I love me some Bruce

Two things I love: New Orleans Jazz Fest and Bruce Springsteen.

From the Washington Post:

"Out-of-town performers also paid homage to the city. In one of the weekend's most exuberant performances, Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band played a slew of songs that resonated with New Orleanians. Using a full horn section, fiddlers, a banjo player and an accordionist, he delivered a two-hour set Sunday evening that opened with "Mary, Don't You Weep" and included his rewritten version of the folk song "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?"
Before a crowd of thousands he sang the new lyrics:
There's bodies floatin' on Canal and the levees gone to hell
Martha get me my 16 gauge and some dry shells
Them's who's got got out of town
And them who ain't got left to drown
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?
Before the song, Springsteen also delivered a scathing assessment of President's Bush response to Hurricane Katrina, saying that having surveyed the city on Saturday, "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious. This is what happens when political cronyism guts the very agencies that are supposed to serve American citizens in times of trial and hardship."
But the most emotional song of the set came when Springsteen performed "My City of Ruins," as the crowd joined in the refrain, "Come on rise up, come on rise up."
Other times, the crowd drew its own interpretations from lines musicians had penned long ago. Ani DiFranco -- who moved to New Orleans a year ago and has decided to stay -- drew a roar from her audience, including women sporting dragonfly and mermaid tattoos, when she belted out feminist lyrics. "I live for the fight/Every tool is a weapon if you use it right," she sang.

From the NY Times:

"Mr. Springsteen led his large but never unwieldy Seeger Sessions Band — with horns, fiddles, banjo and more — in a set featuring folk songs from Pete Seeger's repertory, with arrangements that gleefully veered toward south Louisiana Cajun music and New Orleans traditional jazz. Mr. Springsteen wrote new verses about New Orleans for Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live," and he dedicated it to "President Bystander." Introducing it, he said, "This is what happens when people play political games with other people's lives."