Cyril Neville on the Southern Wetlands and Tributaries by Monica Yasher
C. Neville
The South finds itself, once again, bracing for flooding. The raging waters have no distinction on wealth, color, or age. It has the potential to ravage anyone along the Mississippi River and it’s tributaries. Water can wash away a year of work, a lifetime of memories, and future dreams.
Americans find themselves watching the news today for the river rising, and this comes right after high winds and a record number of tornadoes in the South. There are hundreds of homes damaged and more damage is yet to come to our South. Rolling Fork, home of the bluesman Muddy Waters, was also in danger of getting inundated. Many towns are faced with caring for their levees, during the midnight hour, to prevent another New Orleans situation.
I had the chance to speak with Mr. Cyril Neville, who is involved in the organization, Voice of the Wetlands. Cyril challenges us to find out about our waterways, and why the South finds itself in the state it is in with it’s waterways. He challenges us to educate ourselves. He challenges us to care.
The South finds itself, once again, in a state of National Emergency. Please help Cyril, and all the artists that are involved in the Voice of the Wetlands. Maybe we can begin to change this cycle, if we work together. A voice of one can be loud for a cause, if we all speak together.
Please join me in reading my conversation with Mr. Cyril Neville.
Monica: Hello Cyril. I’ve been fortunate enough to catch quite a few of artists from New Orleans this year. It seems like you guys have a lot of fun in New Orleans! I see that you have some causes you believe in. Why don’t you tell me about New Orleans and some of your causes within the area that you support? Would you like to talk about any of those?
Cyril: Actually New Orleans is still under water. There are small squirmishes that go on that don’t get to the public eye. There are still a lot of people still trying to recover from Katrina, years after the fact and then an oil spill comes around. Things were getting what we call…better, with tourists in the street. Summer became a nightmare for a lot of people. But the thing about it is, you only hear the tip of the iceberg on the news. Real ongoing agony in and out of people’s lives never gets talked about in the news. People who have been stepped on for generations. That’s the thing that is the most devastating. Whatever happens to those industries basically devastates the economy of the area. The rule is…the lowest of the economic ladder…they are always going to suffer the brunt…and the most. That’s what’s going on.
One of the causes that I joined a few years back, was with Tab Benoit and the Voice of the Wetlands All-stars. That’s the name of the group. Me and Tab Benoit, George Porter, Dr. John, Anders Osborne, Johnny Vidacovich, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Johnny Sansone, and Waylon Thibodeaux. We put this together, because Tab is basically the voice of the wetlands and that organization. The organization is put together to bring people really up to date on what is going on…on how much the land is lost every hour of every day.
M: Oh wow.
C: There are football fields of land lost every hour or so. I sat at my friend’s house that lives right by the bayou, and there was something passing by his window..that I thought was some different type of ship. I said, “What is that?” He said, “That, my friend, is coastal erosion.” It was like a big…almost island passing by, with vegetation on it and everything. It was a piece of Louisiana washing out into the coast. He said that he has been sitting there watching this now for quite some time. He said when they go out shrimping, they come back to find his land falling in the water.
M: I understand your cause. I am sure you are asked to do many. Why do you feel so strongly about this? What is the connection for you?
C: The voice of the wetlands all started with recording a record in January of 2005. One of the refrains, to one of the songs was “Don’t let the water wash us away”. We did this record in January, and it didn’t come out until October of 2005, which was way after Katrina. Way after 99,000 other Katrina records had been recorded and put out. It got lost in the shuffle. It’s simple as that. People in different styles of music and different walks of life understand what’s going on. And you understand regardless of what part of Louisiana you live in. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t matter what part of the United States you live in. If something happens to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, it is going to affect the rest of the United States. When the ports were closed due to Katrina, it was felt as far away as Detroit…as far away as where ever the Mississippi river flows.
M: Right.
C: It behooves everybody to find out what is really going on. How long has it been going on? Who is at fault? Look up the Army Corp. of Engineer records in Louisiana and the surrounding areas. That will give you some idea of the games they have been playing with people’s lives and how long they have been played.
My reasons for being involved are because I am from here. This is where the creator chose to put me. And, with the gifts that I have, if I wouldn’t have grown up in New Orleans, I may have been born with the same gifts, but I definitely would have turned out very different than the way it is now. And, that’s because I grew up in New Orleans and The Neville family is called the first family of Funk in New Orleans.
