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

Summary:

“Betcha I could show ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your sneakers on your foot, / Got your feet on the street, / As well as 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 girl with the lamps on . . Each and every time I head to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. in this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has treasured almost about Foot on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans his entire life-a city “like no additional place in the us, yet (or consequently) the cradle of American tradition.” Right here we experience everything through his eye, ears, and tastebuds: the structures, music, romance (yes, sex too), historical heroes, and all that glorious meals.

The book is divided into eight Rambles through various areas of the city. Each closes with lagniappe-a little bit extra, a special deal with for the reader: here a short riff on Gennifer Blooms, there a deep breathing on naked dance. Roy Blount understands New Orleans like the within an oyster shell and is only too glad to take us to both the famous and the infamous sights. He captures all the wonderful and wealthy history-culinary, literary, and political-of a city that thought prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who passed away there), Truman Capote (who was conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who examined 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, as well as 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 towns, written by among America’s most beloved humorists.

Also available being a Random House AudioBook