Let the good times roll: Hugh Laurie live at Le Grand Rex, Paris

With all this faux folk at the moment - in which you can't walk into a muddy festival field without encountering a group of posh boys with asymmetrical haircuts, wielding mandolins and thumping out celtic-tinged good times - it makes a change to encounter a somewhat posh (Eton, Cambridge) actor with thinning grey hair thumping out early 20th century blues.

For Hugh Laurie and The Copper Bottom Band are, if nothing else, a jolly good time. There is, though, little point trying to deny you're in the audience for anything other than one of two reasons: 1) you're British and know Laurie best for a 30-year career in TV comedy (collaborations with Stephen Fry, goggle-eyed Blackadder characters etc); and 2) you're French and know him mostly from "Doctor 'ouse".

Looking around Le Grand Rex, the exquisitely art deco Paris theatre, I am in the clear minority as a Brit. Therefore it is quite prudent to assume that shouting out references to lost socks or the more Wodehousean "Tally-ho, pip-pip and Bernard's your uncle" will be lost.

Plus, there is little need. Laurie bursts on stage as if still president of the Cambridge Footlights Revue. "I used to be an actor," he introduces himself, purposely, like an addict declaring in 12-step session "Hi, my name is Hugh and I'm an alcoholic' to supportive applause.

To the many, somewhat scary Laurie devotees in the audience, including a group of ladies wearing T-shirts with "I Love House" and his picture on the front (Kathy Bates in Misery does come to mind...), such a statement might be an issue. Laurie has said previously, that House's success became a "gilded cage" and that he "had some pretty bleak times, dark days when it seemed like there was no escape from the attention".

But here he is, clamouring for it. With a second album - Didn't It Rain - to promote ("I can't believe I've just said 'this is from my first album' he aw-shucks later in the set), Laurie, a very accomplished musician, has brought his love of early blues and jazz to Paris along with highly competent band. With it, a full-on display of the self-effacement and comic foppishness that the English upper middle class do so well. Well, we English in general, actually.

There is something more than a hobby about Laurie's show: it is more musical theatre than, say, a band doing a gig, but that has more to do with Laurie's own entertainingly vaudevillian delivery.

This isn't, however, a travelling version of Jersey Boys. Laurie and his Copper Bottom Band are, as they say in rock circles, a tight act, universally enjoying the repertoire of songs by historic blues figures like W.C. Handy, Bessie Smith and Kansas Joe McCoy. Nor is this a vanity project - the idea of recording an album was presented to him by a record executive who'd seen him demonstrate his chops in an episode of House.

Englishmen from relatively comfortable backgrounds have been performing blues songs since the 1960s, of course. They have never claimed affinity with the music's originators, simply a love of a musical form that, when it gets you, it gets you. But whereas most have trawled the Mississippi Delta for the sort of bottleneck blues that got Beale Street jumping in the Depression, Laurie's authentic passion spreads across a wider range of American roots music.

Thus we run from the New Orleans standard Iko Iko and the much-covered Let The Good Times Roll (man alive, even Joe Strummer did a version of it), to Ray Charles' What Kind Of Man Are You, Lead Belly's infectious You Don't Know My Mind and even Mystery Train, made famous by Elvis Presley, despite being a 1955 B-side (Laurie, once more, self-effacingly apologises for performing a song by "the most famous man to ever walk the planet" without any need, as it's actually done very well).

Indeed they're all done well. Laurie needn't have remained in character so much. As a performer he's a better pianist than singer (he produces an excellent rendition of Nina Simone's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel - best known to British TV viewers as the theme to the BBC's Barry Norman/Jonathan Ross weekly 'Film...' programme).

What Laurie lacks as a singer is made up for by the two starkly contrasting vocalists the Copper Bottom Band has in its midst: 'Sister' Jean McClain - who sometimes goes by the name of Pepper Mashay - is a journeywoman backing singer, with the kind of gospel voice that pins the lugholes back without apology. Taking lead vocal on Send Me To The Electric Chair, she soon has the audience swayin' and hollerin' as if attending Sunday morning chapel.

