied by a psychiatrist and his wife. 600 block of Toulouse, Royal After the garret on Toulouse Street and before the party palace on Dumaine, Williams lived in numerous places, mostly in the French Quarter Speaking with The Times-Picayune in 2015, Kenneth Holditch, the late professor emeritus of English literature at the University of New Orleans, thought an apartment in the building behind the corner building that faces Royal Street could be the spot where Williams firmly became “Tennessee” but lost something else.
“Williams lived there later in 1939, and there was a party going on downstairs,” the professor told the newspaper “A sailor at the party climbed up the fire escape, and Williams always claimed this was when he lost his virginity
“The James bar diagonally across Royal Street was a gay
bar, and Williams could look down from his balcony and see people cavorting around. He said he always felt that he was their patron saint.”
632½ St. Peter St.
It was in this apartment that Williams wrote at least half of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which he completed in 1947, Holditch told The Times-Picayune. Although Williams lived at this address only a short time, it was pivotal in his development. He could “hear the sounds of the streetcar on Royal Street,” Holditch said. 727 Toulouse St
Just across the street from the rooming house where he first settled in New Orleans, Williams wrote in a hotel at 727 Toulouse, in a tiny apartment with windows over the patio. “The site offered a tranquil retreat, and the sound of the hotel’s fountain calmed Williams’ nerves,” The TimesPicayune reported.
Hotels and cottages
“Williams also maintained adjoining rooms at the Hotel Monteleone (214 Royal St.) in 1949 for when he brought his grandfather, the Rev Walter Dakin, to town,” The Times-Picayune wrote in 2015.
“In later years, the playwright complained about the small rooms he was given at the (Omni) Royal Orleans Hotel (621 St. Louis St.) and reveled in the comparative decadence of the Pontchartrain Hotel (2031 St. Charles Ave.).”
And for a time in 1969, Williams occupied one of the Audubon Cottages (415 Dauphine St.), where he held at least one fabled party
Do you have a question about something in Louisiana that’s got you curious? Email your question to curiouslouisiana@ theadvocate.com. Include your name, phone number and the city where you live.
STAFF PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK John Newman feeds a group of ducks Tuesday near University Lake in Baton Rouge.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
The apartment at 632½ St. Peter St. is one of Tennessee Williams’ former residences in New Orleans.
STAFF PHOTO BY ANNETTE SISCO
AT THE TABLE
Easy étouffée recipe hits right, even without extra ‘fat’
BY DEBRA BROUSSARD TAGHEHCHIAN
Contributing writer
“Tee, go and get my wallet,” shouted my dad from the kitchen.
Tee is my Cajun nickname, meaning petite or little. It is very common for folks to call each other by Tee plus their name or their father’s name. I brought his wallet and he gave me $30. He had placed an order for 5 pounds of fresh peeled crawfish at L&L Seafood in Lafayette and he wanted me to go pick it up. He was going to make crawfish étouffée.
Now I was all of 17 years old in the late 1970s and only a driver of one year I had to drive on the other side of town to reach the location. There was no GPS, only careful directions on how to get there, which I quickly wrote down as my father gave them to me. That is just the way parents were then. Without any hesitation, I was given the keys to the car and told to be back soon.
Just as I was leaving the house, my dad said, “Oh, and get the fat, and ask if they will sell you extra fat.”
Thirty dollars doesn’t seem to be enough, but peeled crawfish were $5 per pound and the extra $5 was for taxes and hopefully, extra fat.
“What?” you may ask “Extra fat?”
Yes, in those days you could buy what is called the fat.
While peeling and eating boiled crawfish, you twist the tail meat from the head section and when you pull on the tail, you are left holding the tail and a yellow paste on the tail meat. It’s not really fat but the hepatopancreas, a liverlike organ enjoyed for its flavor I teasingly tell my daughter that it is the fois gras of the crawfish.
Sadly, processors no longer are allowed to sell the fat If not properly frozen, it will spoil and take on a rancid taste. If you really want to make crawfish étouffée with the fat these days you will have to peel your own crawfish and collect the fat
Without the availability of the fat, Cajun cooks had to find other ways to make the étouffée with enough flavor and gravy
That is when I started hearing people using golden mushroom soup added to the recipe. Or some people used Rotel tomatoes and cream of shrimp soup.
Cajuns are always innovative when it comes to facing obstacles and this was just one more way that they had to adapt
The recipe I am providing was given to me and developed by someone who knew how to adapt a recipe. There is no extra fat beyond what is in the package with the peeled craw-
fish, but the flavor is right. Upon my return from L&L Seafood, the house was filled with the intoxicating aroma of onions and green bell pepper cooking in butter That scent, my friends, is what I think heaven smells like.
This recipe is simple and like all simple, fewingredient recipes, freshness and quality of ingredients are very important. I hope that you will give it a try and enjoy this étouffée over a bed of white rice and a side of corn maque choux as I always do.
Crawfish Étouffée Serves 4-6.
and
“Shell's RootsRun Deep in St.Charles Parish. To us,beingagood neighbor means morethan safely clocking in and out;itmeans actively supporting theplacesand communitiesthathavebeen thefoundation of our business fornearly acentury.”
TAMMYLITTLE | General Manager,ShellNorco
In honor of ShellNorco's 95thanniversary,ninety-fiveemployees partnered with thePontchartrain Conservancytoplant1,000 treesat Wetland Watchers Park in St.CharlesParish.
Thesetrees will help fortifythe Lake Pontchartrain shoreline,createnew wildlife habitat, and supportlocalair quality.Atthe event,Shell NorcoGeneral Manager Tammy Little announced a$175,000 donation to theSt. Charles Parish Parksand Recreation Department to helprebuild thepark’spier,which wasdamaged in Hurricane Ida.
PHOTO BY DEBRA BROUSSARD TAGHEHCHIAN
Crawfish Étoufée
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