Book Review: Mr. Saturday Night – Louisiana’s musical traditions take center stage in new book

At the Louisiana Book Festival a few years ago, I attended a dinner hosted by The Oxford American magazine. The man seated across the table from me looked familiar, and I spent most of the meal trying to remember how I knew him. Luckily, Alex V. Cook has an excellent memory, and he connected the dots for me. A decade previously, we were both regulars at M’s Fine and Mellow Café, a music club where the Roux House now stands.

All weekend, I had been blown away by the changes a decade had wrought on not only the Third Street landscape, but the whole downtown area. Before the museum was built and the new renaissance of restaurants and events took place, downtown was a wasteland after the 5 p.m. exodus of government workers. As a freshman in college, I braved this barren space every week for Open Mic Night and met many musicians who would become lifelong friends.

In the decade since M’s closed and downtown Baton Rouge was reborn, Cook has published music reviews and essays just about everywhere: The Oxford American, offbeat, Country Roads, The Believer, WIRE, Paste Magazine and here at 225, just to name a few. As we reminisced about the good bad ol’ days of downtown Baton Rouge, it only took a few minutes to realize this cat really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to music.

He is just the person to write a book like Louisiana Saturday Night, a collection of essays about— as the subtitle says—“Louisiana’s juke joints, honky-tonks, and dance halls.” Just as we trekked to an empty downtown for the phenomenal music at M’s a decade ago, Cook has made a personal and professional hobby of seeking out the best music that Louisiana has to offer, no matter how far the trip or nebulous the rumor of a legendary haunt’s existence.

Cook’s obsession has paid off in this gorgeous book from LSU Press divided by musical hubs of the state: Baton Rouge, Cajun Country and New Orleans. In writing about the places that offer the best music in Louisiana, Cook ends up writing hauntingly about disappearing traditions and places, musicians who have passed and influenced the current crop and our future as a culture and a place. He’s writing about us, from the prairie to the Gulf, but he ends up telling us a bit about himself, too. By the end of the book, you’ll know your favorite places better, you’ll have a list of places to visit, and you’ll feel like you’ve been chatting with an old friend for a breezy afternoon that wafted into a bluesy evening.