#16

The Bourbon Street Musicians
by Kathy Price
Illustrated by Andrew Glass
Clarion Books
2002
40 pages

Traditional Literature

“Sho’ nuff? As grass is green, sho’ nuff, y’all.”

            I chose this book because the front cover looked very interesting. I enjoy reading about different cultures, and this book is all about New Orleans. This story is a retelling of The Bremen Town Musicians. An old mule decides that he has become too old to continue to be a scarecrow for the farmer, so he hits the road and heads to New Orleans to play his trumpet. Along the way, he meets a hound dog who has also gotten too old to hunt for foxes and rabbits. The old dog decides to travel along with the mule and be-bop on the street corner in New Orleans. Next, the two friends meet a rooster and a cat that have both gotten too old to continue to do their jobs, so they join the group of musicians as they travel to Louisiana. The four friends get lost along their trail, and decide to stop at an old shack to ask for directions. As they peek inside the window, the mule sees six men eating supper. The animals decide that they are all hungry, so they start singing in hope of receiving some dinner. The men are frightened when hear the awful noise and they run away. The animals invite themselves inside the house and feast on what was left of the men’s dinner. One man tries to sneak back into the house, but the animals do not let that happen. The four animal musicians decided that they enjoyed life enough in the little old shack that they no longer wished to travel to Bourbon Street.

            Kathy Price uses oil crayon and turpenoid to execute her illustrations. The oil crayons almost give the pictures a blurry tone. She uses a lot of curvy lines to show the wrinkles and old age of the characters. Price uses a bold black line to outline the characters’ bodies. While some pages have a lot of blank space around the illustrations, other pages are full of color. The words in the story have a bluesy, Cajun dialect that goes along with the theme of New Orleans.

This book is appropriate for older children to read, because it may be hard for younger students to understand because of the Cajun dialect. In the classroom, I would use this book to introduce the topics of New Orleans and jazz. This would also be a fantastic book for a music teacher to read when she talks about be-bop and blues.