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And that appreciation for the arts attracts artists to New Orleans from all over the country.
"There's some sort of vortex down here," says Susan Cowsill, who moved to New Orleans 16 years ago from Los Angeles. "New Orleans is like a musical Bermuda Triangle, and I couldn't be any happier that I was one of the lucky ones who was sucked into it."
Cowsill, who landed three Top 10 hits in the '60s with her family's pop band the Cowsills (the inspiration for "The Partridge Family") before she reached the age of 12, says simply, "It's such an open-hearted, open-minded city. New Orleans has so much soul that it just makes me want to cry."
The 46-year-old singer-songwriter has done her share of crying in recent months. She evacuated from the storm to Nashville, where she wrote the poignant post-Katrina song, "Crescent City Snow." Cowsill returned just two weeks later with a military escort (the only way that residents were allowed back in at the time) to search for her brother Barry. His body wasn't found and identified until three months later. She led a memorial service and New Orleans jazz funeral parade for him in late February, just days before Mardi Gras.
"I think the situation for everyone down here is different, but it kind of comes down to two different points of view," she explains. "Either you love the city so much that you just can't stand to see what's happened to it, and you've got to leave. Or you love it so much that it all (the destruction) makes you more determined than ever to stay."
The gigs return
Cowsill and her family are staying, and so is "Washboard Chaz" Leary, who moved to New Orleans from Boulder, Colo. six years ago. During the evacuation, Leary bounced around from Oklahoma to Baton Rouge, but he returned for a couple of gigs in October and came back for good in November. Since then he's been working steadily with the Washboard Chaz Blues Trio, in addition to playing with a number of other bands such as Tin Men, the Palmetto Bug Stompers and the New Orleans Jazz Vipers.
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