JAY – Steamboat Willie, a New Orleans jazz musician who performed two years ago at University of Maine at Farmington to help raise money for displaced musicians, received keys to a new home Wednesday on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, his daughter, Rebecca Yarborough said.

Steamboat Willie escaped his apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans with two days’ worth of clothes just before Katrina struck the city two years ago.

He fled to another section of Louisiana and slept with 300 others on pews and floors of a church before leaving the state.

Steamboat, who has family in Maine, including his mother in Augusta and daughter, Rebecca, in Jay, worked building houses for others with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity on his days off, Yarborough said.

Habitat called him and told him they were giving him one of the houses for all of his volunteer work, she said.

“I was actually talking on the phone with him when the phone call came in,” Yarborough said.

He clicked out to see who it was and when he came back to talk to her he was “bawling his eyes out,” Yarborough said.

Her father, a trumpet player and leader of a band, was displaced from his apartment. Instead of viewing himself as homeless, he went on tour to raise money for the American Red Cross and the displaced musicians fund, Yarborough said.

He was surprised, she said, when he was told he was getting the three-bedroom house in the Upper Ninth Ward.