Rock and roll can change your life. A hurricane can destroy it.

If you’re reading this site, it is because of your interest in rock and roll. As is well-known but not frequently considered, the roots of rock and roll come from a part of the world that has been more smashed and trashed than any hotel room in the history of touring. The blues players of the Mississippi Delta have long lived under conditions that many of us have only seen in the pictures of Walker Evans. Now even those most meager circumstances have been utterly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Those who were making their living by playing in clubs on Canal Street in New Orleans no longer have gigs—and aren’t likely to, there, anyway, for some time to come.

We all owe something to the people who are responsible for the music we love, the women and men who are now, if lucky, being helped out by people from the Salvation Army or the Red Cross. Donate.

Words by Stephen Macaulay. Sentiment shared by all of us at Glorious Noise. Personally, I’ve had some of the most mindblowing experiences of my entire life in the Crescent City. From seeing Tav Falco and His Panther Burns playing at a bar the size of your parents’ living room to barfing my guts out all over my shoes on Bourbon Street, New Orleans has always seemed too exotic and wild to be America. To see it shattered like this is truly heartbreaking. And it exposes something very, very wrong with our society. Let’s all try to do something to fix it…