Dominic Massa / Eyewitness News
NEW ORLEANS – Yvonne “Dixie” Fasnacht, the French Quarter club owner and musician whose legendary Bourbon St. bar welcomed customers and celebrities from all walks of life, died Sunday. She was 101.
Dixie’s Bar of Music, at Bourbon and St. Peter, was one of the first openly gay bars in the country, known as much for its class as for its clientele, which included straight and gay customers and celebrities.
Famous patrons over the years included Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Rock Hudson, Danny Kaye and Gore Vidal, according to a profile this past April in Preservation in Print, the newspaper of the Preservation Resource Center.
Fasnacht, known to all as "Miss Dixie," was remembered as a no-nonsense saloon keeper, one who looked out for her customers at a time of frequent police raids and less accepting social attitudes.
“'Dixie's was the kind of place where Uptown and downtown, straight and gay, celebrities and regular folks rubbed shoulders,'" writer David Cuthbert quoted one customer as saying in a 1996 Times-Picayune profile. "Everybody who was anybody ended up at Dixie's," said another, "it was famous all over the world."
Miss Fasnacht's bar originally opened near the now-defunct St. Charles Hotel downtown, but became much better known for its Bourbon St. location, open from 1949 until 1964.
According to Cuthbert, F. Edward Hebert helped put the first Dixie's on the map, writing about it in the New Orleans States before he ran for Congress. The literary and entertainment clientele helped give Dixie’s its reputation as a “see and be seen” spot.
The club’s 35-foot mural, featuring caricatures of 66 entertainment luminaries, is now displayed on the third floor of the old U.S. Mint on Esplanade Avenue, part of the Louisiana State Museum. The mural carries autographs of many of the famous visitors to the bar - Helen Hayes, Johnnie Ray, Hermione Gingold and Connee Boswell (one of the Boswell sisters, the famed singing group whose members Dixie knew as a high school student in New Orleans). The mural has been in storage at the Old U.S. Mint since Hurricane Katrina, but there are plans to include it in a new exhibition on New Orleans music, scheduled to open in 2013, according to museum officials.
The club's Mardi Gras celebrations also became legendary. No coincidence, perhaps, since Miss Fasnacht's family name in Swiss-German means “Carnival.”
Miss Fasnacht was also an accomplished jazz musician, who, at the urging of her older sister Irma, learned clarinet and saxophone while a student at Francis T. Nicholls trade school. Dixie joined several all-female bands, including the Smart Set and the Southland Rhythm Girls, traveling the country with their brand of Dixieland jazz and even appearing in a Universal Pictures film short.
Once she returned home to work on Bourbon, Miss Fasnacht and her sister lived above their bar for many years and Dixie remained a well-known resident of Bourbon St. until only recently.
She is survived by three grandnephews and grandnieces, as well as a great-grandnephew.
A funeral Mass will be celebrated Wednesday at 11 a.m. at Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home, 5100 Pontchartrain Blvd. Visitation will be from 9 a.m. until 11 a.m.
