Ben Sandmel first came to Louisiana as a riverboat deckhand traveling between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. When the boats docked, he explored the Crescent City and soon fell in love with its lively music scene.
Born in Nashville, he grew up in Cincinnati and eventually ended up in Chicago, playing in blues clubs.
“I was a drummer since junior high school,” he says. “I was in a garage band called The Henchmen. It was originally The Cadavers, but we didn’t think that was commercial enough. We played British invasion, surfer music, soul, mostly rock.
“In Chicago I played with Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Johnson, Junior Wells. I was often called at the last minute when somebody didn’t show up. It was an interesting scene, but it had some ugly sides.”
Every spring through late fall, he worked on riverboats. “I had read Huck Finn,” he says. “I was interested in that side of American folklore and culture. It’s a crummy, dirty, dangerous job with high turnover, so it was not hard to get hired. The money was terrible—less than a dollar an hour—but it was a huge adventure.”
He graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a degree in folklore and recalls writing a lengthy term paper on riverboats. “I was interested in the traditions of the river, occupational folklore,” says Sandmel, who is currently working on a master’s degree in musicology at Tulane University.
While playing blues in Chicago, he reviewed records for Living Blues and Down Beat magazines and profiled musicians for the Chicago Reader, a weekly newspaper. “I did my first set of liner notes for Clifton Chenier’s album I’m Here on Alligator Records,” says Sandmel, who has since written dozens of them. “I was paid fifty dollars and a set of snow tires.”
In 1982, he finally heeded the siren song of New Orleans. “Once I got here, it just clicked,” he says. “I got an assignment from Louisiana Life magazine to interview Clifton Chenier. I spent a week in Lafayette and met a lot of people there.”
It took a week because the great zydeco artist wasn’t exactly cooperative. “He wanted to get paid for the interview,” recalls Sandmel. “I’d go to his house every day, and he’d put me off. His wife would come to the door and say, ‘He’s not here,’ and he’d be standing right behind her. He finally let me in to record an interview. But when the tape ran out he wouldn’t let me flip the tape, so I only got forty-five minutes with him. But he was a very impressive guy, super smart, shrewd.”
Sandmel rapidly found outlets for his talents in music, folklore, and writing. “Nick Spitzer, who was running the Louisiana Folklife Program, hired me for the Florida parishes fieldwork project, to write about traditional blues and gospel. I drove twenty-three hundred miles back and forth and recorded interviews with musicians on a cassette machine.” His analysis of blues and gospel music was published in the 1988 book Folklife in the Florida Parishes.
He also helped produce several blues festivals in Baton Rouge, as well as the 1987 Folklife Festival. “I hired the Hackberry Ramblers,” he recalls of the pioneer Cajun band from Lake Charles. “I had seen them at the World’s Fair in 1984 and was blown away by them. They showed up at the 1987 festival without a drummer, so I asked to sit in with them. We clicked as if we’d been playing together for years.”
Soon Sandmel was the youngest member of the Ramblers, whose founders Luderin Darbone and Edwin Duhon were then in their seventies. He became the manager of the group, arranging tours of Europe and cutting a deal for Cajun Boogie, their first release in thirty years.
“I decided to start my own label, Hot Biscuits. In 1997, we put out Deep Water, which was nominated for a Grammy in the traditional/folk category.”
Around that time Sandmel met the great New Orleans rhythm and blues artist Ernie K-Doe. Born Ernest Kador Jr. at Charity Hospital, K-Doe was best known for his 1961 single “Mother-in-Law.” Although that song topped both the R&B and pop charts, K-Doe never again charted nationally. But locally and regionally he scored with such catchy tunes as “A Certain Girl,” “Te Ta Te Ta Ta,” and "Tain't It the Truth."
