It was Saturday night and Frenchmen Street was still dark and quiet. Bourbon Street was lit up and the bands in the few clubs that were open were playing to nearly empty houses, consisting mainly of cleanup workers and National Guardsmen. But across town, on Oak Street, the house was rocking at the Maple Leaf Bar as Walter “Wolfman” Washington and his seven-piece band entertained an SRO crowd starving for live music after a long, dreary month of nothing.

For the entire month of September you could have taken New Orleans, dropped it into a dry county in Texas and you wouldn’t have known the difference. Following the worst natural disaster in the city’s long history, there was no live music or entertainment to be had anywhere. It was dark, silent and empty. A shroud had been draped over us and it was a gloomy, depressing spectacle. Hundreds of thousands of people, including our most talented musicians, scattered in all directions, many of them finding lucrative gigs in their host cities. New Orleans, world-renowned for its non-stop music and lively entertainment, went dead—a once-proud city in ruins.

All was forgotten at the Maple Leaf as music lovers—young and old—stood shoulder to shoulder swaying in place to the hot licks coming from the Wolfman’s talented guitar and vocal chords. There was no room to dance but the house was magically transformed into a mini-Woodstock of undulating bodies and waving hands and arms—a hundred people or more, an entire village, celebrating the return of the music. They couldn’t get enough of it.

The following Saturday it was more of the same. This time blues vocalist Timothea, newly returned from a south Florida evacuation and looking rested and radiant, sat in for a couple of numbers. After belting out “Mean Woman Blues” and “It Was Fun While it Lasted,” she told the appreciative crowd how music and the musicians have made New Orleans what it is, predicting it will come back strong again.

WWNO’s Fred Kasten, broadcasting from a makeshift studio in his Carrollton home, took off early from his Saturday night jazz program to join in the revelry. By the front door, holding court at a checkerboard table was Washington’s pretty, gruff-voiced wife, Barbara. “What’s the plan?” she was asked. “Is Walter going to be back next weekend?”

“I don’t know, baby. We ain’t got a plan right now. We just taking it a day at a time.”

Finishing his second set, Washington took a breather and slid into the seat next to her. Within minutes he was being summoned outside to the sidewalk for an interview with a crew from a French television station. The week before, he was interviewed over MSNBC. In recent years, he had been spending about as much time on the road as he did in town. He could have been playing anywhere in the world that night for far more than the five dollar per head cover charge at the Maple Leaf. He chose instead to stay here and help his city piece together the fragmented strands of its musical heritage. For that we will always be grateful.

Within the next few weeks—perhaps even in a few days—the lights will be back on on Frenchmen Street. Bourbon, Decatur and North Rampart streets are slowly coming back to life. By Halloween, some are predicting, the city could be kicking up again in nearly full gear. When that happens, it will be welcomed with open arms. Musicians are starting to make their way back to New Orleans from their places of exile. Music lovers will once again be fanning out around town, flocking to their favorite hangouts, grooving to the sounds that once were—and will be again—the pulse of the most fun city on earth.

With the passage of time, restoration efforts will remove from sight the visible evidence of Hurricane Katrina’s destructive fury. The memories of the bleak times we endured will be replaced by the fun times that are yet to come. Many more great years lie ahead for the city we love—perhaps even greater than those we’ve already experienced. But, whatever happens, nothing will ever erase the memory of the night the music returned. It was one of those magical moments in time that will remain engraved in our collective consciousness until we pass into whatever lies beyond this mysterious state of being we briefly borrow and call “life.”