While much of the evening follows the course of the Mississippi from Chicago to New Orleans, Laurie and band head even further south with Kiss Of Fire, an Argentinian tango that brings young Guatemalan backing vocalist Gaby Moreno to center stage for a breathless rendition of the turn-of-century pot boiler, once covered by Louis Armstrong. Here, Moreno applies a noirish vibrato to her vocal parts, sung in Spanish, while Laurie contributes the counter melody in English.

We have, at this point, landed firmly in the territory of West End period musical. For a more conventional blues act, it would have been an eccentric choice at best, but with Laurie rarely stepping out of character, it merely adds to the Good Old Days variety of the show.

Laurie may never shake off the actor tag. To some, he may forever be Gregory House or Bertie Wooster. His persistent, very English self-effacement throughout the show certainly won't rid him of the latter association. But you cannot fault his earnestness. His knowledge of this music being played is encyclopedic, and his lifelong passion for it comes through with every song - all the way through to the finale.

Changes - the Alan Price song I always associate with an 1980s TV commercial for the Abbey National bank - is played with full-on New Orleans trad jazz gusto, a ripe trombone leading out a Mardis Gras procession in full flow before abandoning the Crescent City for Chicago and Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell. Well known for its 'role' in Pulp Fiction, Laurie's 12-bar piano boogie and brisk accompaniment from the seven musicians brings the encore to a sprightly conclusion.

I could have probably left it there. But there is a crowd-pleasing coda to the evening: the Disney Jungle Book singalong I Wanna Be Like You. Having started the evening with Iko Iko, and wandered our way through the hinterlands of blues and traditional jazz, we end with a song from the collective childhood of almost everyone in the theatre.

This finale may have an air of self-indulgence about it. It was an enjoyable novelty when I used to hear it on Junior Choice on a Saturday morning, for Laurie a light-hearted piece of big band fun. Clearly, he's enjoying himself. How very unlike a certain doctor I could mention.

House call

There is probably a medical term for an aversion to medical dramas on television.

Whatever it is, it has steadfastly kept me away from Casualty, Holby City, Grey's Anatomy and Chicago Hope, and were it not for Sherry Stringfield and Julianna Margulies I might never have glanced at E.R.

Even though Scrubs and M*A*S*H provided acceptable yuks amongst the yuck, hospital dramas contain just a little too much human frailty for my liking. Which raises questions about what drew me to House.

On paper - actually, in reality - I should have shied away from it. The premise of a crippled misanthrope with Conan Doyle allusions (yes, we get it - he lives at No. 221 and he pops pills) should have had me running for the hills. An English actor - Hugh Laurie - playing an American, replete with American accent to boot, should have had me screaming on my way to the hills.

But having caught one, and discovered that Laurie's blues-loving, dysfunction-seeking, manchild bad boy doctor was actually one of the funniest characters on TV, I soon managed to lose my hangups about both medical dramas and English actors trying to do American accents (don't worry, Americans trying to do English accents is an even faster accelerant to my temper), and have become hooked, like a Vicodin addict, on House.

Via iTunes I have been ploughing my way through the seasons, blissfully ignoring the fact that, structurally, every episode is the same (lead patient with hard to diagnose condition; quirky second patient; gratuitous references to Cuddy's cleavage; mention of Lupus in every diagnosis discussion; Wilson apparently the only other doctor on duty in the hospital;).

But though House made an international star of Laurie, not to mention the highest-earning actor in American television, his name can still draw a blank. But say "Dr. House", and there will be an instant flash of recognition. The same applies to Laurie's Blackadder co-star Rowan Atkinson: "Mr. Bean!" has replaced "Bobby Charlton!" and "Benny Hill!" as the standard term of appreciation of all things British for those with no grasp at all of the English language.

So, hats off to Hugh. Over eight seasons of House, Laurie has animated one of television's most memorable creations. And, if you notice the occasional flashes of his musical talents - House playing blues on the Princeton–Plainsboro's lecture theatre piano, or cranking out the Ritchie Blackmore on his Gibson Flying V - you may also notice that it is Laurie himself performing.

House undoubtedly provided Laurie with a platform for his 2011 debut album Let Them Talk, a genuinely loving homage to New Orleans blues and jazz, with contributions from the Crescent City's own celebrity doctor, Dr. John, as well as Tom Jones, who is not known for his medical skills but does have a deep voice, copious chest hair and the ability to collect women's underwear while performing on stage.

