Shannon McNally's Ghost Music (continued)

McNally realized one of her dreams when she got to meet Dylan. "I was out on tour when Charlie was still with him and every night off that I had lined up with where they were I just went to the show over and over and over again. They let me stand on the side of the stage. I was practically sitting on Larry Campbell's amp. He gave me a guitar lesson. He wanted me to play a C chord and a scale. He was very specific about what he wanted me to do. He said 'Play a major scale,' and I played it, then he says 'Play a pentatonic scale.' I'm sitting and he's standing over me, he's totally backlit. The only light in the room is right behind his head. He's smoking a cigarette and he's in this black suit, ten minutes before they hit at Madison Square Garden, and he's telling me to play more pentatonic scales. Then he goes 'That's the blues.' So I said 'That's where we're going, right?' He goes 'That's where we're goin'.' He goes 'Play me a song I might have heard.' He was so ordinary, kind of inquisitive and not weird at all, just normal, but I didn't expect him to ask me to play him a song. He wanted me to play something in C, and all I could think of were his songs, and my songs. I'm not gonna play him any of his songs and he's not gonna know any of my songs, and I could not think of one, so I said 'Can I play you one of mine?' and he said 'Well all right but just the first verse.' So I played him a song called 'John Finch.' The first verse is 'Hang down John Finch, hang down and cry, hang down John Finch, there's an angry crowd outside.' And he says 'Sounds like the Kingston Trio. Know who they are?' I was devastated. I'm like 'Oh, man.'"

Dylan is another musical visitor who was captivated by New Orleans. "New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it," Dylan wrote in his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. "The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing--spirits, all determined to get somewhere."

The mystical sense Dylan evokes from New Orleans sounds akin to McNally's self-description of her roots-influenced songs as "North American Ghost Music."

"I don't see how it would miss him," she said, nodding her head. "If anybody would have picked it up, he would have. Everything he said, he talked about 'that woman's voice on OZ,' and Tony Hall, Willie Green, and how air is just different here, how the heat and the air mix, the smell of the air…"

McNally is part of all that now, part of a new generation of transplanted New Orleans artists who draw inspiration from the music of the city's past but are playing something different. Some, like the pioneering violinist Gina Forsyth, arrived long ago, only to be joined by the likes of Mike West, Lynn Drury, Anders Osborne, Theresa Andersson,  Susan Cowsill, Marc Stone and Jeff & Vida. Open sessions such as Marc Stone's Monday night shows at the Old Point, which have featured nearly all of the above mentioned as guest stars including McNally, offer a process by which musicians can stretch out to test new material as well as favorite covers.

"People are so used to doing long gigs and lots of bar gigs, and people have large repertoires," McNally concluded, "so when I play with Marc Stone he says 'Just come in, you'll be the featured artist, we'll do whatever you want to do.' You just yell out the changes as we're going, you just do it. The whole town is like that, it's like anybody in town can come play. It's not an expensive place to live, you can come down here and you can do it, you can eke out a living and play for the sake of it.

"I think the most nurturing thing about New Orleans is the quality of what's here. You can see the Neville Brothers play, you can see Snooks play, just being in the presence of certain musicians is lesson enough. Just feeling them the way they are. New Orleans is unique because these guys are here. You can sit at Gatemouth Brown's feet and watch him do what he does. When Pinetop Perkins comes to town you're on the presence of a 90-year-old delta bluesman. And the things that made him the way he is, many of those things are still here. In New Orleans you can still feel it, and you can watch it and get close to it."

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