In New Orleans, in February, had you driven east from the Lakeview neighborhood all the way to Peoples Avenue in Gentilly, the quickest route would have been Robert E. Lee Boulevard. As of this month, you’re traveling the same road with a different name: Allen Toussaint Boulevard.
That change—replacing the name of a Confederate general who had no direct connection to New Orleans with that of a musician born and bred in the city, whose triumphant hits span generations and styles—reflects a citywide initiative to rid the streetscape of the names of Confederates and white supremacists. The headline in the local Gambit weekly on Jan. 6, after the city council’s unanimous vote in favor, declared “Lee Surrenders Again.”
In New Orleans, this isn’t the first removal of Lee’s presence from public view. A monument to Lee was one of four removed in 2017 by city council order—including statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, and General P.G.T. Beauregard, whose 1861 attack on Fort Sumter ignited the Civil War, as well as an obelisk honoring members of the Reconstruction-era Crescent City White League. In a bold speech after those statues came down, then-New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said, “We now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people.”
That reminded me of the opening lyrics to one of Toussaint’s best songs—“Now is the time for all good men / To get together with one another.” (Several lines later: “And do respect the women of the world.”) Toussaint wrote that for singer Lee Dorsey, whose 1970 version was released as simply “Yes We Can.” The Pointer Sisters scored their first hit with it three years later, this time titled “Yes We Can Can,” for the syncopated repetition of Toussaint’s refrain. Toussaint’s music expressed the indelible rhythms of his city but arrived a few beats ahead of the social change its composer didn’t live to see.
Long before his death in 2015, at 77, Toussaint—who was a magnificent pianist—composed, arranged, or produced hits for an astonishingly long and broad list of artists in nearly every American musical genre. (Among many other songs, “Southern Nights,” “Lady Marmalade” and “Working in the Coal Mine.”) These songs blended funkiness with elegance, all grounded in what Toussaint once described to me as his city’s distinctive “strut of the street.” At his 2018 memorial in New Orleans, hometown heroes spoke of Toussaint—who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Blues Hall of Fame two years later and received a National Medal of the Arts in 2013—as one who helped script their careers and their city’s story. Elvis Costello, who recorded the post-Katrina album The River in Reverse with Toussaint, described himself as “one of a long line of pilgrims and supplicants in search of Allen’s magic touch.” He recalled how, in 2005, Toussaint “believed that music would restore the spirit of the place he loved."
That long line of pilgrims to Toussaint’s studio door included Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Labelle. And Toussaint’s belief about music’s restorative powers in his hometown was well-founded. While researching post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans, I learned that in the long wake of the flood resulting from the levee breaches after the hurricane, the key players of New Orleans culture were far more than pleasing TV-news B-roll: They were the story. They led the way, suggesting and maintaining a vital sense of community and solidarity while stimulating aid. The second-line parades that rolled through the city while it was still in ruins represented more than just joy in the face of pain; they were claims to city streets by citizens cast out during one of this country’s more glaring incidences of disenfranchisement based on structural racism.
The street signs now bearing Toussaint’s name began going up on March 7, and they reclaim roughly four miles of boulevard in a tangible, permanent way for even those who don’t come out for parades. In general, we tend to take Black culture for granted even as we celebrate it. Yet grooves that move bodies also often build a body politic. Artists like Toussaint, whose music was loved by all kinds of Americans, invest us in things we now struggle with: bridge-building, truth-telling, even reconciliation.
New Orleans City Council Motion M-20-170, mandating the renaming of streets, parks, and places in New Orleans, set in motion a public process involving a nine-member commission and a 16-member panel of experts. The process reflects similar efforts in other American cities amid a broad-based reckoning with structural racism that has been amplified by the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The New Orleans street-renaming process laid out specific criteria for removing and replacing names on street signs and public places—chiefly, service in the Confederate army, and continuing attempts to overthrow rights of citizens after the war through the abrogation of Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Amendment guarantees. The public renaming process, the council motion stated, “may only occur by ensuring a robust and transparent public conversation about those we choose to recognize and honor.” In New Orleans, such a conversation quite naturally leads to recognition for Black musicians. Among the city’s six acts of renaming thus far are: Red Allen Way, for trumpeter Henry James “Red” Allen, an innovative contemporary of Louis Armstrong, and Marsalis Harmony Park, for pianist Ellis Marsalis, who died in 2020, and was patriarch to the city’s best-known family of jazz.
With the possible exception of Louis Armstrong, the city council’s panel of experts got it right: “No one was more responsible for bringing New Orleans music to the world” than Toussaint. Born in New Orleans in 1938, he lived his whole life there, save for four years of post-Katrina displacement in New York City. After his return, his home and studio were on the very boulevard that now bears his name, easily spotted by the wrought-iron treble clefs on the studio’s front gates.
