The January 19 Musemgoer story in the New Orleans Advocate | The Times-Picayune highlights a couple of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s contributions to the historic January 23 performance – a world premiere, actually – of Morgiane, the 1888 opera by New Orleans-born composer Edmond Dédé. Read all about it.
The free performance takes place at 7:30 p.m. in St. Louis Cathedral. The story details a pre-concert presentation at HNOC’s Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street, as well as the exquisite printed program HNOC has produced for the concert, which will feature excerpts from three acts of the opera performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and OperaCréole in partnership with Opera Lafayette, based in Washington, DC. The program’s front covers, courtesy of HNOC, is at left above.
Thursday’s performance will be the 17th edition of the Musical Louisiana: America’s Cultural Heritage concert series produced in partnership between HNOC and the LPO. There is a history-rich archive of programs created for past Musical Louisiana concerts that can be found on HNOC’s recently redesigned website. The program for this year’s performance will soon join the page.
In addition to my story and HNOC’s webpage for Musical Louisiana, there are a number of digital assets to study before or after the performance. WWNO, New Orleans’ NPR affiliate and home to weekly Museumgoer radio reports, previewed the concert on “Louisiana Considered.” Opera Lafayette is producing a series of virtual and in-person preview events. The Folger Shakespeare Library is displaying the opera’s original manuscript and has a good backgrounder on the work and its rediscovery. HNOC’s First Draft Blog has a story about it. The Washington Post, Gambit and the Times-Picayune (link provided once available) have written about the opera’s music. For the deepest dive of them all, view the complete original score, as digitized by the Harvard Library.
“Billy Cannon: They Called Him Legend”
A new episode of the Museumgoer podcast (listen here or just click below, right above the photos) expands on my January 15 WWNO report about the exhibit “Billy Cannon: They Called Him Legend,” now on view at the great Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge.
The WWNO report isn’t available in digital form, so I’m uploading my script for the segment below. Some photos of the exhibit (images courtesy of me) and a few links follow that.
The script:
With just a little college football left to play this season, it seems like a good time to spotlight a new exhibit at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge dedicated to the life of Billy Cannon, LSU’s first Heisman Trophy winner. Cannon’s life encompassed much more than football, as most LSU fans know, and the exhibit doesn’t flinch when it comes to recalling his staggering fall from grace about midway through that life.
But the exhibit’s narrative starts well before that, cataloging Cannon’s schoolboy athletic exploits as he made his way toward Tiger Stadium and beyond. Amazingly, Cannon and his family saved so many objects from his life that early displays in the exhibit include ribbons won in middle school.
There’s a statue of Cannon outside of LSU’s stadium because of his remarkable career there, and ghostly video footage of his 1959 “Halloween Run” punt return against Ole Miss plays on a video display that also includes archival footage of Richard Nixon awarding Cannon the Heisman.
The trophy itself gets front-and-center positioning next, displayed against a wall-sized photo of the Tiger Stadium statue. The clever staging here could help connect the timeline dots for younger fans familiar with the statue who might wonder who that guy was.
Who he was was a complex character, as the exhibit’s next segments demonstrate. After a decade plus of professional football (playing mostly in the American Football League) Cannon, who studied dentistry during his off-seasons away from pro football, established a thriving orthodontics practice after his 1970 retirement.
The star’s second act ended with his startling arrest for conspiring to produce $6 million in counterfeit currency. His five-year prison term for that crime was curtailed early due to good behavior, but re-establishing his orthodontic practice proved impossible. Cannon’s third act was devoted to improving medical care for inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and he ran the prison’s dental program until shortly before his death in 2018.
The “They” in the exhibit’s title, “Billy Cannon: They Called Him Legend,” could refer to a number of generations of LSU fans but “Legend” was actually awarded to him by the prison inmates whose smiles he restored.
The exhibit will be on view through January 10, 2026.
The podcast:
The Baton Rouge Advocate has covered the exhibit. The Louisiana State Museum has a webpage for it, too. Baton Rouge TV coverage of the exhibit’s 2024 opening includes an interview with Cannon’s daughter, Bunnie, who played a key role in conceiving the exhibit and who is referenced in the podcast interview with Joyce Miller, Louisiana State Museum historian and the exhibit’s curator.
Special thanks to Dhani Adomaitis, programming coordinator at HNOC for her help with the Morgiane coverage and to Joyce Miller for the back-to-back podcast interviews (she’s the curator for “Rodrigue: Before the Blue Dog” at the Cabildo, which was the podcast topic last time) and to you for reading and maybe listening.
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