I resisted writing about Snooks Eaglin’s funeral yesterday, wondering if it was tasteless to comment on it. But later in the day at the visitation for Antoinette K-Doe at the Mother-in-Law Lounge, people asked how it was, so I’ll use that request as my guide.
It was very nice. It was generally the right mix of church ritual and secular expressions, so there was a ritualized comfort dimension, but it was a service about Eaglin and it couldn’t have been mistaken for anyone else’s funeral. Irma Thomas’ gospel performance was powerful, though her brief remarks left me feeling like she was asked to sing more because of her love of gospel than her relationship with Eaglin.
There was a lot of good humor in the stories Quint Davis and John Blancher told about life with Snooks, and there was a little strange drama in the emergence of James Jackson, the drummer in Eaglin’s first band, the Flamingos. He seemed to need to be central to things, standing with Eaglin at his coffin when Flamingo bandmate Allen Toussaint started his recollections of Eaglin. But who knows? Maybe he was closer to Eaglin than any of us knew, or maybe this was his first chance to feel like a somebody in 50 years. At funerals, I prefer to attribute the most generous motives to people’s behavior.
The only time the star power of the event seemed a little unwieldy was the conclusion, led by Charmaine Neville, Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and Frogman Henry. It was great to see Henry onstage, and it added a very New Orleans note of strangeness when he sang spirituals in his little girl voice, but otherwise, it was hard to know the connection between the participants and Eaglin – and maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe they were just there to express their sadness, and they did so by singing. It was the morning’s one show biz moment, but again, I’ll assume positive motivations on the part of all concerned.
The best stories: Snooks being kept awake by the sound of falling snow in Woodstock, New York; Snooks helping Toussaint figure out chords to popular songs on the piano; and Toussaint and Jackson confirmed the famed story of Snooks driving blind. Jackson says it was his car, and the only thing that worried him was that Snooks drove fast.
