Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White »

Tom Sancton

Tom Sancton makes his debut as a writer of political thrillers with The Armageddon Project. For 22 years he worked at Time magazine, most recently as the Paris Bureau Chief. He coauthored the 1998 international bestseller Death of a Princess: The Investigation, which examined the circumstances surrounding Princess Diana’s death. His acclaimed memoir, Song for My Fathers (Other Press, 2006), recounts his early life among legendary jazz men in his native New Orleans. He currently lives in Paris.

Visit the book's website at www.otherpress.com/songformyfathers.

Tulane Reading Project 2006

Former Time Paris Bureau Chief and bestselling author Tom Sancton returns to the New Orleans of his youth and the music that shaped and guided his life.

Song for my Fathers is the story of a young white boy driven by a consuming passion to learn the music and ways of a group of aging black jazzmen in the twilight years of the segregation era. Contemporaries of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local obscurity until Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of interest in traditional jazz. They called themselves “the mens.” And they welcomed the young apprentice into their ranks.

The boy was introduced into this remarkable fellowship by his father, an eccentric Southern liberal and failed novelist whose powerful articles on race had made him one of the most effective polemicists of the early Civil Rights movement. Nurtured on his father’s belief in racial equality, the aspiring clarinetist embraced the old musicians with a boundless love and admiration. In a sense, they became his spiritual fathers and role models. Meanwhile his real father, who had first led the boy to the “mens” and shared his reverence for them, later recoiled in horror at the idea that his son might lose his way in the world of late-night jazz joints, French Quarter bar rooms, and a precarious life on the margins of society. The tension between the father’s determination to control the boy’s destiny and his son’s abiding passion for the music is a major theme of the book.

The narrative unfolds against the vividbackdrop of New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. But that magical town is more than decor; it is perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken place in any other city in the world. Written several years before Katrina crashed into New Orleans and changed its face forever, Song for My Fathers seems all the more moving in the wake of that cataclysm.

The New Yorker

When Sancton’s father, a former editor at The New Republic, returned to the South to write novels, he instilled in his son a passion for jazz, taking him along to listen in—even on school nights—at Allan and Sandy Jaffe’s Preservation Hall, in New Orleans. In time, Sancton started playing jazz himself. (A clarinettist, he included among his mentors George Lewis and Punch Miller.) This jazz memoir’s straightforward style has the virtue of allowing the musicians to speak for themselves. The book is a mirror for their private tribulations, and also for public ones: as a teen-ager at a Tulane frat party, Sancton watched, ashamed, as an all-black local band was told to play “Dixie.” A moving introduction explains that this memoir was written before Hurricane Katrina; much of what Sancton lovingly depicts has now vanished in space as well as time.