Bruce 'Sunpie' Barnes, Bayou Bandleader

Bruce 'Sunpie' Barnes melds the distinctive musical sounds of Louisiana with the rhythms of the natural world

By Barry Yeoman
Conservation
Sep 26, 2024

In 1991, young park ranger Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes (above) scans for birdlife at Louisiana’s Barataria Preserve. Three decades later, the full-time musician, who remains an active naturalist, performs in Switzerland (below).

ON A FULL-MOON NIGHT IN 1988, a young park ranger named Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes paddled a canoe into the wetlands of Louisiana’s Barataria Preserve. It was 2 a.m. when he pulled out his harmonica and played an instrumental from his childhood, “The Coon and the Hound.”

First, Barnes recalls, the frogs joined in: pig frogs, chorus frogs, spring peepers, squirrel treefrogs, barking treefrogs, bird-voiced treefrogs. Then the alligators approached; his harmonica repertoire included a barking sound that resembled their mating call. A half dozen gators lingered at the canoe’s edge as he serenaded them for the next two hours.

Barnes, now 61, is known today as the bandleader, accordionist and harmonica player for the New Orleans-based Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots. His band performs at festivals around the world: a fusion of zydeco, blues, Creole funk, gospel and melodies from Africa and the Caribbean. He has toured with Paul Simon and Sting, and his music is featured in more than 20 movies and television shows, including “Déjà Vu” and “Undercover Blues.”

He is also a naturalist who spent most of his 40-year career working for the National Park Service. But for Barnes, music and nature don’t inhabit separate silos. Louisiana’s rhythms, he says, are as place-specific as its bayous, marshes, cane fields and forests. The wetlands even produce their own music. Barnes has visited Barataria at night with a sound engineer, capturing wildlife sounds to weave into his recordings.

He came to both passions early. Growing up in Arkansas, Barnes’ earliest memory involves sitting on his father’s knee and listening to him play blues harmonica. He acquired his nickname from his Uncle Sunpie, a piano player who visited from Louisiana during holidays. “They’d play blues all night,” Barnes recalls of those visits.

As a child, Barnes sometimes snuck outside at 1 a.m. to watch flying squirrels glide. Walking to school, he and his brothers set rabbit and raccoon traps, which they checked on the way home. He caught crawfish and dug up mineral-rich clay, which he sold to women who ate it. The cultural practice, known as geophagy, has existed in Africa, North America and elsewhere since antiquity, sometimes linked to soil’s micronutrients and antitoxic properties.

An image of Bruce Sunpie Barnes performing.

His early enchantment with the natural world led Barnes to major in biology at Henderson State University and to start working at national parks as an undergraduate. He arrived at Barataria, part of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, in 1987, when he was 23. Barnes surveyed the park’s plants and animals and led interpretive hikes. He cleared out the trenasses—artificial waterways cut by trappers—and led daytime canoe trips. Hours after sunset, he returned to the water by himself.

“The night canoeing was just off the chart,” Barnes says. “Animals screaming everywhere. You could see 300 alligators easy. All the birds, everything, all the calls, coyotes, barred owls.” Under the park’s auspices, he began to offer full-moon canoe tours, which wound past cypresses and tupelos draped in Spanish moss and sometimes included his harmonica performances. In 1989, after The New York Times published an article about the tours, he says he booked about a year’s worth in just one day.

New Orleans, meanwhile, was less than 20 miles away. “The city was upside-down,” he says. “It was music everywhere.” On Sunday nights, Barnes would go to the Grease Lounge in Tremé, eat the free turkey necks and ya-ka-mein (a beef-noodle soup) and listen to the R&B musicians whose support became critical to his own musical career.

He hung out at Fats Domino’s home, where the rock ’n’ roll pioneer fed him red beans and rice. “Which meant that I got to call in sick to work,” he says, “because Fats invited me over to go to the hardware store with him, and he’s gonna cook a pot of beans, and he’s just wide open.”

Barnes left Barataria in 1999 to become a ranger at the park service’s New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, which is based in the French Quarter and offers musical and educational programming. It’s not what most people envision when they think of national parks: no rock formations, no big sky. Yet it still focuses on preserving a unique American place.

Barnes retired from the National Park Service in 2015. He still plays music full time, and he remains a naturalist, leading walking tours and photographing medicinal plants and fungi. Some of those photographs are currently on display in New Orleans at The Cabildo, one of the Louisiana State Museums. The exhibit, “Botanica: Gardens, Landscapes, and Plant Medicines in South Louisiana,” which he also helped curate, runs through May 2026.

Plants, fungi and music, to Barnes, all have medicinal power. In his adopted home, they are never far from each other. “When you roll into New Orleans, you can hear some of the world’s greatest music,” he says. “And in the same day, you can get in your car and drive 25 minutes and be in the wetlands, completely surrounded by nature and water, and feel like you’re 1,000 miles from civilization.”

Barry Yeoman is a journalist who lives in North Carolina and teaches at Duke and Wake Forest universities.