New Orleans. Wet bodies press close in the pit. Their faces red from the daylong parades, the tourists have come to usher in Mardi Gras with New Orleans musical royalty. Like the mosquitoes outside thirsting for a fresh taste of life, the drunk, the sober, and the merely tipsy crowd the House of Blues stage. It is midnight, and the Neville Brothers—Art, Charles, Aaron, and Cyril—are running through a brand of New Orleans funk, zydeco, jazz, soul, rhythm-and-blues fusion uniquely their own. If the city had a soundtrack, it would sound like this. The whole creaky wooden room is caught in the city’s primal rhythm. They clap, they writhe, they pound the railings. A security guard in the corner of the room grooves all by his lonesome.
Then at 1:30 a.m., Aaron Neville, the centerpiece of the outfit—a mountain of a man, his arms and chest busting the bounds of a distressed jeans vest—puts down his tambourine and reaches for the microphone. The party atmosphere suddenly dissipates. He is a daunting figure, but those close enough to see his eyes find a gentleness, even a shyness, in them. He adjusts his earpiece, absently stroking the cross-like tattoo on his left cheek, and nods toward the band. Like a schoolboy singing for the first time before the class, Neville tentatively begins Amazing Grace. His fragile falsetto is barely audible after the pounding party music of the past hour. But the throng falls still. From the stage comes the voice of a battered angel: an ethereal sound with edges roughed by hell. As he reaches for the high notes, the muscle below his right eye twitches. Otherwise, there is no movement in the performance. None is necessary. The revelers are listening, perhaps for the first time this evening—listening and turning deep within. Past the booze, the weird hats, and the plastic beads, Aaron Neville has brought redemption into the room. Never mind that it wasn’t invited.
Neville does not perform a song—he confesses it. The music is charged with the details of his personal life. Listen closely, and you can hear his simple faith and the well-earned scars of prison time, heroin addiction, and the burglaries of the distant past woven into each phrase. This is not just rhythm and melody: There is something real here, and these people know it.
The congregation now under his spell would make any priest green with envy. Neville can go into the night dens where clerics cannot and deliver his music—“medicine,” he calls it—to the afflicted. This music saved Aaron Neville’s life and became his path to Christ. And so he goes out night after night, pointing the way to others.
With the towering image of Neville clutching the microphone fresh in my mind, I recently made my way up the walk of his home to talk with him about his life, his music, and his recent CD of religious music, Devotion, released last fall.
Lovely Lady of the Projects
It was a very different Aaron Neville I found at his two-story French Quarter–style home in New Orleans East. At the edge of a posh golf course, his home is a far cry from the Calliope Housing Project where he grew up downtown or the shotgun house where he was born uptown. Visitors can’t help but see a statue of St. Jude peering from the bushes out front, and in the foyer, a statue of Our Lady of Fatima casts a gentle glance at all who enter.
In the oversized pinkish den, beyond the baby grand, the soap All My Children blares on the television. And over at the breakfast table is the man himself. For the first time since I have known him, Aaron Neville looks all of his 60 years. A pair of glasses teeter on the edge of his nose. He appears every bit the father of four and grandfather of six. His hulking mass is bent over a long table as he studies a crossword puzzle.
“The last name of TV’s Nanny?” Neville yells to his wife in the kitchen. “Joel, what’s her last name? Fran what?”
It is hard to imagine that this unassuming, soft-spoken, cool guy in the blue muscle shirt and loose pants has won four Grammys and sold millions of albums. Yet here he is, gently rising to shake hands with me and confessing sheepishly that he loves the soaps, especially All My Children: “I used to put Erica Kane [a character on Children played by Susan Lucci] on the guest lists for our shows. Never did come though.” He turns the volume down on the tube, and we get down to business.
From his birth in 1941 to the present, Neville tells me, song was never far away. He was first exposed to music by a pair of doting grandmothers who would fight over “rocking rights” to the tot. Sitting on their knees, little Aaron heard spiritual sounds that would soak deep into his memory and his soul. The sounds of Mahalia Jackson, Brother Joe Mays, Sister Rosetta Tharp, and Nat King Cole regularly filled the Neville home. He was also taken with the yodeling sounds of the singing cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Today you can hear their ghosts in his singing. “It stuck in me, you know,” he tells me in his New Orleans drawl, a childlike smirk on his face.
The possibility of reaching God through song would also stick with Neville. His father attended Trinity Methodist Church across the street from their home on Valence Street in New Orleans. Aaron and his brothers would occasionally sing in the choir. But his mother, Amelia, was a Catholic, and her sons would be raised in her faith.
At Amelia’s insistence, the Neville children attended St. Monica’s Catholic School. Nearly 60 years later, Aaron Neville recalls the experience with fondness: “St. Monica’s was always a safe place for me. Between that and my mom, I was taught morals—something the world is lacking today a lot.”
In addition to morals, the catechism, and the poem “Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue,” Neville learned something else from the white sisters who taught in the all-black school: racial tolerance and brotherhood. All these years later, he cannot forget their witness. “They had to run from the Klan, got death threats,” he said. “And that taught me a lot. Even today I don’t see no color. I saw a holy lady, and she was teaching me—they were like my parents away from home.”
St. Monica’s also introduced Aaron to a song that would haunt him for the rest of his days. “I became fascinated by the Ave Maria,” Neville recalls. “I didn’t know the words. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but it just used to do something to my heart. And later on in life, it became a light at the end of the tunnel for whatever I was going through. I would get a cleansing feeling. That sound of praising the Blessed Lady was like a saving grace for me, especially when I was at the bottom of a pit.”
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