The Nine Lives album is a musical adaptation of the New York Times bestselling book “Nine Lives” by Dan Baum (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009). Over one hundred musicians (mostly from New Orleans) perform on the album, including Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, John Boutte, Lillian Boutte, Wendell Pierce (from HBO’s Treme), Broadway star and Tony Award winning actor/singer Michael Cerveris, Kevin Griffin, Michelle Shocked, Harry Shearer, Shamarr Allen, The Dixie Cups and Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The memoirs and history books on this list are mostly available as e-books and/or audiobooks via SimplyE and/or OverDrive.Mystery Street Records is proud to present “Nine Lives, A Musical Adaptation (Volume 1)” by Colman deKay and Paul Sanchez, a two CD collection of 24 original songs, released March 1, 2011. It’s proof that truth is often stranger and better than fiction. All these years later, it has achieved a new normal but it’s not necessarily the city it once was, in some ways it’s better-in others not so much, but it still has its indelible vibe, its mood, and definitely its mythology. It’s a city that has clawed its way back from the brink. This year marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and its devastation of New Orleans. A lot like fiction -only better-because this story is true. It’s a story of joy and love, regret and sadness all paired with a pot of red beans and rice simmering on the stove and the oppressive New Orleans heat and humidity (with no a/c!) as a backdrop. My mother would tease him that he could be a character in that classic New Orleans novel Confederacy of Dunces and my dad would roll his eyes and shake his head in protest. If you think this all sounds like it’s straight out of a Southern Gothic novel you’re not far off. My dad was the adored, spoiled, only child in a house with his mother and five or six spinster and widowed aunts and cousins who put all of their love and energies onto him, for all the children they would never have. From that point forward, until his death a few years later, my dad would really only spend time with his father in an upstairs bedroom while listening to ball games on the radio. When my dad was nine, his father had a heart attack and was bedridden. He grew up in a modest two-story home which was shared by his parents and various, unmarried female relatives and located in the Lower Ninth Ward’s Holy Cross neighborhood, not far from the Mississippi River. His mom was a school teacher and his father worked in insurance. He was a miracle child to his older Catholic parents, of French ancestry, who thought their chance for children had passed them by. My father was born and raised in New Orleans in the 1940s and '50s.
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