Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-In-Law Lounge

North Claiborne Avenue runs through the Tremé, the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, in a part of New Orleans where the streets are wide and the buildings low and the culture so densely layered that even a single block can carry several lifetimes of music, grief, ceremony, and celebration. The Tremé sits adjacent to the French Quarter but belongs to a different world — the world of second lines and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals, of neighborhood institutions that are as much community anchors as commercial enterprises. It was into this world that Ernest Kador Jr. was born on February 22, 1933, the son of a Baptist preacher, and it was from this world that he drew everything that made him singular. His stage name, Ernie K-Doe — phonetically simplified by the Minit record label in the same spirit that gave the label itself its simplified spelling — became one of the defining signatures of New Orleans rhythm and blues.

K-Doe's career followed the arc common to mid-century R&B artists: a powerful early run, a long middle stretch of diminishing commercial returns, and then either irrelevance or reinvention. He started in gospel, moved to secular R&B, recorded with the Blue Diamonds in 1954, and spent the late 1950s building a regional reputation on a string of sharp, energetic singles. Then in 1961, Allen Toussaint wrote him a song. "Mother-in-Law" — a comic complaint about the domestic interloper, set against a rolling New Orleans groove — went to number one on both the Billboard pop chart and the R&B chart simultaneously. It was K-Doe's first top-forty pop hit and his last. He never had another at that level, but in New Orleans, which measures musical legacy by something other than chart position, it didn't matter. He was in the fabric of the city.

The middle decades were hard. K-Doe drank heavily, developed a reputation for unreliability among club owners who didn't want to book him, and by the mid-1980s had effectively bottomed out — doing explosive, often unhinged radio programs on community station WWOZ that built him an international cult following while his personal circumstances deteriorated toward homelessness. The shows were something: K-Doe announcing records, proclaiming his own greatness, delivering improvisational monologues that became collector's items circulated on cassette tapes mailed around the world before the internet existed. WWOZ eventually canceled the show. K-Doe seemed, as his biographer would later put it, destined to die in the gutter.

What saved him was Antoinette Dorsey Fox, an old friend who reconnected with him, helped him substantially reduce his drinking, and eventually became both his business partner and his wife. In 1994 — some accounts say 1995, the lounge opened formally in 1995 — Antoinette opened the Mother-in-Law Lounge at 1500 North Claiborne Avenue, at the downtown river corner of Claiborne and Columbus Street in the 7th Ward, specifically so that K-Doe would always have a venue. He had acquired a deserved reputation for unreliability, and no established club could count on him; Antoinette built him a room of his own. K-Doe performed there every Monday night, wearing capes and crowns, having declared himself the Emperor of the Universe in 1998 during a resurgence that saw him perform for sixty thousand people at the Washington Monument and ride as king of the Krewe du Vieux Mardi Gras parade in 2001. The lounge became, in short order, something unusual — a funky-but-chic destination drawing a vastly diverse clientele who all got along, the building's exterior covered in murals depicting K-Doe and collaborators including Allen Toussaint, the interior a dense shrine of memorabilia, photographs, and posters. Every inch was dedicated to him and to the music he embodied.

K-Doe died on July 5, 2001, of kidney and liver failure following years of alcoholism. His death produced one of the great New Orleans jazz funerals of the modern era — he lay in state at Gallier Hall, an honor reserved for the city's most notable citizens, and the procession wound from there to Saint Louis Cemetery Number 2, where the Duval family donated space in their 200-year-old family tomb. He was interred alongside his second mother-in-law, with whom he had been exceptionally close, and his best friend, the musician Earl King. After the burial, Antoinette commissioned a life-size mannequin of Ernie, dressed in his actual suits and jewelry, given weekly manicures, sometimes placed outside the lounge with a hidden transmitter playing looped K-Doe recordings for passersby. In New Orleans, this was not considered unusual. It was considered faithful.

Antoinette ran the lounge until Hurricane Katrina flooded it with five and a half feet of water in August 2005. She came back. With the help of the Hands on Network and the musician Usher, the lounge reopened on August 28, 2006 — the first anniversary of the storm — and Antoinette used it to feed returning neighbors and visiting volunteers while the Tremé put itself back together. On Mardi Gras mornings she led walking parades of women dressed as baby dolls from the lounge door. On Fat Tuesday, February 24, 2009, she died of a heart attack while closing up the lounge for the night, hours after riding on a float in the Krewe of Muses parade. The building that both she and Ernie had built their last years around was the last place she worked before she died.

The haunting tradition at the Mother-in-Law Lounge does not involve anonymous presences or unknown figures — it is specifically Ernie and Antoinette, still in the building they made. The reports are consistent with the character of the place itself: warm, theatrical, musical, the kind of haunting that fits a man who performed seven consecutive renditions of his signature song in front of a shark tank wearing a green plumed cape. Staff, musicians, and regulars have reported the sense of presence and the particular weight of a room where two people poured everything they had into making it exist. The lounge was reopened in 2014 by New Orleans trumpeter Kermit Ruffins under the name Kermit's Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, and continues operating as a live music venue, Ruffins cooking for patrons from a grill in the back of a truck parked outside in the New Orleans tradition of feeding people as an act of love. The murals still cover the exterior. Ernie's suits are still inside. Whatever is left of two people who refused to let the music stop is presumably still there too.