ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

by Michael Tisserand

The drive to Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana stretches past large homes and small trailers, a single-pump gas station with a sign for boudin egg rolls, and a family cemetery. It’s a cool Sunday evening, and as an orange sun dips behind green-blue wisps of clouds, a sonorous voice carries through Dockside’s open side door and onto the nearby Vermilion River. Rainin’ in my heart Since we be-e-en apart … The soulful voice takes its time, lingering on the vowels. The voice’s source can be found inside Dockside. There, surrounded by keyboard and guitar players and a sax, bass and drums, stands a glass-walled sound booth in which two people stand, swaying in time to the song. One is Yvette Landry, former middle-school teacher turned Gram- my-nominated professional musician and leader of her own band, The Jukes. She has organized tonight’s recording session. The other is tonight’s singer, Warren Storm. He’s 82, with jet-black hair and a jet-black mustache. Heavy silver rings decorate his fingers and an alligator tooth dangles from his neck. He looks like a rock legend — which, in fact, is what he is. I know I was wrong Baby, ple-e-ease come back home The song, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” has been recorded by everyone from Neil Young to Tom Jones, but it was co-written and first sung by Louisiana blues musician Slim Harpo, whose version scored on the rhythm and blues and pop charts in 1961. It’s one of those swampy classics that tonight’s band — Roddie Romero on guitar, Eric Adcock on piano, Chris French on bass, Gary Usie on drums, and saxophone player Derek Huston — never tires of playing. In addition to “Rainin’ in My Heart,” the band’s session tonight in- cluded three other new versions of classics Storm has reinvented over the years — new takes of the Fats Domino hit “Let the Four Winds Blow,” Merle Haggard’s “My House of Memories” and the 1920s hillbilly tune “The Prisoner’s Song,” which was Storm’s biggest career hit. Storm’s swinging version for Excello Records soared to the top of the charts in 1958, earning him both a spot on Wink Martindale’s Memphis-based television dance show and an invitation to a party at Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Even at the end of a long recording session — plus an afternoon gig he’d performed before arriving at Dockside — Storm’s voice shows no sign of wear, his energy level closer to that of an energetic teen- ager than an octogenarian legend. He shouts “Yeah!” and “I love that, me!” at Romero’s guitar solos. He holds a cane but mainly uses it like a prop, in turns pretending it is a microphone, a conductor’s baton, and a flute. “Hey Warren, I wish I had a dime for every time you sang this song the last 60 years!” Adcock yells from the piano. “Yeah, baby!” Storm shouts back.

Photo by Terri Fensel

The session finally wraps up. Landry dances around the studio. There’s some small talk about the dangers of driving your boat in the Vermilion River at night. Then the musicians start peppering Storm for tales of the records he’s made, panning for nuggets about historic ses- sions. Almost as an aside, Storm mentions that he’d played drums on Slim Harpo’s original version of “Rainin’ in My Heart,” at J.D. Miller’s studio in Crowley, Louisiana. As the band takes that in, Storm laughs quietly. “Yeah, baby,” he says again. As Yvette Landry tells it, the inspiration to record with Warren Storm started one Thursday night at her regular gig with steel guitar player Richard Comeaux at Buck & Johnny’s in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Comeaux had invited 92-year-old steel guitar player Milton Gilbeau to the restaurant, and Gilbeau brought his friend Storm. “I’m setting up and I look out the window and see this jet black hair and mustache walking to me, and I grab Richard and I’m freaking out,” remembers Landry. As she sang that night, Landry eyed the table where Gilbeau and Storm were sitting. “They’re like 13-year-old boys and they’re cut- ting up,” she says. She hesitated about singing one song: “I Need Somebody Bad.” Penned by Mississippi-born songwriter Ben Peters, it became a country hit for Jack Greene in 1973 — but in Louisiana, the barroom weeper is primarily known as a Warren Storm song. Yes Lord, I need somebody bad tonight ‘Cause I — I just lost somebody good Landry recalls asking Comeaux, “Is this even appropriate? This is Warren’s song.”

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