Feet on the Street:: Rambles Around New Orleans Audiobook (Free)

“Betcha I could tell ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your sneakers on your ft, / Got your feet on the street, / And the street’s in Noo / Awlins, Loo- / Eez-ee-anna. Where I, for my part, first ate a live oyster and first saw a naked female with the lamps on . . Each time I head to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. with this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has cherished almost about Ft on the road:: Rambles Around New Orleans his entire life-a town “like no various other place in the us, and yet (or as a result) the cradle of American tradition.” Right here we experience everything through his eye, ears, and taste buds: the structures, music, love (yes, sex as well), historical heroes, and all that glorious food.

The book is divided into eight Rambles through various areas of the town. Each closes with lagniappe-a little bit extra, a special deal with for the reader: here a brief riff on Gennifer Plants, there a deep breathing on naked dance. Roy Blount understands New Orleans just like the within an oyster shell and is too glad to consider us to both famous and the infamous places. He captures all of the amazing and wealthy history-culinary, literary, and political-of a city that figured prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who died there), Truman Capote (who was conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who studied voodoo there), and countless others, including Andrew Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Move Morton, Napoléon, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Edgar Degas, Lillian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, and the Dixie Cups.

Above all, though, Feet on the road is a special event of friendship and joie de vivre in one of America’s greatest and most colorful cities, written by one of America’s most beloved humorists.