Louisiana Voice

The list of famous musicians who have lived or plied their trade in Louisiana who have since departed is long and illustrious.

There are Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash who were regulars on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport before hitting it big.

There was Janis Joplin who called the honky tonks and road houses in South Louisiana her second home while establishing her musical chops.

Percy Sledge who had wanted to play second base for the Cincinnati Reds, moved to Baton Rouge after recording When a Man Loves a Woman (recorded while wearing his baseball uniform), a song that became a megahit not once, but twice.

More recently, Jimmy Buffett who died almost exactly three years ago on Sept. 1, 2023, began his musical career as a busker, singing on the streets of New Orleans for whatever tourists were willing to cough up.

Almost a year after Buffett’s death, Kris Kristofferson, who wrote Me and Bobby McGee while flying helicopters for PHI out o Lafayette, died on Sept. 28, 2024. He actually landed a rented helicopter on Johnny Cash’s Tennessee estate in order to pitch songs he’d written. Cash was so impressed that he debuted Sunday Morning Comin’ Down on his ABC Network TV show, launching Kristofferson’s career.

And, of course, there was a host of New Orleans performers and songwriters who made our lives happier with their music.

Fats Domino, Tony Joe White, John Fred, Rod Bernard, Johnny Horton, Jim Reeves, Percy Mayfield, even Ray Charles…

Sadly, they’re all gone.

And now, country music icon Dolly Parton has joined them in death.

It was little known until she mentioned it in her 2020 book, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, that when she a mere child of 12 (or 13—different stories give varying ages), she rode 30 hours on a bus with her doddering grandmother so she could record her very FIRST RECORD, Puppy Love, at GOLDBAND RECORDS, a small studio owned by Edward Wayne Shuler, Sr. and which also gave the world Phil Phillips’s Sea of Love.

Lake Charles TV station KPLC posted a story about Dolly, complete with a PHOTO in which, even as a child, she displayed that incredible Dolly smile.

Dolly died today (Aug. 25) at age 80. But she was so much more than a singer. She was an actress, an entrepreneur but most of all, a true philanthropist who set up her Dollywood Foundation and the Imagine Library as a means of offering scholarships, books and disaster relief to children.

Whenever I talk about my book Louisiana Rocks: The True Origins of Rock and Roll, I like to say Louisiana is known for its great food, colorful politics and damned good music. Writing about just this small sampling of the state’s 300 or so of the state’s outstanding musical artists only serves to underscore the richness and depth of that talent.