Quite rightly, Let Them Talk garnered good reviews, out of surprise, perhaps, for some reviewers, caught unawares that a mostly comic actor could also be a very accomplished musician (as WWDBD? noted in Criminal Records, the history of album-making actors isn't a happy one). And thus Laurie - now post-House - returns with a follow-up album, Didn't It Rain.

The formula hasn't been changed: it's another collection of entries from the blues and jazz songbooks, but with somewhat less emphasis on the Big Easy sound, and a little more flavour of the blues found further up the Mississippi, such as Jelly Roll Morton's I Hate A Man Like You, and covers of Dr. John's Wild Honey, Alan Price's Changes (once the tune accompanying a building society advert, if I recall) and Georgie Fame's Yeh, Yeh.

Conversely, the opening track, a cover of WC Handy's St. Louis Blues, is pure Dixieland trad, much the same, in fact, as Laurie's treatment of Changes. Kansas Joe McCoy's The Weed Smoker's Dream - last breathily aired by Jessica Rabbit… - is authentically faithful to the original.

If there's one real complaint about Didn't It Rain, however, it's that it doesn't feel like Laurie has stretched himself as much as you feel he could have done. When Laurie does let go of the safety of tradition, the impact is noticeably better. On Unchain My Heart he brings the 80s FM radio stodge Joe Cocker made of it to something closer to the stabbing soul of Ray Charles' version. Yeh, Yeh, on the other hand, feels like no more than a party piece added onto the album for good measure, but then with Laurie such an exceptional blues pianist, he's entitled to show off a little.

Produced again by Joe Henry (another roots auteur, the 'new' T-Bone Burnett and the man responsible for Billy Bragg's excellent Tooth And Nail), Didn’t It Rain is a tad undemanding. Maybe it's the material, maybe it's the treatment.

Let It Talk felt genuine, a sincere tribute to a genre Laurie clearly adores. The blues is a broad church, and there have been plenty of mainstream rock and pop acts who've produced their own blues covers albums wthout anywhere near the personal love of the form Laurie brings to bear. And, to his credit, he has avoided the obvious reference points of Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, and stuck to his somewhat eclectic interest in the New Orleans branch of the blues line.

On this follow-up, the sincerity doesn't come across anywhere near as strongly and does feel like more of the same. Some tracks, too - while proficiently performed - are a little too perfectly formed, giving parts of Didn't It Rain the feeling of a West End musical soundtrack. These are, it must be said, niggles. Laurie's recording career has thus far proven to have cogency than many, if not most, albums made by stars in their ascendancy, even if - to British television audiences at least - Laurie's star has been ascendent for a very long time.

American Dreaming - tales about the Southland

Alex Demyan and NewOrleansOnline.com

Exactly one month ago today I was setting off for a brief excursion through what Paul Simon called "the cradle of the Civil War", indulging in the music, culture, history and hospitality of the American South.

The trip - though criminally short - was nevertheless long enough to reinforce my belief that for all the exotic, fascinating and culturally diverse destinations the world has to offer, I am still drawn to - no, absorbed by - the United States, its people and its places.

A week earlier What Would David Bowie Do? had been on American soil for a business trip, and between this visit and the journey down south, spent an inordinate amount of time arriving at, passing through or departing from various US airports. It was an experience which served only to demonstrate what fascinating observatories of local life they are.

New Orleans' delightfully named Louis Armstrong International Airport (known locally as “Satchmo”) provided a perfect sample of the rich potpourri of the resident and the transitory, its waiting areas, walkways and lounges like a microcosmic fishtank sourced from the greater ocean of American life.

Amid all the usual departure gate hub-bub was a regular fixture at any US departure lounge: the Willy Loman. Conspicuously pacing up and down, feverishly pitching his wares via an apparently invisible Bluetooth headset, he appeared insanely animated in front of an indifferent audience. Next to me sat the sweet old gran heading home to visit the grandkids; across the divide, the single mum struggling with children and luggage; and - yes, fans of Airplane! - elsewhere at that departure gate was the obligatory nun. Can anyone remember the last time they saw a nun anywhere other than an airport?

