Word: iberia
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...world was the narrow cell in the New Iberia jail, where he waited for the talk to end. Finally it did. Willie had to go back to the chair. His lawyer came to tell him that he thought he could still get another stay, but Willie said: "No, leave it alone. Thank you, but leave it alone. I'm ready...
...around town with the slidehorns hanging out over the tailgate. He went barnstorming for as little as $5 a week and tips. Twelve years ago Bunk lost his teeth and gave up playing. A Pittsburgh jazz fan found him, a toothless stooped laborer in the rice fields at New Iberia, La., got him some false teeth and raised money for a horn (TIME, May 24, 1943). Said the New York Herald Tribune's highbrow critic Virgil Thomson: "[Bunk] is the greatest master of blues or off-pitch notes ... an artist of delicate imagination...
About five years ago a Pittsburgh jazz enthusiast named William Russell heard from Louis Armstrong that Bunk Johnson was still alive somewhere in the Deep South. Once Bunk was found at his old home in New Iberia, La., he became a voluble correspondent. He slowly pecked out his careful letters on an old typewriter. Says he: "You can sit down with a cup of coffee and a cigaret and be sure you won't go to sleep because that little bell keeps waking you up." Bunk kept insisting in his letters that if he had a trumpet...
Last summer William Russell and some friends made a trip to New Iberia to find out whether Bunk was really as good as he said he was. They came away determined that Bunk should be heard. Finally an offer came from San Francisco, where an interior decorator named Rudolph Pickett Blesh was lecturing on hot jazz at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Blesh wanted Bunk to illustrate a lecture...
...morning of the concert Clarinetist Whaley disappeared and Bunk Johnson refused to get out of bed for rehearsal. But that evening Bunk Johnson and his band were terrific. Some suggested they be put on a permanent basis. But Bunk was thinking about the soft Gulf breezes and New Iberia. Said he: "This San Francisco fog just gets me all full of cold...