His songs—including “Mother-in-Law,” recorded by Ernie K-Doe, “It’s Raining,” an anthem for singer Irma Thomas, and “Working in the Coal Mine,” Dorsey’s biggest hit—helped put local artists on the national map. He was among the first to hire and produce the wily band of studio musicians that stepped out on their own in 1969 as The Meters to define New Orleans funk.
Toussaint shaped an outsized chunk of the popular music broadcasted in the last few decades of the 20th century. “Whipped Cream,” a trifle of a song he first recorded while still in the army, crept into American lives first as a 1965 hit for trumpeter Herb Alpert and then as the theme of “The Dating Game.” Glen Campbell’s 1977 version of Toussaint’s “Southern Nights” topped the country charts. Both the Rolling Stones and The Who recorded his “Fortune Teller.”
Toussaint spent most of his life as a behind-the-scenes master. All that changed in New York City in 2005, after he lost his home, recording studio, and most of his belongings to the flood. A brunch he played at Joe's Pub, in Manhattan’s East Village, to raise funds for New Orleans, turned into a regular gig. He entered a late-in-life spotlight as a performer and a forceful spokesman for his city’s recovery. His music took on deepened meaning. His “Tipitina and Me,” on the 2005 benefit album Our New Orleans, transformed a rollicking classic from his hometown’s defining pianist, Professor Longhair, into a just-as-funky lament. His rendition of “Yes We Can Can,” for Democratic convention delegates in Denver, Colorado in 2008, sounded as if written in that moment for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. On 2013’s Songbook, Toussaint reclaimed “Southern Nights,” this time with a long, spoken meditation on boyhood wonder while gazing up at the Louisiana night sky.
To gaze up at these new street signs means many things in New Orleans. They are “a ray of sunshine where there was darkness,” for Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, who as mayor of New Orleans presided over the naming of an airport for Louis Armstrong. “Robert E. Lee was a loser who fought a failed war,” he told me. “Allen Toussaint was a straight-up winner.”
Irma Thomas, the 80-year-old “Soul Queen of New Orleans” who first sang with Toussaint at 18, sees such recognition as a city taking notice of its culture-bearers. “None of us go into the music business thinking about what we will do for our city. But this recognizes how much good Allen did, and how much we all can accomplish. Sometimes that gets taken for granted.” What would Allen say about all this? Reginald Toussaint, who first recorded as a percussionist with his father 36 years ago, didn’t even pause: “Well, alright.”
Not everyone agrees. No change in New Orleans goes unchallenged, especially one that stirs issues of race. I’ll never forget pulling my car over on the way to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2017. Across the street from the Jefferson Davis monument, then slated for removal, were two-dozen men and women, many in military garb, settling in for a protest that looked more like a battle encampment. Last year, Reginald Toussaint and his sister, Alison Toussaint-LeBeaux, rejected one proposal to rename a section of the boulevard in racially diverse Gentilly after his father without the same change taking place in the mostly white stretch in Lakeview. One public comment suggested a similar split: one section named for Toussaint, who was black, and the other for clarinetist Pete Fountain, who was white.
In city known for musical innovation, imponderable dualities, and inscrutable personal style, Toussaint epitomized it all: He was a genteel creator of hits who drove a two-tone, gold-and-brown 1974 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, who could look correct in a brightly colored suit, silk tie, white athletic socks, and sandals. His music fostered good times yet often contained stark commentary. His lyrics to “Freedom for the Stallion”—recorded in 1972 by Lee Dorsey, and later remade in separate recordings by Boz Scaggs, The Hues Corporation, and Three Dog Night—considered racism in still-timely fashion, with lines like: “They've got men building fences to keep other men out / Ignore him if he whispers and kill him if he shouts.”
In 2015, amid debate in New Orleans over Confederate monuments, a Facebook page titled “Allen Toussaint Circle” proposed a new name for Lee Circle, where the Robert E. Lee statue then stood. That didn’t happen. A boulevard is better. I can’t help but imagine Toussaint cruising past his former home in his Rolls, his name flashing by above. In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300,” author Jason Berry argues that the city’s signature sound began with processions and parades that were, in effect, “a performance narrative countering that of the Lost Cause.” (Toussaint’s “strut of the street” as protest.) In that book, Toussaint tells Berry that New Orleans has a distinctive hum—“B-flat all the way.” I doubt that’s true. But along one boulevard, the place suddenly seems a lot less tone-deaf to this moment in time.
Larry Blumenfeld writes regularly on jazz and culture in New York and New Orleans. He was a Katrina Media Fellow with The Open Society Institute.
