Jim Russell, the recipient of OffBeat’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Music Business and the “youngest” 84-year-old in New Orleans, is my surrogate father. I began working at his Magazine Street record shop in 1970, when I was a teenage college drop-out. The years I spent at Jim Russell’s were as close as I ever got to a “higher” education. Under his tutelage, I learned everything: why New Orleans is the fount of all music; who the great New Orleans mu...