Bandleader and naturalist, New Orleans
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.”
Bandleader and naturalist, New Orleans
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.”
On his start as a 19-year-old naturalist:
“The guy who hired me, first thing he told me was, ‘Well, I don’t know if you’ve been in northern Arkansas, but it’s lily white. I don’t know if you’re going to be—’
“I said, ‘It’s what?’
“He said, ‘It’s lily white.’
“And I was smiling. I said, ‘Man, I’m going to be a park ranger. I don’t care where it is. I’ll walk through it.’ We had a quote: I’ll walk through a lion’s cage with pork-chop drawers on if I think I can get to what I’m trying to get to on the other side of it.
“He wasn’t wrong. I literally lived less than three miles from the national Klan headquarters. That’s where I met David Duke for the first time. He had a huge rally going on right outside the National Park Service headquarters.
“Some of the risks I took, I probably wouldn’t take today, but I definitely did it then. But also I felt like exposure was a lot of what was not happening for young people there. I was the first person outside of their community they’d ever seen. There was a lot of curiosity, but they also had a lot of bad information about who and what things were.
“So I just decided that I would kill them with kindness and be myself, and let them know, ‘Hey, I’m not really afraid of you in any kind of way. And you shouldn’t be afraid of me either. We’re going on this cave tour. It’s going to be five hours, and three-and-a-half hours are going to be in a cave. And you best believe your life depends on me. So let’s be friends. We can hug early and we can hug afterwards. But if you’re going on this cave tour, you’re coming with me and you’re going to be in my world. We’ll have a good time and we can both learn to understand.’”
“The music that comes out of New Orleans miraculously traveled around the world and it’s helped people see themselves beyond all kinds of barriers. Same thing in the wetlands. I get people into nature long enough to let go of all that nervous, urban tension to where they can see themselves as a part of the universe and a part of the planet itself.”
On preserving a culture’s uniqueness:
“When I started to work and become a part of the communities that are around here, it gave me a sense of the importance—and uniqueness in this particular area—of how well people have created survival skills over the years. And when I leave here and go out into other parts of the world, it just becomes more apparent, especially around the continental 48 states in the U.S., that, yeah, a lot of things homogenize in different ways. But this is still a place where community organizing, the preservation of culture, is done with the least amount of financial wealth and goods.
“It’s not like we have fantastic arts programs all over the city of New Orleans in every public school or private school. They are here, but it’s actually in the communities that the people still do it and they do it in a miraculous way. It’s done by spirit and effort that has not that much to do with monetary gain or anything like that. It’s not about that.
“It’s how people learn to survive. It’s how they survived moving to this country from other spaces to try and build a new home. It’s how they survived being captured and brought here.
“And it’s the same way that people come here with what’s known as the American dream to try and become a part of something, but also to create a platform for knowledge of tradition for future generations of people. That’s real preservation.”
From John:
“I sort of feel like we need to do the portrait of you with your accordion in the swamp.” I said. “Are you game?”
“It’s gonna be so hot,” Sunpie said. “And buggy.”
Then he smiled and added, “Let’s do it.”
The sun was shining as we drove to Barataria Preserve. The first thunder rumbled as we walked the boardwalk to the location we had scouted the day before. The bugs were hungry.
We set up fast as Sunpie played for us. We made the portrait as it started drizzling and packed up in a downpour.
Things change fast in Louisiana. And they stay the same.
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
Still Here: Stories from a fragile coast
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A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah
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