Still more people came, emptying out of tottering honkytonks, and following the umbrellas pumping up and down. Now the funeral procession began to move, slowly, the limousine following, to the rhythm of the dirges. It took another 15 minutes to get the crowd moving behind the Olympia and Tuxedo bands, two of the city's traditional marching brass ensembles. The funeral procession began more than an hour late the next morning, under cold, slate-colored skies. His brother, volcalist Aaron Neville, was more philosophical: "The body is dead, but Byrd's still here." Where was the media all those years Byrd was playing but couldn't cut records?" One reporter circulated through the parlor asking, "Can anyone find me a musician to interview?" Art Neville, keyboard man for the city's premier pop band, the Neville Brothers, said, "These cameras are 65 years too late. Two other camera teams from local TV stations also stormed into the small building, lights flashing, to film the body in the casket and the reactions of the crowd, many of whom were weeping. Many people believed that the record, along with a documentary film about him planned for public television, would bring him fame and fortune.Ī camera crew working on the documentary went into the mortuary the day before the funeral, lending a bizarre atmosphere to the proceedings. The day he died, his new LP, "Crawfish Fiesta," was being shipped by a Chicago record company. Contributions from the musicians union and from friends were necessary to help the family with the funeral, and a benefit concert is planned. Within hours of his death, radio stations and jukeboxes in local taverns began playing his records, a tribute that continued through the week. His luck began to improve and he soon became a cult figure to a new generation of fans who crowded into the New Orleans music clubs that began to fluorish during the rhythm-and-blues revival of the last decade. As director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Davis saw to it that Professor Longhair received top billing. ![]() In 1970 he was sweeping out a record shop when local promoter Quint Davis became his manager and resurrected his career. The tide of electronic rock music in the 1960s passed Byrd by. The range of parade sounds woven into the recordings influenced a generation of local musicians. During the '50s he cut recordings of "Got to the Mardi Gras" and "Big chief," which quickly became Carnival anthems. His first hit, "Bald Head," came in 1950 on Mercury Records and it was the only one to make the national charts. The throngs came out in the 40-degree weather, hundreds of them with cameras - denizens of the street, elderly folk, mothers with babies, children, scores of young whites, well-heeled tourists tipped off by their hotels that a jazz funeral was under way, and the many musicians who knew and loved the old rhythm-and-blues pianist. Word of his funeral spread like brushfire through the streets of new Orleans on Saturday. Only in the last few years were there signs that he might achieve the popularity of other seminal New Orleans jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Byrd's contemporary, Fats Domino. But much of his life was spent in painful obscurity. Henry Roeland Byrd, who took the stage name Professor Longhair in 1947, had become a folk hero in New Orleans and had a cult following in parts of Europe and Japan by the time he died at 61 last week of pulmonary emphysema, chronic brochitis and advanced cirrhosis of the liver. ![]() "Lawda mercy," said an old black woman in the crowd, "nobody could ring that piano like the Fess." The Olympia band began "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," a gospel played in slow time, as a dirge. Attendants had to burrow through the crowd to get the casket in the hearse. When the pallbearers brought the casket down the front steps of the mortuary, a huge roar went up, almost as if the legendary pianist, Professor Longhair, had come in person to perform at center stage.īrightly colored unbrellas began to sprout like mush rooms above the crowd, a time-honored Carnival tradition, the reds and silvers and yellows bobbing above the heads and shoulders of the people pushing in ever tighter. Nearly 3,000 people surrounded the Majestic Mortuary, so many that the Tuxedo band set out along a side street, circling the block to draw away some of the throng. Even before the casket appeared, the crowd was swelling across both sides of Dryads Street, which runs through the center of Back-o'-Town in New Orleans.
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