The St. James Infirmary Blues; or, Notes Towards a Definition of Voodoo

“When I die, gimme six crap-shootin’ pall-bearers / Chorus girls, sing me a song / Put a red-hot jazz band at the top of my head / Hallelujah as we roll along.”

The question of how to dispose of my mortal remains has weighed on me of late. Raised Baptist and Episcopalian by turns—with a meager annuity of Judaism courtesy of certain paternal relatives—I’ve since strayed from the path of righteousness into the turpid thickets of cohabitation and Crescent City blues. Which means, of course, that for this agno-mystic, ruminations on divine judgment and soul-transposition present thickets of their own—as does the cadaverous question that opens this paragraph.
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