“Betcha I could show ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your sneakers on your feet, / Got your foot on the road, / And the street’s in Noo / Awlins, Loo- / Eez-ee-anna. Where I, for my component, first ate a live oyster and first saw a naked girl with the lighting on . . Each time I go to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. within this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has treasured almost about Foot on the road: Rambles Around New Orleans his entire life-a city “like no various other place in the us, yet (or as a result) the cradle of American lifestyle.” Here we experience everything through his eyes, ears, and taste buds: the structures, music, love (yes, sex as well), historical heroes, and all that glorious food.

The book is split into eight Rambles through different parts of the town. Each closes with lagniappe-a tiny bit extra, a special deal with for the audience: here a short riff on Gennifer Bouquets, there a deep breathing on naked dance. Roy Blount knows New Orleans just like the inside of an oyster shell and is too glad to consider us to both the famous as well as the infamous sights. He captures all of the amazing and wealthy history-culinary, literary, and political-of a city that figured prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who passed away there), Truman Capote (who was simply conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who researched voodoo there), and countless others, including Andrew Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Move Morton, Napoléon, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Edgar Degas, Lillian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, as well as the Dixie Cups.

Above all, though, Feet on the road is a special event of friendship and joie de vivre in one of America’s greatest and most colorful cities, written by among America’s most beloved humorists.

Also available being a Random House AudioBook