Professor Longhair: Fess

FESS: The Life and Music of Professor LonghairEvery Mardi Gras, New Orleans plays a song almost nobody remembers writing. "e;Go to the Mardi Gras"e; comes out of radios and brass bands and bar bands across the city like it's always existed — because for most of the people singing along, it has. The man who wrote it spent a decade of his life sweeping the floor of a record shop that still had his own unsold singles in the bins.Henry Roeland Byrd taught himself piano as a boy on a broken instrument missing half its keys, in a New Orleans alley, and built out of that scarcity one of the most original sounds in American music — a rolling, Caribbean-inflected left hand that Fats Domino borrowed, that Allen Toussaint called the foundation of everything he ever wrote, and that Dr. John, flatly and often, credited with putting the funk into funk itself. Under the name Professor Longhair, he had exactly one national hit. He also had a stroke that nearly ended his career before it began, a decade of professional invisibility that nearly finished the job, and a rediscovery — tracked down dealing cards in a Dryades Street barroom — that brought him back to a stage just in time for the world to start paying attention.Fess follows Henry Byrd from the barrelhouses of Rampart Street to a wrap party aboard the Queen Mary with Paul McCartney, through the stroke, the silence, the return, and a death that arrived in the middle of recording the finest album of his life — built from named interviews, archival recordings, and Byrd's own words, wherever they could be found and checked.He never had the hit records to match his influence. He had something rarer: nearly every musician who came after him, saying so.Know the story. Hear the blues differently.