October 2024

The celebrated musician, educator, and all-around Renaissance man passes on his passion for local culture.

– by Doug Brantley

For the past 37 years, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes has been living his Creole dream and happily sharing it with others.  

The multitalented, multi-instrumental musician, proficient in everything from the harmonica and accordion to piano and rubboard, has played everywhere from the French Quarter Festival and Jazz Fest to venues state and nationwide and in 30-plus countries.

Come Halloween Day, you’ll find him taking part in Voodoo Authentica’s 26th annual, day-long VOODOOFEST, as he has since its inception, joined by various Voodoo practitioners, academics, musicians and culture bearers - like Barnes.

“A lot of what VOODOOFEST is about is bringing people into these secret worlds where they are usually outsiders,” says organizer Mambo Brandi C. Kelley, “and making them feel included rather than ostracized for what they don’t know.” 

Kelley, a New Orleans Voodoo priestess, continued. “We learn so much when we open ourselves up to what others are bringing to the table.  We find common ground in the real stars of the show – our ancestors.  Our presenters really get that, especially Sunpie.” 

Growing up in rural southern Arkansas, Barnes’ love of music was literally instilled at his father’s knee.

“My earliest memories of being around music was when I was about 3, sitting on my father’s knee and him playing harmonica,” he recalls.  “It resonated very deeply with me.  It was like some kind of magic.”

That magic was passed down to him not only from his father but also his father’s father, who played accordion, and his uncle Sunpie, a piano player who likewise passed on his moniker.

His maternal grandmother, a healer/star reader/dream interpreter, handed down a magic all her own. 

“As a kid, I used to have tremendous, visionary dreams,” Barnes says.  “I still do.  She had similar things going on and was the one person who could help guide me through it.”

Though raised in Arkansas, Barnes’ Louisiana roots run deep, with both sides of his family originally hailing from St. Joseph Parish in the northeastern part of the state.

“A lot of times my dreams would be in Creole and associated with my relatives,” he notes.  “So, when I moved down here, at first it was a little shocking to hear people speaking Creole, which a lot of folks did at the time.

“It came back to me like a flood of feelings and emotions.  I realized what I was hearing in my dreams as a child.”

As much of a natural as he is performing, Barnes – who is also a former teacher, author, photographer, and one-time Kansas City Chiefs linebacker – is a naturalist at heart, supplementing his music career with a 30-year stint in the National Parks Service. 

This, too, was a passed-on passion that would eventually guide him to New Orleans in the late 1980s and later, the French Quarter’s Jazz National Historical Park.

“My grandmother taught me a lot about different plants, healing plants,” he says.  “My father also.  They knew about the natural world and how to utilize it and exist in it but not be invasive.  Being a park ranger, it’s something I wanted to pass on to others.”

When not at his day job or giving full-moon canoe tours, Barnes was diving deep into local music and culture.  In 1989 he started the Downhome Blues Band with R&B singer Barbara George (“I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More”).

And he began sitting in on 6th Ward jam sessions with such greats as Fats Domino, Earl King, Polka Dot Slim, Jean Night, Chuck Carbo, and Irma Thomas.

“All those folks were super welcoming and gave me a chance,” Barnes says.  “When most people speak about formal music education, they try and put it in some lofty place.

“But for me, it’s about having a relationship with someone who is like a neighbor or friend or family member, and they show you everything they know.  That was my university.”

He would later take his musical education on the road, steering his Ford Ranger toward Eunice and elsewhere around south Louisiana, expanding his influences along the way.  

“If there was a zydeco dance happening,” he says with a laugh, “I was going to show up.”

The result was the so-called “Afro Louisiana” style Barnes and his Louisiana Sunspots band, which he founded in 1991, would come to be famed for, blending blues with zydeco, gospel, and other regional components. 

“New Orleans is an absolute mecca for modern music,” Barnes believes, “because it has retained those organic rhythmic elements that came here from many different parts of Africa and Europe and the native American people who already existed here. 

“It’s really about the spirit of how you approach music that’s different here and catches folks right away.  They can feel the spirit of the people.  It’s about gift-giving and spirit-giving and doing like musicians in New Orleans have for hundreds of years.  That’s what VOODOOFEST is all about, too.”

Early on during his days at the Jazz Park, Barnes would spend Fridays in the Tremé, familiarizing himself with the neighborhood’s history and heritage at the former Blandin Funeral Home, where friend Sylvester Francis would soon open his Backstreet Cultural Museum.

At the same time, he was also being educated in the city’s Black masking culture by fellow musician Donald Harrison, Sr., a member of the Guardians of the Flame, who introduced him to other Mardi Gras Indians.

“They were all in their mid- to late-70s and 80s,” says Barnes, “but they knew all about masking.  I just loved learning from them, the songs and everything.  And all of them spoke Creole.”

Between the two, he would come to know Albert Morris, late Big Chief of the North Side Skull & Bones Gang, which dates to 1819 with traditions tied to African spiritually.  

Over time, Morris coaxed Barnes into joining the skeleton-themed group, whose crack-of-dawn outings kick off from the Backstreet Museum.

“When Super Sunday came around in 1999, he made me a suit on the spot,” Barnes recalls, “painted up the head and slapped that thing on me with the paint still wet.  He handed me a tambourine and said, ‘Get out there!’

“I had no instruction about what to do and felt a bit like a jackass.  I opened the door and there were four or five people out there, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just make a big wide circle around the block, then come back, because this is crazy!’

But as he headed off, the small group gathered and tagged along.  “I thought, ‘Oh, this is worse.  Now I’ve got people following me!’”

Follow him they did and continue to, with Barnes having taken up the Gang’s Big Chief mantle after Morris’ passing in 2010.  In the years since, the group’s popularity has exploded, as have the crowds that come to see them, spawning a 2017 documentary and garnering international attention.

“We come out to honor and celebrate our ancestors that came here from Africa,” Barnes says of the Bone Gang’s greater goal.  “We get up early, dressed as skeletons, and remind people that’s where we’re all headed. 

“So, learn to embrace the cycle of life and to respect it and to not do things that expediate the ultimate demise.  And be kind to your neighbors.”

In September, Barnes traveled to Bonn, Germany for the opening of “Dance Worlds” at the Bundeskunsthalle Museum.  Continuing through February 2025, the exhibition explores the influence of ritual dance forms from around the globe, with the Skull and Bone Gang’s suits representing New Orleans.  

Several other of the skeletal suits, he points out, are also on permanent display at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. 

“New Orleans is truly one of the cultural centers of the world,” says Barnes.  “It’s the retention that has been so important, that people have retained and maintained these folk cultures throughout time.

“The main thing is that they can survive and keep going through tradition and education,” Barnes adds, nodding back to VOODOOFEST.   

“Education means that you are willing to come toward something, not try and take it, look at it, and put it in a neat little box that’s comfortable in your mind. But to learn about and understand it.

“You’ve got to come toward something to understand it.”

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