Let Them Talk: The Piano Prince

If I asked you to name a prodigiously talented, extravagantly flamboyant, African American, sexually fluid musician with a body like an exclamation point and a taste for the rococo whose premature death left the world a little grayer, of course you’d say “Prince,” and you’d be right. Or half-right.

Every since Prince’s April 21st death was reported—ever since a tidal wave of mourning began to gather force, leaving testimonies and tributes and tall tales in its wake—I’ve been thinking surfing the Zeitgeist, thinking about James Booker.

If you don’t know Booker’s music or his story, start with the 2013 film Bayou Maharajah (it streams from all the usual sources), which traces the pianist-singer’s life from its 1939 start, his coming up in the home of Baptist-minister parents in Bay St. Louis, Louisiana, to its sad, sorry end in an emergency room waiting-area in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, where he was born. His story is full of twisted luck and uncanny moments: the film’s sequence where a dozen friends relate contradictory stories of how Booker lost his eye. The sequence where Harry Connick, Jr., demonstrates Booker’s baroquely syncopated piano technique, which Connick as a child studied firsthand (Connick, Sr. was a New Orleans District Attorney who traded Booker a get-out-of-jail-free card for his son’s piano lessons). The sequence where a young guitarist struggling to keep up with Booker onstage describes how the musician maintained his almost unfollowable pace—more notes than any ten fingers could possible play—all the while trying on a succession of glitter-studded eyepatches, hoping to find the one that most appeal to a man in the audience he hoped to attract.

After his 1954 debut as “Little Booker,” he played with just about everybody from Fats Domino to Freddy King, Aretha Franklin, even Ringo Starr and the Doobie Brothers before issuing an amazing string of live and studio albums, many solo. Booker taught Dr. John to play the organ. He studied classical piano as a child. He played a version of “The Minute Waltz” (dubbing it “The Black Minute Waltz”), a ton of standards (I love his “Angel Eyes,” for instance) adaptations of pop songs (Doc Pomus’ “Lonely Avenue”), classic blues like “St. James Infirmary,” and original songs like the mysteriously allusive “Papa Was a Rascal,” opened and closed by these lines:

There was a sweet white woman down in Savanna GA
She made love to my daddy in front of the KKK.

You know we all got to watch out for the CIA.

Booker’s addiction to opiates started in childhood, in the aftermath of a terrible and traumatic auto accident. In 1970, he spent time in Angola for drug possession. The rest of his life he rode a surreal roller-coaster: successful gigs in the U.S. and Europe; throwing it away by ditching recording sessions to get high as soon as he got paid; worshipped by astounded fellow musicians; treated like dirt by every racist, homophobic institution that crossed his path. Knowing how good he was made it all worse. By Booker’s last years, he was seeing the CIA around every corner, tapping into not only his deeds but his thoughts. You can call it paranoia, and it would be hard to argue with that, except to say that the thicket of everyday hostility a black, gay, one-eyed, drug-addicted musician would be expected to hack his way through in mid-twentieth century America could make it very hard to see the world as a welcoming place.

Booker had a slew of nicknames: he dubbed himself “The Bronze Liberace,” sometimes costuming himself to match, while others called him “The Piano Pope,” “The Ivory Emperor,” and—perhaps most clearly to the point at hand—“The Piano Prince of New Orleans.”

And that point is this: beyond the tributes to his genius, my friends who’ve been posting about Prince and emailing links for other people’s posts and articles have stressed the sheer level of permission Prince’s chutzpah and let-them-talk knowing oneself-ness and over-the-top allowing it to shine and walking his own path infused into their own lives.

I’m imagining the ribbon of time folding back on itself for just a moment, enabling the late, great James Booker to trip the purple path to Paisley Park and be welcomed inside as if all the love and fame that was Prince’s could have been his too. The persistence of racism and homophobia—well, I don’t have anything new to say about that beyond cursing and keeping on. But just for a minute, imagine James Booker with access to creative and economic power comparable to that amassed by Prince. “Slowly but surely,” Booker wrote, “I know it’s gonna get back together right now.”

Well dead and gone, I may be dead and gone
Just helping the ground rotting
Yeah but the truth will live on
It never be forgotten

Was Prince’s occasional eyepatch a coded homage, I wonder? Wouldn’t that be something?

Booker live, just voice and piano, “Slowly But Surely.”

”Let Them Talk,” live.

Just let them talk, if they want to
Talk don’t bother me