Tab Benoit isn’t exactly cut from the cloth of your typical Old Testament prophet.
First of all, he’s a blues guitar player, an occupation that tends to be better versed in sin than salvation. Then there’s that voice, which sounds like George Jones seeped in cognac to the point it where comes out sounding like a Cajun Otis Redding. The Old Testament never sounded so good.
But Benoit’s voice has been crying out both for and from the wilderness every bit as resoundingly as any mad-as-hell prophet’s ever did. He saw Hurricane Katrina well before it happened, and he knew Louisiana was selling its soul to oil companies long before the BP oil spill. He wasn’t silent. Benoit founded the non-profit Voice of the Wetlands back in 2003 to try to get the world’s attention to what was happening and save his homelands before they disappeared beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
In fact, eight months before Katrina hit, Benoit and an all-star cast of Louisiana musicians went into the studio and recorded a Voice of the Wetlands album that began with the song “Bayou Breeze.” The chorus pleaded, “Don’t let the water/wash us away.”
In early 2005, he was narrator and guide in an IMAX film that was tentatively titled “Hurricane Warning” because of its central premise: The mismanagement of the Mississippi River delta was causing the erosion of the vast coastal wetlands that served as buffer against hurricane flooding, especially for New Orleans. By the time the film was released in 2006, the title was changed to “Hurricane on the Bayou.” The film was no longer a warning, but rather about a warning that had not been heeded.
“It sounds like we were prophesying what was to come,” said Benoit. “But really, this has been a problem we’ve had for over 70 years. We’ve known about these problems for a long time. The rest of the country just didn’t know.”
Benoit started out his adult life flying airplanes for the oil companies along the southern coast of Louisiana and playing guitar on the side. As he flew, he couldn’t help but notice that the swamps he flew over were disappearing into the gulf. The Mississippi had been turned into a glorified aqueduct for navigation purposes, and as a result the fresh water that sustains swamps wasn’t reaching them. Instead, the gulf’s salt water was eating them away – a football size chunk of wetlands has been disappearing every hour for decades.
“People think we are losing our swamp to development,” Benoit said. “No. We are losing it because the coast is actually being eaten by the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s not supposed to be happening – we are actually supposed to be building land [through sediment build-up]…So to say New Orleans was built below sea level, right on a coast in a vulnerable spot, is ridiculous. New Orleans was actually a well-protected spot.”
Voice of the Wetlands was Benoit’s effort to clear up misconceptions and try to fix the problem, much as environmentalists had earlier succeeded in saving the Florida Everglades. This was how a blues guitar player became an environmental leader – he was named Louisiana’s Conservationist of the Year in 2010 – and the head of a non-profit.
“Every blues musician that ever started a band started a nonprofit. We have the best knowledge of how a nonprofit works,” he said, breaking into laughter. “…I figure the best resource we have is our music and our culture, and we haven’t used it to try to tell the story and educate people. That is what Voice of the Wetlands started out to be – a way to use the culture, and the music especially, to help get the rest of the nation on our side so we could get this thing fixed.”
The Voice of the Wetland All-Stars – featuring Benoit, Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Johnny Vidacovich, Jumpin’ Johnny Sansome, and Waylon Thibideaux – play Saint Rocke Feb. 9. See www.tabbenoit.com for more info. ER
