NEW ORLEANS (WGNO)- Authentic New Orleans Christmases happen with the help of authentic New Orleans personalities.
Telling the story of our city during the holidays is the great Benny Grunch of Benny Grunch & The Bunch fame, and he’s been at it for a while.
“I’ve been playing music professionally since 1959, but I started playing guitar, ya know lessons, my momma didn’t know what the heck else to do with me, and in those days that was just coming in 1956, so she marched me down to Werlein’s Music and got me guitar lessons where I used to go every week,” recalled Grunch.
He eventually went on to play bass and tour with a number of bands before settling back home to write and perform music. Part social commentary, with a lot of humor, but always about New his beloved New Orleans, kinda like our own Randy Newman.
Says Grunch, “I get that all the time, I hear that a lot”
We caught up with Grunch, hanging our with his grand kids Zack and Marley at his Lakeview home, and he told us the story of how he got the idea for the iconic “12 Yats of Christmas.”
“Someone from out of town actually suggested, who had been living here a while, she said you guys need to do a 12 Days of New Orleans Christmas,” according to Grunch.
The year was 1990 and of course that got the ball rolling. While playing a gig in Baton Rouge, Grunch had all the days set except for the first day of Christmas, and then fate stepped in.
“I had everything down, the whole thing, and I couldn’t ‘A crawfish they caught in Met-air-ee‘, nah too cosmopolitan ‘A crawfish they caught in Paradise‘, nobody ever heard of Paradise, and I’m not kidding, I was going to a gig at the Riverwalk, and I got behind an Arabi cab, ‘And a crawfish they caught in Arabi‘,” said Grunch.
Benny Grunch & The Bunch are playing their Annual Christmas Eve at Walgreens concert at the corner of Bonnabel and Veterans tomorrow from 12noon-2pm. For a list all upcoming shows, and to buy cds go to www.bennygrunch.com