COURSEY HARRELLS FERRY MILLERVILLE OLD JEFFERSON PA R K V I E W SHENANDOAH TIGER BEND WHITE OAK
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W e d n e s d ay, M a r c h 18, 2026
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‘Sinners’ shines light on blues legends from Louisiana Hopefully Ryan Coogler has a U-Haul on standby. The 39-year-old movie director may need a moving van March 15 to bring the Oscars home for his horror film, “Sinners.” The movie, which grossed $369 million in worldwide box office receipts, is up for a record 16 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Original Song. “Sinners” is already a winner for putting the spotlight on Herman the blues and at Fuselier least three Louisiana musicians who shaped the sound. Much of the vampire thriller is set in Southern juke joints of the 1930s, makeshift dancehalls that shook with sounds that poured the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll, soul, R&B, rap, country and more. Coogler illustrates that past and future in a scene with the original song, “I Lied to You.” The 1930s scene drifts to visions of the coming decades of rock, rap, break dancing and funk. Buddy Guy, an 89-year-old native of Pointe Coupee Parish, appears briefly in the movie as an aging version of the character Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore. Born in 1936 in Lettsworth, Guy was a product of this “Sinners” era with skills that heavily influenced Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and others considered guitar gods. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner and Kennedy Center honoree, Guy is still going strong with a tour of Australia set for April. Fellow blues senior and Homer native Bobby Rush has also enjoyed “Sinners” notoriety, along with the late harmonica legend Little Walter of Marksville. Rush, 92, wasn’t seen in the movie, but his harmonica was used for the character “Delta Slim.” Guy and actor Miles Caton performed the Little Walter original, “Juke.” The song has more than 2.2 million streams on Spotify and nearly 750,000 plays on YouTube. Like Guy, Rush is not resting in his senior years. Between now and end of May, Rush has gigs stretching from the French
ä See LEGENDS, page 3G
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
Buddy Guy uses a drumstick to play a Jimi Hendrix tune at the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
STAFF PHOTO BY JAN RISHER
STAFF PHOTO BY JOY HOLDEN
STAFF PHOTOS BY MARGARET DELANEY
STAFF PHOTO BY MADDIE SCOTT
SPECTRUM Across the
A downtown BR color walk shows we find what we look for
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ä For more photos from the color walk,
BY JAN RISHER Staff writer
few weeks ago, I asked three members of the newspaper’s features staff to meet me outside the Old State Capitol for a small experiment. We would each draw a color from a hat. Then we had one hour to walk around downtown Baton Rouge, photographing anything we saw in that color. That was the entire assignment. No competition. No prizes. Just one color and one hour. Margaret DeLaney drew yellow. Joy Holden pulled purple. Maddie Scott got blue. That left me with red. When I sent the calendar invitation, I suspected my colleagues might greet the idea with some skepticism. I’m aware enough to realize that my ideas sometimes exhaust them.
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DeLaney later confirmed that suspicion. “When the idea of a color walk came up, I have to admit I was slightly amused,” she said. “Walking around downtown hyper-fixating on one color seemed like a good way to spend the afternoon, but I didn’t think it would bring peace or calm my nerves.” We had all left the newsroom with deadlines on our minds and doubts that the exercise would be particularly meaningful. But once we scattered in different directions looking for our colors, something unexpected happened. Afterward, when we compared notes, we realized we had all experienced the same shift. Once each of us started looking for a single color, we began seeing
it everywhere — in signs, storefronts, building details and tiny flashes we would normally have walked right past. The color hunt added intention to what would have otherwise been just another one-hour walk. Sometimes the discoveries even came with a burst of delight. “Once or twice I jumped up and exclaimed, ‘Yellow!’ while people passed me by on the sidewalk,” DeLaney said. Scott quickly decided blue might be the easiest color to find. “Blue is everywhere,” she said. “In storefront logos, in the library, even on some great album covers.” But the most surprising part came after the walk ended. “As I drove home, my mind kept noticing more blue,” she said. “It felt like scoring points in a game.” She said the experience brought a wonderful change in perspective for her.
ä See COLOR WALK, page 2G
Were frogs from Rayne sent to space? BY ROBIN MILLER
Staff writer
Frogs? In space? Cue a froggy theme song by John Williams while the “Frogs in Space” prologue slowly scrolls from the bottom of the screen into the infinite galaxy. This is where the Frogs must find a way to destroy the Death Star before it obliterates the universe, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, frogs don’t really factor into heroics at all when it comes to outer space, that is, unless commendations are awarded for inner ear studies, which was the National Aeronau-
tical Space Administration’s main interest when it launched two bullfrogs from Rayne into the earth’s orbit in 1970. This basically answers Mark Jeffers’ question about Rayne’s space frogs. “I remember hearing a story about Louisiana giving NASA two frogs from Rayne when I was a kid,” the Baton Rouge reader said. “Is this true? And if it is, what was the purpose?”
Frog capital and ears Yes, it’s true, and Louisiana used it as an opportunity to pro-
mote the City of Rayne as the Frog Capital of the World while helping NASA investigate the effects of microgravity on balance, specifically targeting the causes of space motion sickness, which had significantly affected Apollo astronauts. As reported by NASA at the time, a frog’s inner ear structure is similar to that of humans. The frog’s smaller size provided a simplified but accurate model for the study. “Since 1965, NASA has flown more than 80 different organ-
PROVIDED PHOTO BY NASA
NASA engineers attach the Orbiting Frog Otolith spacecraft to launch two ä See CURIOUS, page 3G bullfrogs from Rayne into space in November 1970.