I've been an annual visitor to the United States for almost 20 years, and lived there for two of them. I'm sure some will regard me as being of the barnyard for lacking breadth of horizon, that I should be spending my vacations backpacking through the Himalaya, exploring Mayan temples by kayak or in-line skating up the Ho-Chi Minh Trail. And while it's true that American travel doesn't present any greater challenge than deciding between the bewildering choice of drive-throughs and motel chains, the country isn't any less rewarding, enriching or invigorating a visit.

America has never failed to live up to expectations: my first ever visit took me to Los Angeles where - like Stevie Wonder's "hard town Mississippi" rural refugee - I couldn't help saying to myself, "Yeah, just like I pictured it".

You have to remember that I grew up in gloomy, grey 1970s Britain. LA - represented by Charlie's Angels and CHiPs - was America: a blue-skied paradise populated by big cars, perfect teeth and flawless beauty. Jaclyn Smith was her name.

I knew this was somewhere I wanted to visit, even be part of, and I eventually got my wish. Subsequently, and exhaustively, I've explored the better two-thirds of California - from San Diego to San Francisco, Venice Beach and Carmel on the coast east into and out of the deserts to the majestic Sierras, the jaw-droppingly beautiful Yosemite and the glorious tranquility of Lake Tahoe. I even know the taxi back-doubles to reach Los Angeles International Airport.

California was only the beginning: I branched into the Pacific Northwest - once known for Twin Peaks, Nirvana and Big Foot, and now, dreadfully fey vampires - coming across a bizarre mock Bavarian village in the Cascade Mountains and Greenpeace chasing Indian whale hunters around Neah Bay, the remotest tip of the 'lower 49 states'; I've been bitten to death in South Carolina and bored to death in southern Texas; I've hiked the steel canyons of Manhattan and barrelled through the sandstone canyons of Utah in a 4x4, blaring out The Clash, just in case an Osmond was lurking behind a tree. I've covered a lot of ground, but in truth I've barely scratched the surface.

Ever since Christopher Columbus misprogrammed his GPS and discovered India to be closer to Cuba than expected, America has been about aspiration. On my recent trip from Memphis to New Orleans, however, I received a timely reminder that aspiration continues to duel with adversity.

The South, today, may not be as dirt-poor as it was when share croppers came in from the fields to Memphis to find their fortunes - or the sanctuary of a Beale Street juke joint - but it still struggles. Mississippi and its southern neighbour Louisiana boast the poorest communities in the United States. Downtown Memphis, in particular, is marked by its vacant storefronts, its homeless and a noticeable lethargy, even in the middle of a normal working day.

And yet this is the corner of America from which pop music as we know it today was founded. The rhythms that emerged from its cotton plantations to fuse with gospel and folk, evolving, in Darwinian fashion, into blues and jazz, became the rock and roll that established music as the predominant youth culture of the last 60 years.

At risk of committing Lennonesque blasphemy - dangerous sport when it comes to the Bible Belt - there are parallels between the South and the Holy Land. To visit the original haunts of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, BB King and Robert Johnson (the founding member of the 27 Club) carries the same sensation of walking amid mythic history as visiting Nazareth, Galilee and other places of biblical history in Israel, as I was fortunate to do last year.

Memphis is Jerusalem and Clarksdale - a long, straight, hour-long drive away down Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61) and into Mississippi, is Bethlehem. The crossroads where Highways 61 and 49 meet is Manger Square. Here, the story goes, Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil for the ability to play the guitar. I won't dwell on the symbolism of the crossed guitars which now marks this junction, save to say it's a dilapidated symbol at an intersection few would want to linger at.

The blues spawned by the Mississippi Delta may have eventually found its way into British bedrooms in the 1960s, where it was indulged by white, suburban middle class boys, but the region bears little benefit today of the excess and opulence it gave rise to. Apart from the Delta Blues Museum and an arts center co-founded by local resident Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale has little else. Down at that crossroads you become conscious that time has scarcely moved on in the 80 years since Johnson's apocryphal satanic encounter.

As it was for those early blues pioneers, Memphis remains the area's aspirational magnet. Beale Street today might be a theme park version of the street it once was, but amid the bachelor and bachelorette parties staggering up and down its main drag of an evening, authentic, live blues can still be heard.