The good years were followed by bad years that encompassed alcoholism and even homelessness. But K-Doe revived his career with the help of his second wife Antoinette Dorsey Fox. Together they opened the Mother-in-Law Lounge on North Claiborne Avenue, where K-Doe, the self-styled Emperor of the Universe, often strutted onstage sporting a cape and a crown. His radio show on WWOZ, with its stream-of-consciousness patter and outrageous pronouncements (“Burn K-Doe Burn!” “I’m cocky but I’m good!”) captivated listeners and won him new fans.
In 1998, Sandmel interviewed K-Doe onstage at the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and they hit it off. “I started going to the lounge more and more,” says Sandmel. “The early Sunday evening shows were just classic.” When Sandmel collaborated with photographer Rick Olivier on the 1999 book Zydeco!, K-Doe showed up at book signings, pulled up a chair, and signed books alongside the authors.
In July 1999 Nick Spitzer put on a Fourth of July concert at the foot of the Washington Monument. K-Doe played with Eddie Bo’s band. Sandmel flew to Washington with them and wrote a cover story for Gambit Weekly newspaper, “Mr. K-Doe Goes to Washington.”
An excerpt: “[T]here's no contest when it comes to picking the day's snazziest dressers. K-Doe wears his cobalt blue outfit for the ride to the concert site . . . [H]e heads to the trailer to change yet again. After lengthy preparations, K-Doe and the Paradise Ladies emerge wearing identical red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam outfits, replete with tall, floppy stove pipe hats.”
Sandmel thought the article, which was later anthologized in Best Music Writing of 2000, was “the nucleus of a book.” So did K-Doe. “He just popped up and said, ‘You ought to write a book about me.’ We made plans to go around his old neighborhood with a videographer.”
In July 2001, while Sandmel was away on a gig with the Hackberry Ramblers, K-Doe died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-five. “I came back for the funeral,” says Sandmel. “I started working on the book that fall.
“My agent sent out a proposal for three years,” he says. “Nobody bid on it; they said he was too obscure. I decided to just go ahead and write it. If I waited to get a book deal, a lot of people I wanted to talk to would have died.”
Antoinette kept the Mother-in-Law Lounge going. And she kept the surrealism going by commissioning a life-size mannequin of K-Doe, which she dressed in his costumes and squired about town. She encouraged Sandmel to write the book. With help from grant money, he did about two hundred interviews, including several with Antoinette, with K-Doe’s musician cousin Walter “Wolfman” Washington, and with Allen Toussaint, who worked with K-Doe on many songs.
“Kenny Neal talked to me about when K-Doe played juke joints in the country and his connection with the Baton Rouge blues scene,” says Sandmel. “His family had a place called Kador’s Lounge in Baton Rouge. K-Doe was kind of a bridge between Baton Rouge and New Orleans music.”
K-Doe’s own pronouncements were available on recordings fans had taped of his radio show. “A lot of tapes are circulating,” says Sandmel. “When word got out about my book, people sent them to me. I put in a lot of long nights transcribing them.”
As he acquired material, he obsessively wrote and rewrote, finishing a second draft in 2009. “I gave a copy to the Historic New Orleans Collection,” says Sandmel, who knew the staff because he played on their softball team. “They liked it.”
Last month HNOC published the book as the second in its Louisiana Musicians Biography Series. Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans, a cross between a biography and a coffee-table book, captures its subject’s many facets in often hilarious vignettes. It contains more than 150 photos and would undoubtedly have pleased both K-Doe and Antoinette. (She died on Mardi Gras day in 2009.)
“Sometimes people forget what a great R&B singer K-Doe was,” says Sandmel. “He was highly respected by his peers. His recordings are up there with all the best stuff. He was eccentric and flamboyant in his cape. That’s part of his appeal. But without serious musical credentials he’d just be another New Orleans eccentric. He was a guy who cheered a lot of people up. You mention his name and people smile. He’s the embodiment of grass-roots surrealism in New Orleans.”
More about Ben Sandmel’s book at erniekdoebook.com.
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
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