Editor's note: When I was recently in NYC, my old friend Holly Perkins said she had a friend named John Swenson, a veteran music journalist and writer at large, who had recently finished a piece on Shannon McNally for a New Orleans publication. We're very grateful that he saw fit to pass it on to us, under the dire circumstances. It begins with his email:
"This piece was finished only a few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and turned this paradise into a lost city. The very magazine it was printed in, offBeat, never hit the streets. I submit it as my tribute to a beloved city..."