Certainly we are not the only musical family. We are just one of many phenomenal musical families from this area. I don’t know what it is. But something about New Orleans has nurtured some of the…I could go on and on. The Baptise family. Mr. Lionel Baptise, Alvin Baptise, Howard Baptise. This is the same family. Just different branches. My friend James Andrews and his brother have a family member in every brass band in the city. The Andrews family. The French family. This is something that I am very proud to be a part of. Anything that I can help to preserve…that is my motivation for what I do.
M: That is really nice. When you think about it, I live in Pittsburgh and my rivers touch your rivers. We need salt up here in the winter time, and that’s how it gets here from the rivers. All of us have a piece of Louisiana, and I think you are right. People do not understand the impacts.
C: Everybody gets their sea salt from down here. We also have the problem, since the turn of the century, about people caring more about their bottom line than about people’s lives and ecology and eco systems. All that matters is what is in my bank account. There’s a song about blackened bayou’s. Everyone loves the sea folk from Louisiana with blackened catfish from Louisiana, and blackened red fish. Now we have blackened bayous and blackened beaches, blackened pelicans, blackened turtles to go along with it.
M: That’s really a sad concept.
C: There’s people with severe skin rashes, respiratory problems, and head aches, even mental illness from breathing from whatever is coming off of the gulf. I mean, like I said in the beginning, the cleanup from Katrina at the 5th anniversary was far from done. Some of us have never recovered. Some of us will never recover from that. Then to add insult to injury, here comes this disaster. Everybody with any kind of heart, anybody with grandchildren or children, like I have, should try to help to bring some attention to this, so that people who have a heart, and would like to help, would have a means to help. Just go to Voice of the Wetlands website. There is a lot of information and people need to know. If you really want to know why things are the way they are out there, you have to research the history of oil companies and all the Corp. of Engineer’s actions in and around those marshes.
M: Ok. Thank you Cyril.
C: If you flew over those marshes, you can see better from the air. Everything that you can see that is curvy, nature made it. If it’s a straight line, the oil companies made it. And that’s how salt water and fresh water started to mix and kill stuff in the beginning. We still don’t know the long term effects and what this is going to be.
The musicians from Louisiana love it here. People love playing in New Orleans. People realize what the real deal is, and come to see why Louisiana is called the sportsman paradise. You can go fishing and boating here, when everyone else is shoveling snow.
In New Orleans you can’t separate your musical life from your everyday life, because that’s what our culture is. It is a way of life. Economically we became a part of tourism and cultural arts. Some would say that we belong to cultural arts and tourist. I have heard it put like that down here, that the Neville Brothers and all the musicians belong to the tourist industry.
There are a lot of things that we the people let slip by. That’s why we find ourselves in this country in the financial predicaments that we find ourselves in. There’s been too much emphasis on what Wall Street needs or what Wall Street wants, as opposed as to what is going on and the reality of Main Street. When is our bail out coming?
So just think about people who were devastated by Katrina and wound up in places, that to a certain extent after a significant period of time, every bit of help we had coming was cut off. People in New Orleans, Louisiana and just the Gulf Coast got scattered to the four winds. We got people from New Orleans now in these 49 states. They sent us to the four winds. We heard statements like God has finally done what they have been trying to do for 40 years. I’m talking about people in high places. They got other folks talking about changing the complexion of New Orleans. There are mean things.
M: But without those people there, it is not New Orleans.
C: What you have now is publicity going on. When the Saints won the Super Bowl, everybody thought everything was ok. That’s a myth. We have a problem and people will never come back. That was by design. There are some people in the projects that never got the chance to take one picture off of their wall. Never got to go back in their homes to go get a pillow, a blanket, or nothing.
They came back and everything was boarded up, and as soon as they could, they tore them down. A lot of people don’t have a place to come back to. And, the ones that do have vouchers to come back, a new day has started, by the time you left and the time you got back. If someone accumulated a record, now it stops you get from getting houses, federal aid of any kind. There are a lot of things that Americans, if they were aware of them, I would hope that they wouldn’t sit still for what’s going on. It’s a lot. Since Katrina and the cleanup, people are still scattered. Some people are still trying to come home. Some are settled and satisfied and not worried about coming back. You have some people just surviving wherever they are. They are living from paycheck to paycheck, that’s if they have a paycheck coming. Meanwhile you have people in high places talking about that they want New Orleans back. I’m looking at people here whose lives will never be the same. Life will never be the same.
