‘The Voodoo Thing’

One afternoon around 1990, as a teenager working my after-school job in an optometrist’s basement office, I was listening to a local college radio station when the DJ, needing a break, decided to play the entire B-side of a record. I had never heard anything like it. Sludgy grooves, wails of unidentifiable wind instruments, and the clatter of an incongruous mandolin and harpsichord drifted in a steamy cloud of artificial reverb. In the middle of it a young man, supported by several backing vocalists, murmured incomprehensibly: “Je suis le Grand Zombie, my yellow belt of choison/Ain’t afraid of no tomcat, fill my brains with poison.”I was intrigued when the DJ said that the music was by Dr. John, from his 1968 debut album Gris-Gris. I recognized the name from a track on Atlantic Blues: Piano, a double-LP compilation I had bought as part of my efforts to learn to play in that style. But the music I heard on the radio was nothing like those songs. It was pianoless, nearly formless, not the blues but a suggestion of other dark mental states or colors. Where did it come from?Born Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack in New Orleans, in 1941, to a white family with a deep history in the city, Dr. John...