The Story of Chickie Wah Wah

Some venues are built to make money. Some are built to fill a gap in the market. Chickie Wah Wah was built because one man — a Brooklyn cab driver who had moved to New Orleans and fallen in love with its music — believed the city deserved a room where people would actually listen.

The Name

In 1956, Bobby Marchan and Huey “Piano” Smith walked into Ace Records and cut a track called “Chickie Wah Wah.” It was loose, joyful, and unmistakably New Orleans — a rolling piano line, a honking horn section, and a call-and-response vocal that felt like it had been born in the streets of the Ninth Ward.

Bobby Marchan went on to become one of the most influential figures in New Orleans R&B. His “There Is Something on Your Mind” reached number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1960. He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. When Dale Triguero named his new venue “Chickie Wah Wah,” he was doing more than picking a catchy name. He was making a statement about what the room was for: the living tradition of New Orleans music, passed from generation to generation, still rolling.

The Builder: Dale Triguero (1953–2021)

Dale Triguero was born in Brooklyn in 1953. He drove a cab. He bartended. Somewhere along the way he made it to New Orleans, took a job at a bar in Tremé, and never left.

New Orleans has a way of doing that.

Triguero wasn’t a music industry guy. He wasn’t a developer or a nightlife entrepreneur. He was someone who loved music — specifically the kind of music that gets played in small rooms for people who are paying attention. He saw a gap: New Orleans had plenty of venues where music was background noise, and a handful of legendary rooms where the music was everything. He wanted to add one more to the second category.

Dale Triguero died on July 8, 2021. He was 67. The venue he built outlived him — and the community made sure it would stay that way.

Born from Katrina

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans. The flooding that followed gutted Mid-City. The space at 2828 Canal Street was no exception.

While many property owners walked away from flood-damaged buildings, Triguero saw something in the bones of the place. He rebuilt it. It took time, labor, and the kind of stubborn optimism that only works in New Orleans. Chickie Wah Wah opened in 2006, while much of the city was still in recovery. It was, in a very real sense, a statement of faith in the neighborhood and the city.

A Music Church

“It’s like a music church in there,” Meschiya Lake once said about Chickie Wah Wah. “People come to actually hear the music. That’s rare.”

Jon Cleary has held a long-running residency at the venue — returning again and again to the intimate room where his piano playing and New Orleans-rooted sound hit hardest. The room’s acoustics and scale make it the kind of place where you feel the music in your chest.

The stories accumulate. The one people still talk about: the night Tom Jones showed up unannounced. Not as a headliner, not on the calendar — just Tom Jones, walking into Chickie Wah Wah on Canal Street because someone told him it was where the real music happened. He stayed all night.

The Community Saves It

After Triguero’s death in July 2021, the future of Chickie Wah Wah was an open question. The New Orleans music community didn’t wait for someone else to answer it.

Twenty local owners came together and purchased the venue for $910,000 — not as an investment, but as a preservation act. The ownership collective was structured to ensure the venue’s original character would remain intact: a room where the cover charge goes to the musicians, the calendar is driven by the music, and the intimacy is non-negotiable.

“This venue belongs to the city now,” said Patrick Templeman, one of the collective’s members, at the time of the purchase. “That’s how Dale would have wanted it.”

Today

Chickie Wah Wah hosts more than 300 shows per year in its 200-person room at 2828 Canal Street. The Canal Street streetcar stops directly out front. The cover charge — typically $8 to $25 — goes to the musicians on stage.

The venue is owned and operated by its community of 20 owners. It books everything from deep blues and New Orleans jazz to Americana, country, funk, and folk. Local legends play here regularly. National touring artists make it a consistent stop. The programming is driven by one question: is this music worth sitting still for?

The streetcar still stops out front. The music still starts at 8. Dale Triguero built a room worth keeping. The city agreed.