Bruce Sunpie Barnes is a bandleader who plays accordion and harmonica for Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots. The band travels around the world playing what he calls Afro-Louisiana music: a fusion of zydeco, blues, Creole funk, gospel and tunes from Africa and the Caribbean.
But Sunpie also has a parallel career as a naturalist. He spent 32 years working for the National Park Service, much of it in Barataria Preserve, a vast expanse of wetlands, bottomland hardwood forests, and palmetto groves. The Preserve, part of Jean Lafitte National Park, has 200 bird species and is 85 percent water.
As a young man, Sunpie kept one foot in each world. By day, he surveyed plants and animals and led hikes and canoe trips. At night, he frequented the numerous New Orleans bars that offered live music. He befriended some of the greats, including rock-and-roll pioneer Fats Domino, who would sometimes call him late at night and invite him to hang out at the hardware store in nearby Chalmette.
“He would go through the hardware store, not buy a single thing, just take two hours and walk through it,” Sunpie recalls. “But before he went, he would put on a gigantic pot of red beans and rice or something like that. And it would cook for three or four hours. And he'd come back, play piano, drink a few beers, and just hang out all day.” Sunpie used his sick days for what he calls “those Fats Domino moments.”
Later Sunpie became a ranger at New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, which is based in the French Quarter and offers musical and educational programming.
In both arenas, Sunpie is a conservationist. “I don't have a separation in me as a person between trying to sustain coastal wetlands, trying to sustain fisheries, trying to sustain culture,” he says. “I might be on a few too many boards right now, but I'm on them because it's around the passion of preservation, around the natural world and around cultural things.”
For example, he is Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, a New Orleans tradition that dates back to 1819. Early on Mardi Gras morning, the skeleton gang travels door-to-door in the historically Black Tremé neighborhood, waking residents with calls of “You next!” They bring a reminder of mortality and a message denouncing violence and drugs.
“It came out of enslaved African males trying to say on Carnival Day, Mardi Gras Day, that I'm actually a human,” he says. “And I'm going to self-validate and show you who I am.”
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