This morning I posted on my love’s Facebook page. I don’t even have a FB page, but I posted for him for years, first when he was alive and some yoyo he hired wrote stupid stuff he would never say in a fake, page-written southern drawl he would never use. And then every once in a while after he passed three years ago, I have chosen to remind people of this extraordinary man I was blessed to be with for a dozen years.
Recently, it struck me that the last live Jazz Fest (New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival) was in 2019, the year following Henry’s final Jazz Fest performance, the year after he passed, the year in which he was celebrated—and the year before we lost so many, and so many we didn’t need to lose, where the planet was asked to rise up together, make good, support each other, do right. We’ve not been terribly good at rising, but Henry would be hopeful, always hopeful, that there’s always the possibility. For all of us—individually, communally, collectively. He was always about showing up—a reminder, Gabrielle Mullem’s extraordinary documentary about Henry’s music camp for kids with vision challenges, The Music’s Gonna Get You Through. After Katrina, he never stopped thinking about how to recreate it somewhere else, somehow. Although Henry brought so much to his time here for/with all of us, he was full of ideas and visions that have yet to be fulfilled—including that we show up and support/love each other. If we get that piece, the rest will come.
When I had a message in my inbox this morning from Miles Willis, a jazz radio broadcaster at WPFW (DC) 89.3 FM, saying he was playing music from Henry’s The Village and Viper’s Drag in celebration of the “birth anniversary of Henry Butler,” I was insanely happy.
They were the only albums Willis said he had. He has a show from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. Tuesdays—small slice of the pie, but every slice counts for the whole! People often forget that—each and every one of us matters on the planet. Henry knew that too.
Fiercely private and independent, he worked intensely to keep his personal life and his professional life separate, and so I did too. So many stories—the navigation of our intertwined lives. Most people saw him through a lens consumed by his music, often viewed as the “last in a line of distinctive New Orleans pianists like James Booker and Professor Longhair.” I am grateful to have had the whole man.
Over the years I haven’t written publicly about us, but it’s likely time I break that seal since I have an essay, “I Tell Henry the Plate Is Red,” coming out in the anthology Breaking Bread from Beacon Press in spring 2022 that, obviously, includes him.
I think I’ve published only four poems in which we are the energy and the juice, but they never were identified in that way.
“My Ocean as the Blind Man Sees It”—published in Off the Coast, and broadcast on Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio
“Cachexia of Time”—Solstice Literary Journal (Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize finalist)
“The Last Night”—Deep Water column in Portland Press Herald
“You Did Good”—ArtWord at Portland Museum of Art, after Ashley Bryan’s Serwaa