Word: perdido
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Louis was five his mother took him away from Jane Alley, moved some 18 blocks to Liberty Street, near Perdido in the old third ward. Socially it was the shortest of steps, but it was up, and for Louis it was decisive: near by were the Fisk School, where he learned to read & write, and honky-tonks like Sicilian Henry Matranga's place and thickly packed Funky Butt Hall, where both the syncopation and the dancing were strident and brassy...
...revolver out to the street and fired it off. He was picked up and taken to juvenile court where, he remembers, the magistrate told him that while he wasn't a bad boy he might get to be one if he kept playing around Perdido Street at night. Louis was packed off to ihe Colored Waif's Home for Boys, a New Orleans reform school...
...Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there's mah man") Oliver came around to listen...
Life with Daisy had its ups & downs, and on a Mardi Gras day just 30 years ago, Daisy threatened Satchmo with a razor as he stood at the corner of Liberty and Perdido Streets in full Zulu court regalia. Louis had had enough. He took a job playing with Fate Marable's band on the Mississippi River excursion boats Dixie Bell and Sidney. The pay was the unheard of (for Satchmo) sum of $55 a week. Says he: "I had so much money I just plain didn't know what to do with it." They played such...
Because of la cometa, more people than usual were praying in Mexico City churches, but they lighted fewer candles at the altars. Explained sad-eyed Maria Rodríguez, as she stood in the queue at the corn mill on Niño Perdido Avenue: "When artificial light burns while a comet is in the skies, newborn babies will be marked, on their bodies if male and on their faces if female." The other women nodded soberly. "Even if all the lights are out," said Juana Sanchez, "one hundred children will be born this year with harelips, two prominent...