BB King's, at the corner of Beale and 2nd, is now part of a franchised chain, but the Memphis original is a must-see, if only for the quality of live acts it hosts every night, but also out of homage to its patron, who does still make appearances when, at the age of 86, he has time while remarkably still touring.

King, born in share-cropping farmland 130 miles away in Indianola, Mississippi, came to Memphis as a 21-year-old and picked up guitar-playing sessions on the legendary local radio station WDIA. It was while DJing and playing blues for WDIA that he acquired the nickname 'Beale Street Blues Boy' - B.B.

If you happen across the angular building at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, on the corner with Marshall Avenue, go in, do the tour, and get to squeeze into the recording studio where, on July 18, 1953, an 18-year-old local truck driver walked in off the street, paid $3.98 to record three songs. The songs included My Happiness - a gift for, it is claimed, his mother's birthday.

He walked out with a 10-inch acetate disc of the recordings and that may well have been that. Fate - and producer Sam Philips' receptionist - brought Elvis Presley back to Sun Studios, where he recorded and released That's All Right in 1954 and sparked a global cultural phenomenon of seismic proportions.

In 1957, at the age of just 22, Presley moved in to Graceland, just nine miles south-east of where Sun Studios still stands today. The first thing that strikes you about Graceland is just how modest this cod-colonial pile is by mansion standards. Newly-minted English football players would consider it tiny. It is as much a shrine to the King of Rock'n'Roll as it is to what passed for rock star interior design in the era Presley lived in it.

Visiting it today, one sees a house frozen in time, with 70s chintz and patterns which would, today, come with a health warning. Graceland's modest size is tempered by the fact that its estate boasts a large shed full of Presley's cars - a mix of the gaudy and the opulent - as well as not one but two airliners, which used to fly under the call sign 'Hound Dog One'.

Such arriviste trappings might be incongruous to the poverty around Memphis, but Graceland is a revered local money-spinner. A lesser known local attraction is the Stax studio. Rebuilt to perfection (the original was knocked down by a property developer), it plays another important role in the cultural heritage of Memphis, celebrating both a record label and the single neighbourhood that produced Isaac Hayes, Ike Turner, Booker T. Jones, Rufus Thomas, Steve Cropper and Donald 'Duck' Dunn.

This was the multicultural backbone of Stax Records: a fusion of rhythm, soul, blues and gospel influenced which, combined, challenged the still-segregated landscape of American society in the early 1960s - in the very city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, outside room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel.

Today the hotel is a part of the Civil Rights Museum, a fantastically curated, chronological exhibition of a period of American history few can be proud of, and which depicts a story that spans multiple centuries to within my lifetime.

Heading south of Memphis, following the curves of the Mississippi, you encounter more of the impoverished rural landscapes people have either aspired to break away from, or reluctantly accepted to be their lot and stayed put.

Challenging this is Natchez, a Miss Havershamesque town overlooking the Mississippi as it bends between Louisiana and the state named after it. When cotton was the currency on the Mississippi - and a lucrative one at that - Natchez, with its commanding view of the river, was a wealthy town. Today, its wealth has visibly faded, although the town centre retains a fabric of suburban respectability.

Natchez is a charming town, but hardly worthy of an overnight stay. If you do, two attractions make it worthwhile. Firstly, there is the Under-the-Hill Saloon on Silver Street. This slightly creaky riverside pub, with its - how do you say this politely? - eccentric barman, Harley-riding clientele and eclectic decor (yes, that was a real hand grenade we saw behind the bar) is a local institution.

Above it is the three-room Mark Twain Guest House, to which guests share a single bathroom and, for their $100 night, do without in-room televisions and telephones in order to preserve the "somewhat historic atmosphere of our rooms".

Whether Mark Twain ever stayed there for real remains to be proven. If he had have done, he'd have certainly eaten at The Magnolia Grill next door which - either through a paucity of anything better or, simply because of the atmosphere of the evening - served up arguably the best meal of the entire week spent south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

First timers, travel writers and more seasoned visitors to the United States find it near-impossible to avoid commenting on the enormity of the country - its places and its people - or on the absurdity of its excess. And yet, in Natchez, What Would David Bowie Do? encountered perhaps the most wasteful application of a natural resource on God's green: a petrol-driven truck employed just to transport patrons less then 50 feet up and down the causeway between the entrance of a Mississippi steamer casino boat and the roadway where shuttle buses drop them off. Having picked them up from the car park further up a hill. Let me go over that again: a truck, which transports people 50 feet up or down a landing ramp.

