"Crescent City Soul:
The Sound of New Orleans, 1947-1974"
(EMI Records, 4 CDs)

By TONY SCHERMAN

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New Orleans rhythm & blues is a strange and marvelous, wild-eyed world where grown men cluck like hens, groan like frogs, bray like mules and shout things like "Goobah, goobah, goobah." And EMI's "Crescent City Soul" chronicles this world exhaustively and lovingly. This four-CD box, which by no means confines itself to hits, digs as deeply into an American pop-music genre as any box set you're likely to find.

Culturally and politically, New Orleans is a separate republic. Because of its roots as a commercial crossroads, its neighborhoods add up to an ethnic checkerboard, each square bleeding into the next. Until the rise of Miami, New Orleans was America's biggest tropical city, as strongly stamped by Caribbean culture as by the stern Protestant ethic to the north. Musically, this translated into a singular mix of parade band rhythms, what Jelly Roll Morton called "the Spanish tinge," hot jazz and deep-Southern blues.

While rhythm & blues, of course, turned into rock 'n' roll, with performers like Chuck Berry managing to tap rock's huge new market, white teenagers, only one New Orleans act -- Fats Domino -- crossed over emphatically into the mainstream. Crescent City r&b was too idiosyncratic to appeal more than occasionally to America's teens. It remained a self-contained musical culture, yet a fertile and influential one.

Behind the flood of New Orleans r&b, there were really only a few essential characters, the two most essential being record producers Dave Bartholomew and Allen Toussaint. Of "Crescent City Soul's'' 119 tracks, Bartholomew supervised (by my count) more than 50, Toussaint almost 40.

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