For those who live in New Orleans, the batture is the “wet” side of the earthen levees, a mystical no-man’s land of secrecy and wildness, where children can play outside the watching eye of adults by the shores of the Mississippi river.
It has been many decades since Tommy Malone was one of those kids, but the experience is still with him. His new musical project, The Batture Boys, is consumed with water, both its threats and its gifts. Growing up in the tiny sugar cane town of Edgard, Louisiana, his childhood spent on the batture is never far behind. “It is always on my mind,” he says while sitting outside in a coffee shop in the Mid-City neighborhood. “We swam in the river all the time. Didn’t think about it.”
The Batture Boys unites Malone, the leader of the long-running roots-soul band the Subdudes with Ray Ganucheau, the Mississippi multi-instrumentalist who co-founded the Continental Drifters, the collective formerly based in both Los Angeles and New Orleans. Together, their debut album Muddy Water serves as a news report from the Gulf of Mexico – songs testify to the horrors and hypocrisies following the levee breaches of Hurricane Katrina and the flowing crude of the BP oil spill, the worst manmade environment disaster in US history. Those two events anchor this record, as Malone and Ganucheau frame them with poetic anger. Deep Water Horizon takes its title from the oil rig that exploded in 2010, killing 11 people and releasing more than 200m gallons of oil into the Gulf over a period of five months. The song, which rollicks out of the speakers like any prime cut from The Band, assesses the aftermath of broken promises and devastating fallout to the Louisiana wetlands.
“Bubbling up from the bottom of the sea/deep water, back and dirty/clean up plan was only a scam/they washed their hands, but not the land,” Malone sings.
The song that sparked the collaboration was Send the Bones Back Home. Ganucheau had written the chorus and called Malone for feedback. Malone recognized it immediately as a tribute to Johnny Ray Allen, a deep-south musical hero who played bass in the Subdudes and who died unexpectedly in 2014. The song imagines Tupelo, Mississippi, near where Allen grew up, as a metaphor for eternal comfort.
“It gave me chills,” Malone said. “I asked, ‘Can I finish it?’ I wrote out the verses that day.”
From there they embarked on songwriting sessions together. The core of Muddy Waters is their vocal harmonies, which feels as natural as blended pine. While the Subdudes spanned the Americana spectrum, from zydeco to gospel, the Batture Boys is more focused, bridging deep grooves with southern soul, with Malone’s hero Otis Redding as an obvious touchstone. (“To me that was the culmination of all the cool shit. It was soul, but it had a country element to it, even the twang of his voice. It wasn’t like James Brown. It was a little more hick sounding but still oozed soul,” he said.)
When it was time to record both men traveled to the Los Angeles area to work with Grammy-winning producer-engineer Jim Scott, who produced the Subdudes, and also worked on records by Tom Petty, Wilco and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among many others. He encouraged them to flesh out their sound and introduced a rhythm section.
Maone and Ganucheau met in the mid-1970s when entrenched in the New Orleans music scene. Malone, a teenager at the time, played strip clubs on Bourbon Street with his brothers John and Dave Malone, who later became the leader of The Radiators, the Gulf’s answer to the Grateful Dead. Back then, the city was teeming with funk and jazz and R&B originals, including songwriter and guitarist Earl King (Big Chief, I Hear You Knocking, Trick Bag). Malone eyed his playing up close at local gigs. “He would always be drunk and play these outrageous solos. I studied him. His playing was simple but really complex, like Miles Davis,” he said.
Ganucheau grew up in New Orleans and earned a reputation as a go-to bassist around town. Soon he got gigs as a studio engineer, first meeting the Subdudes in 1994 on Annunciation, after British producer Glyn Johns left the project. The commercial success of that band took Malone into the next decade. Eventually he enlisted Ganucheau to work on his solo albums. But besides music, they also shared a bond familiar to most people in the area.
The Mighty Flood is Malone’s Katrina song. “We all suffered,” says Ganucheau. The hurricane touched ground in August 2005 in Waveland, Mississippi, about 70 miles east of New Orleans. It also happened to be where Ganucheau and his wife lived at the time. Their house was flattened. “I lost everything. We were nomads,” he said. After moving around, they ended up in New Orleans the next year.
Around that time, Malone was rehabbing his house that took in four feet of water in Mid-City. He and his wife lived there for awhile, but relocated to Nashville after they grew frustrated by the city’s slow recovery. He moved back a few years later.
The scars of that time emerge in The Mighty Flood, a bluesy shuffle that ushers the reader through the disaster. “They say what don’t kill you gonna make you stronger/Some folks gonna find out they got to wait much longer,” Malone sings.
“Growing up around water, you acquire an affinity for it,” explains Ganucheau. “Opposed to maybe if you grew up landlocked in the midwest and maybe water is more of a novelty or just a destination. When you’re here surrounded by it, its ubiquitous, its everywhere. I think there’s some kind of magnetism that sort of intrigues me about it. You get used to it, it’s part of the culture. It’s everywhere.”
The New Orleans that has emerged since Katrina is more expensive, less diverse, and also young. The city is now a magnet for younger musicians, which has resulted in a lively music scene, which now leans on traditional folk and singer-songwriter fare.
In the Batture Boys’ music is the sound of the city’s former self – unkempt, street, funky, mysterious. And deceptively simple. Despite a rhythm section, the music is squared against the dynamic between both men’s voices. Their vocal interplay and locked instruments ride the groove together, like a pirogue on the batture side of the levee, pushed into the brown current. “Oh muddy water, roll on, muddy water roll on/the sons and the daughters will see you rise and fall,” Malone sings. “Long after most of the friends and the lovers have waved goodbye and gone.”