And so on further to the mouth of the Mighty Mississip' itself, New Orleans - the final destination of this brief road trip. Simply put, one of the most charming cities on the map, even though a clearly pissed off Mother Nature did her best to wipe it clean off that map in 2005 when she sent Hurricane Katrina spinning across the Gulf of Mexico.

When she struck, Katrina breached the delicate acquaintance The Big Easy had enjoyed with the Gulf since the port was founded by the French in 1718. Flooding caused by the city's levees breaking killed more than 1000 residents and displaced tens of thousands more. In fact, exactly how many were displaced is still not known, six years later. Census figures have shown that New Orleans - once America's third-largest city - lost almost a third of its population over the last decade. Today it is America's 52nd largest city.

Built, largely, over reclaimed swampland, New Orleans is a cocktail bar's shaker of influences. With its clearly French foundation, the infusion of Creole, Haitian, Spanish and other European elements give the city a flavour unlike any other I've visited in America with, perhaps, the exception of San Francisco.

Cosmo Condina/NewOrleansOnline.com

The jazz music is there, but the good stuff needs searching for. Bourbon Street, like Beale in Memphis, may be the star of the show, but it is a somewhat tacky thoroughfare.

It is loud and colourful, with no shortage of bars to tempt you in. Some even have authentic jazz and blues. Others, however, are just garish karaoke bars, catering to the culture clash of Mid-West sales reps attending conventions and Mid-West rednecks who all converge on the city at the same time.

At least it's easy to set the two crowds apart: the reps are all dressed in sports jackets, their mobile phones holstered at the hip, while the rednecks almost exclusively wearing baseball hats, facial hair and capped-sleeve T-shirts bearing logos of a motor oil brands.

New Orleans is not, of course, just one street. During the daytime, the French Quarter provides both respite from the aching sun as well as a charming and thoroughly walkable area in which to step in and out of bars for a cooling drink, or to sample some of the food delights, especially creole cooking and, for the totally indulgent, a local speciality known as a Po' Boy.

These are, essentially, very large sandwiches - what Americans will refer to as a "submarine", owing to them being made out of a French baguette, are the size of an actual submarine, and are loaded with so much unhealthy crap that they can be legitimately be described as weapons of mass destruction.

The Po' Boy originated in the Great Depression, when a pair of entrepreneurial brothers came up with the idea of selling foot-long sandwiches to poor families on the basis that each 'Poor Boy' would adequately provide a meal to an entire household. Today they are far from cheap, and given the propensity for over-indulgence, you are unlikely to see a Po' Boy eaten by either a single family, or anyone on a low income.

Here, in fact, lies a pillar of the American paradox: the United States is the world's wealthiest nation, and yet 15% of its 312 million inhabitants live below the poverty line. That's the equivalent of the entire population of Spain. America remains highly aspirational: TV advertising is about doing well, living healthier and aspiring to own that next-generation SUV, despite the fact you will not be able to afford its fuel or, come to think of it, the house to park it outside. This is a country with a gross domestic product - of almost $15 trillion, but where child poverty is twice as high as many European countries, and where more than half a million children are officially listed as homeless.

Driving through - or driving past - poverty like this makes no difference as to whether you're in the USA or the outskirts of Mumbai. Of course, it asks moral questions of the traveller, but as self-indulgent as this sounds, my curiosity for a part of America which has struggled for long enough, and will, sadly, struggle for a lot longer, is driven by a celebration of the culture and pleasure it has provided the world.

Lacking any real erudition, I'll leave more dexterous reflections on Americana in general to Kerouac and Bryson: I wouldn't even dare suggest this dog-and-pony show of mine would, in any case, offer anything deep. But for all of America's critics and cynics, who say it lacks culture, history, society, I say take a closer look. Look deeper and you will find a country that might surprise you and even enchant you in the way it did me before I'd even set foot there - and has continued enchanting me ever since. My own personal American road movie is not yet past the opening titles. There is plenty more to come.