Vaughan'sLounge

Vaughan's Lounge has been a fixture of the Bywater neighborhood since 1959, a small corner bar that has served as the neighborhood's living room through decades of change. It is not a pretty room — the decor is functional at best — but it has a soul that most venues would trade everything they own to possess.

Kermit Ruffins established his Thursday night residency at Vaughan's years ago, cooking red beans and rice outside on the sidewalk and playing a full set of jazz and brass band music inside. The combination — free food, great music, cheap drinks, and a room full of real New Orleanians — became legendary, drawing a devoted weekly crowd and introducing the venue to the world.

The venue was featured in the HBO series Treme, which faithfully documented the Thursday night tradition and introduced Vaughan's to a national audience. But the show's fans who showed up found something real waiting for them — the same neighborhood bar, the same red beans, the same music that had been happening before anyone thought to put cameras on it.

Vaughan's Lounge is the kind of place that reminds you why New Orleans is different. It exists not for tourists, not for the music industry, not for anyone other than the neighborhood it serves. That the music it provides happens to be extraordinary is simply what happens when a city takes music this seriously.