Red Beans and Ricely Yours

Guess where Mona Lisa Saloy got her title, Red Beans and Ricely Yours? Music lovers have a leg up in this one.

Mona Lisa Saloy did not make it up herself, although her selection of title for her book New Orleans-based poetry enriches her reader's experience.

Red Beans and Ricely Yours is, in fact, how Jazz Trumpeter and New Orleans native Louis Armstrong signed his letters.

Armstrong's early years in a poor and dangerous section of New Orleans serves as a kind of prehistory to Saloy's poems about the city in mid- to late-20th century.

Although not blood kin, Armstrong serves as yet another of the ancestors who floats, omipresent, behind the action in Saloy's verse.