Musical ancestors

I'd like to write about a special week in my life - if I remember correctly, it was in late March or early April in 1979, which would become a turning point.

I had played in rock bands in high school, and music was the only thing I cared about, besides girls. My parents tried to make it as difficult as possible for me to play or learn about music, and this continued after my dad died, shortly after I graduated. My mother pressured me to sign up for Zoology studies at LSU, so I caved in and registered for school in the fall. In the emotional void I was experiencing, I did as my siblings had done before me - I moved into a dorm and joined a fraternity. I studied Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, and English, and finished my first semester with a 2.64.

One day the following semester, when I was 18 and living in a fraternity house, I returned from classes and one of the neanderthals there said "Hey Roy! Some old guy turned up here asking for you!" . I was having a really bad week in my second semester, my chemistry classes were killing me, and I just wasn't motivated. In fact I was beginning to fail. I took the phone number the man left and called him. His name was Al Rose and he said he was writing a book about early jazz musicians from New Orleans. How could I help this guy?

He wanted help researching my great-uncles and my grandfather, who were all musicians. What? I knew that my grandfather, Leon, played the violin, because my friend Brien Lundin's grandmother had visited Leon and Mozella Verges decades before (small world) and told me about it in her thick Cajun accent ("Voiges? You any kin to Lay-aw Voiges?"). I didn't know anything about my great-uncles.

Well, the story unfolded. There were four of them: Joe, Alphonse, Leon, and Michael. Joe was the oldest, played piano, and wrote over 600 songs. Alphonse was a ragtime pianist.  Leon was a violinist. Michael was a well-known drummer. They would all make money in vaudeville and silent-movie theatres during their careers. Joe got a song in a Judy Garland movie. Paul Whiteman, the so-called King of Jazz, tried to recruit Michael. A song by Alphonse got preserved in the Library of Congress.

Wow! This news was electrifying to me. Right when I was not wanting to go on, and feeling like I'd lost my way, suddenly I was the heir to a disposessed throne - part of an honorable lineage of men who'd devoted their lives to music.

I immediately dropped all my classes but one, just to stay in school, and marched over to the LSU Music School.

More on this story later, where I reveal just why my parents kept all this from me.