When Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes talks about New Orleans, he does not speak in straight lines. He speaks in rhythm, memory, folklore, food, language, heat and spirit.
He talks about the city as a mother, a teacher, a song, a mirror and a place with a beat always moving underfoot. He talks about New Orleans as a city that has survived by absorbing what came before, holding onto what matters and transforming it into something new.
“This is one of those places that we don’t throw anything away if it’s a good ingredient,” Barnes said. “We keep it forever. It’s just adding on to things.”
For an issue focused on what makes New Orleans irreplaceable, Barnes offers a reminder that not all preservation happens inside a building. Some of it lives in words. Some of it lives in music. Some of it arrives before dawn on Mardi Gras morning. Some of it is carried in food, greetings, stories, movement, humor and the way a place makes people feel seen.
Barnes is a renaissance man – a musician, photographer, a naturalist who worked 32 years for the National Park Service at Barataria Preserve of Jean Lafitte NHP and New Orleans Jazz NHP, member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club and Big Chief of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang, an Afro-Creole Carnival tradition with deep roots in New Orleans. For PRC’s Holiday Heritage Travel Tour, he will share music, language, history and conversation in an intimate setting designed to help visitors listen more closely to the city.
For Barnes, that listening is where preservation begins.
How would you describe the work you do in New Orleans?
The work I do in New Orleans is really based off community love and organizing.
I’m a musician. I play music for many different reasons, but mainly to create platforms where people can feel like they’re in society and in social events on an even playing field with everybody else. I like to use music as a way to create bridges for people to feel included, as well as have a good time.
A lot of times, that comes with historical facts and sometimes fiction. But when they come together, that’s what New Orleans is. It’s around the folklore of it, the projection out into the world and all of the many different influences that have been synthesized in this city.
New Orleans is one of those places where, if it’s a good ingredient, we don’t throw it away. We keep it forever. We just keep adding on.
That’s one of the main ways I look at music and how it works here, and how it travels out into the world.
One of those influences is Creole language. When you hear Creole, what do you hear beyond the words?
I hear how people learned how to reinvent and create themselves.
I hear how people took ingredients from many different things and cultures and created their own sensibility — something they could tailor for themselves, something they could craft. And it’s expandable. It can work in many different ways and places.
It’s also a language that was built out of defense. It came from enslaved Africans who took French-based languages, Spanish, Native American influences, African proverbs and syntax, and created their own special language here in Louisiana.
When you hear that language, you are hearing survival. You are hearing invention.
What gets lost when a language stops being spoken?
As it has been said, thousands of years of libraries of information are lost.
A way of life is lost. A way of thinking is lost.
But it does not completely bottom out, because the fragments of what created those languages still exist. Creole in New Orleans is still in how people speak. It crosses all concepts of neighborhood or boundary. Everybody knows how to say it and how to talk when they want to, because that is the voice.
It’s like a mother’s voice. When you learn the mother tongue, that’s the thing that’s always going to be closest to your heart.
You can’t get away from it.
What can music say about New Orleans history that language can’t?
I think they are so bound together and intertwined.
When you hear New Orleans music — and that covers all of the basic genres people have boxed up and said, “This is blues, this is jazz, this is rock ’n’ roll” — it’s all in New Orleans.
I hate to quote Ernie K-Doe so clearly, but Ernie K-Doe told me, and I heard him say it on the radio: “I’m not quite sure, but I think all good music in this world came from New Orleans.”
And he was the emperor of the universe.
But the main thing is that New Orleans is this place that learned how to synthesize all of these different styles of music. This is a place for dreamers. The language and the music are bound together.
New Orleans is like a big mother. She takes care of her children.
What do people miss when they come to New Orleans looking only for the version they already know?
If you come here and don’t let New Orleans teach you and embrace you for what it is, you can have an imagination for what you thought this place would be. I see it all the time.
But really, it’s about being able to come here and absorb the lessons, the way of life, the way people think.
You’re going to miss the essence of what the city is and what it has to offer if you only want to remain comfortable in your own concepts. Because New Orleans is going to expand and stretch your boundaries in every way possible.
If you allow that to happen, it’s like a Dracula bite.
It’s going to turn you.
What does it mean to really listen to New Orleans?
What New Orleans says with its music, culture, cuisine and the way people ask, “How y’all doing? What y’all did last night?” — it shows a lot of emotional intelligence.
That’s one of the main things New Orleans does. It says, “We’re welcoming. We see you. We’re not going to let you pass down the street and act like we don’t see you.”
When you hear music here, it’s around spirit transfer. It’s very direct. It catches people off guard often.
People come to New Orleans, and they’ve been here 15 minutes, and they start to feel some kind of way. They start to feel things they were not in contact with before in themselves.
When you come to New Orleans, you’re going to start feeling yourself real fast.
During the Holiday Heritage Travel Tour, your experience will be intimate — music, language, conversation and story, not a big stage performance. What does that setting allow you to share?
A setting like that, with a small group of people, gives me an opportunity to really take the time to show them the magic of the place and the endurance people had to come up with.
People had to invent ways and thought processes of freedom. They had to create ways of understanding that everybody is the same, no matter who they are, how they dress, what they eat for breakfast, what they do at night, what they do in the seen world and what they do in the unseen world.
With an opportunity like that, we can talk about it. We can have a relaxed atmosphere where people can ask questions, and I can answer as best I can. I can give examples in the moment and really serve it up to them on a silver platter in a way they will not forget.
What do you hope people walk away with?
I hope they walk away with a reflection.
It’s like a mirror. It’s like masks with the Skull and Bone Gang. When people see people dressed as the dead coming down the street, they’re going to have an immediate reaction. They can’t get out of it. They are either running toward it because they are interested, or they are running from it.
But it’s not really about what they saw. It’s about how they feel and what they see inside themselves.
In those intimate moments, in a historic place like Napoleon House — and they have good groceries, and the Pimm’s are incredible — people can reflect and see how this world is made up.
Some very old, ancient thought processes can strike your spirit. At the same time, they can refresh you in a new kind of way. We can level off with each other in a real humane and beautiful way about many different things all at the same time.
What do you hope people understand about New Orleans after that experience?
I hope they can see that what created what some people call the New World was already here.
It was the number of people, the different kinds of folks and the baggage they brought with them, and what they were able to figure out how to do with it here.
This town was created out of social pressures, but it is still a place where you can sit down and reinvent yourself, or rethink yourself. It is a place that can feel like home.
You can come to New Orleans to visit, and you can go back home to wherever you came from — Fargo, San Diego, Savannah, wherever it is. But New Orleans is always going to get inside you.
It can feel like your first home or your second. The choice is up to you.
But it will feel like home in some ways, unless you can’t get that beautiful, wonderful, sweet Creole energy. And if you can’t, you must have a hole in your soul in the first place.
But it’s a welcoming place. It will feel like home.
What do you love about New Orleans the most?
Man, I like the groceries. The rhythm of the city. I like the beat that’s always under my feet.
When I wake up in the morning and feel like the humidity is below 85 percent, that’s a good day. But if it’s not, that’s status quo. I know about it.
It’s like the heat we feel right now. It’s warm outside. It’s not hot like it will be in July, because the radiant heat gets in the ground.
It’s a place that makes you feel alive all the time.
Undeniable.
