...from N O Cover,
Volume 1, Number 5


"How long have I been playing? Oh, about an hour. No, I've been playing, I don't know exactly. I started as a kid. I'm from New Orleans, where else with a name like Hébert? There's about 6 pages of us in the phone book."

"The music's always been inside of me. I have been interested since I was about 3. There was this old acoustic piano in the house I used to bang on. My Dad threw it away before I got old enough to play...it was taking up too much space. My daddy used to play kind of honky-tonk piano. I sang in the choir when I was 5 or 6 years old - St. Anthony's on Canal Street, but we called it St. Ant'ony's."

"I saw a guitar in a hock shop and said, that's it. This is for me. But I was into it all the way right from the beginning. There was this cheap guitar, we got about a $20 guitar for my birthday. I always get something musical for my birthday - so I had this $20 guitar and I was just into it. I used to sit on my front porch and play it until my fingers bled. That's all there was once it got put in my hands. My mother would curse the day we got that guitar."

"Playing on my porch was playing in public. Everybody would come by and watch. The first thing I was influenced by was Chet Atkins. He's the guy that played this kind of stuff. So I would play a little Chet Atkins and all the people would gather around and I had my first audience. I liked to trip people out with it. Learning those types of things, I went from Atkins to people like Jose Feliciano and most people who are dead now."