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Every year around the end of January-February, it’s carnival time in Louisiana, and Mobile Alabama, near my home, where the first Mardi Gras was held in America.
I lived in Monroe Louisiana in the late 60s, early 70s, the heart of the conservative protestant Bible Belt, and there’s no way they would celebrate Mardi Gras back in those days. (Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday”) The Methodist Church I grew up in now observes Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras when lent starts which is the 40 day period before Easter, but for me it was all about the celebration, and ash Wednesday never figured into the liturgical scheme of things.
.
Most people in Louisiana, especially further south didn’t know it wasn’t a national holiday in the rest of the United States.
Everyone should see Mardi Gras at least once in their life, especially Jazz and blues musicians, and fans of New Orleans music. For someone who’s made a career out of playing New Orleans music, to feel what this music is all about, the rhythm of the streets, brass bands, parades, costumes, and the carefree spirit of it all, is to understand it on a soul level. You know you’re from New Orleans when you believe that purple, green and gold look good together- and you will even eat The King Cake with those colors.
That’s the way it was a Carnival, music was fun, spontaneous, and in my younger years, I didn’t have a care in the world. Some people say it was dangerous, and maybe it was, but I’ve always felt a protection around me. I’ve lived the life of a millionaire, and a hobo, but sadly, I fell away from God in those days, lost in a haze of blues, booze, wild women, At sundown, on Fat Tuesday, still in my metallic Blue Sly Stone costume with a rainbow Afro wig, the local New Orleanians kept telling me “Mardi Gras is over, man”. I didn’t want the party to end, but I didn’t have a clue of the whole tradition. The Season of Lent was upon us, and even though it seemed like wild debauchery, the Catholics in New Orleans knew it was time for a heart and soul purification, and the 40 day period of fasting, repentance, and a spiritual cleansing, to prepare the soul for the coming resurrection celebration of Jesus
I didn’t know the symbolism or the repentance of ash Wednesday until much later, but it means more to me now than any Mardi Gras Parade in the world. The streets were filled with filth, empty bottles, and debris, It was Ash Wednesday, a day that never entered into my mind, having been raised Protestant. I wrote much of the song during Carnival 2011, February a few days after being diagnosed with Cancer, which I'm now cured of.
On that season of Lent, and on the Tuesday after Resurrection Sunday I started seven weeks of Radiation, Chemotherapy, and a purification of my soul. I found a Catholic book store near my home in British Columbia with Holy Water from Lourdes France, one of my favorite places on earth, and I prayed that through I would be healed.
Like the Bible says, there was a time to dance and a time to mourn. In a New Orleans Second Line, they're often in the same day, with a dirge from the Olympia Brass band, with “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”, when the soul has been laid to rest, and the priest says his last words “May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace” and when the band picks up the tempo with “Didn’t he Ramble” and heads back to town from the graveyard with those festive umbrellas and white handkerchiefs, but my soul was still buried there with the dead.
I start the song with a New Orleans Style Brass band, playing the slow dirge to the cemetery, and go into a Funk Gospel Ballad.
As a songwriter, the metaphor of Ash Wednesday morning, was a difficult one to write was a major point in my spiritual journey, I was in no shape to write that song "When Ash Wednesday came around”
I saw it in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and I saw it in February 2011, driving home from the doctors office after hearing the news that I had tongue cancer. I went to my first Ash Wednesday service during the 80s, in San Jose California, because for someone searching for sanity and sobriety, the party wasn't fun anymore.
There in San Jose, California, at the Ash Wednesday service, There were Old folks with canes and walkers, Latinos with low rider Chevys, middle aged folks, 20-somethings, children, teenagers. Some folks were well-dressed, some looked down and out It was clear that for the hundreds of the people that came to that church that day—Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year that they must come. They needed to come for the ashes. I often wondered why.
There was something fearful about the ashes that the priest rubbed on our foreheads that day, Black. Cold. Greasy, Cross. Death. Who has come to Ash Wednesday seeing cancer in the ashes? AIDS? Hep C, Old age? Some come to look at it, to behold the cross, to declare the victory. As I write this many years after that Mardi Gras of 1974, hopefully a lot wiser, I’m hoping something miraculous and healing will rise from the ashes, for someone battling cancer, hope and faith was all had to get me through these 40 days in the desert, but I prayed another door would open, a light to show me the way.
The opening "New Orleans Brass Band" are my friends HG and brother Rainer Gutternigg, who I toured with many times in Europe, in Dixieland concerts.
Background vocals are the amazing vocalist, Vaneese Thomas, who's from the legendary Stax Memphis Family, Father Rufus Thomas, and Daughter Carla Thomas, Vaneese toured for many years with the late Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin and sang recently at the going home funeral service for Aretha. The slide guitar is performed by my friend Lee Yankie, who's my favorite guitarist on the Alabama Mississippi Florida Gulf Coast where I live now.
lyrics
Lyrics by Michael DeCroix and John Lee Sanders
The Revelry of yesterday
Carnival time…Celebration
Yesterday I was in my prime
With a Horn on a Tuesday morn
I Still wanna lead the band
Down to the river’s invitation
But there’s a time and season
And a reason, a time to be reborn
When Ash Wednesday comes around
I long for higher ground
We’ll all be safe and sound
And the Saints will wear the crown
And that long lost wayward son is homeward bound
To that place where grace and mercy will be found
On that morning when Ash Wednesday comes around
You know I’m gonna be homeward bound
I’ve been marchin’ uptown, downtown
While Fat Tuesday drum rolls clatter
Shufflin’ with the saints and the sinners
Feelin’ that big easy laughter
From the graveyard to the boulevard
To the here and ever after
If you wanna smell the rose
Sometimes you gotta feel the thorns
Chorus
Daylight finds me where the river runs
So deep and pure, far and wide
I can hear angels singing sweetly
from the other side
Big parades and masquerades
Slowly drifting out to sea
Leaving me behind, but I don’t mind
Cuz I’ve made it through the Fire
I’ve made it through the rain
Through the mud and the flood
Down to the wire gotta get on board that train
credits
from Tweakin' Some Twang,
released October 30, 2018
John Lee Sanders, Piano, Organ, Tenor Sax,Percussion, Vocals, Horn Arrangement,
Mic Mestek, Drums
Alvaro "Dr. Revelto" Fernandez, Bass
Lee Yankie, Slide Guitar
Vaneese Thomas, Backing Vocals
Hans Georg Gutternigg, Tuba, Trombone
Rainer Gutternigg, Trumpet
Multi-instrumentalist, Composer, Saxophone, Guitar, Piano, vocalist, and Emmy nominated composer, he has evolved a
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