Smug pundits have long ridiculed latter day blues musicians for the dubious sin of plying other people’s miseries for subject material. Well, to quote Little Richard, SHUT UP! It may be cold comfort, but contemporary New Orleans blues songwriters know that Memphis Minnie’s got nothing on them since the events following August 29, 2005.

Nobody knows this better than Andy J. Forest, an exceptionally good harmonica player and even better songwriter. With Anders Osborne producing him, Forest has recorded some of the best recent songs about life in New Orleans before the Federal Flood. In fact, he wrote one of the best pre-Katrina hurricane songs, “Hurricane George.”

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Forest stays clear of the party hearty Big Easy clichés to write about real people and events, a talent which seemingly reached its apotheosis on the beautiful tribute to his Upper Ninth Ward home, the ironically titled Deep Down Under in the Bywater.

Forest’s latest, Real Stories, ups the post-Katrina ante. The tone is not maudlin or sorrowful but angry, documentary, op-ed style, as if Jimmy Breslin were 40 years younger, lived in New Orleans and wrote songs instead of newspaper columns.

Forest is primarily a storyteller and this tale opens with the Swiftian history, “Let ’em Die.” The tone is lighthearted—toe-tapping, even—as Forest sets the scene. “C. Ray had a party down in New Orleans,” he sings as Osborne plays an irresistible R&B vamp along with Heggy Vezzano, the guitarist from the Italian blues band that backs Forest on this session. “If you didn’t have a car or other means of transportation / you were invited down to the Superdome, where things got out of hand,” Forest continues merrily along until he reaches the line that provides the song’s fulcrum: “The U.S. government decided to let them die.”

Even though everyone knows the story already, the line is gut-wrenching and in the context of the song, it hits like the perfect Joseph Conrad sentence.

Forest makes other disaster-era observations in “Trailerless Man” and “Breach in the Levee,” but the rest of the album deals with day-to-day observations like “Stinkin Lincoln,” the white whale of a car that was still sitting in front of Forest’s Piety Street home last time I looked, or “4:20 a.m.,” an account of post-gig activities that speaks for itself.

New Orleans lost a lot in the flood, but at least it didn’t lose its voice. Andy J. Forest is one of the artists making sure of that.

By John Swenson