“She was on one side of the altar and I was on the other side, and I seen this big old thing and I said, ‘Aha, I want to find out what this is,’ ” he said. “And I turned the little switch and hit one of the low keys. It scared the daylights out of me, but that was the first keyboard I played.”

For him and his brothers, music was always part of the story.

“Ever since we were kids we were doing this,” he said. “Anything we’d get around we’d beat on and we’d sing.”

Mr. Neville was just a teenager when he joined the Hawketts. He sang lead on the group’s version of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” which had recently been recorded by the singer Jody Leviens, and a local disc jockey persuaded the group to record the song themselves. By 1955 it was charting locally; it went on to become a staple of Mardi Gras season in New Orleans.

“He started his solo career out cutting insane rockin’ R&B songs like ‘Cha Dooky-Doo,’ ‘Oooh-Whee Baby,’ ‘Zing Zing’ and ‘What’s Going On,’ ” Ira Padnos, a historian of the region’s music and founder of the festival the Ponderosa Stomp, said by email.

Mr. Neville spent several years in the Navy in the late 1950s. In the early ′60s he began working with the prolific musician, songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint, made soul records like “All These Things” (1962) and formed a six-piece group, the Neville Sounds, which in 1968 morphed into the Meters. Dave Thompson, in his book “Funk” (2001), called the Meters “the ultimate New Orleans funk combo.”