Black Music & Performance in New Orleans

Adapted from Tulane University ADST 3550

This course provides an historically situated introduction to African American music and performance traditions in New Orleans. The course opens with an exploration of the historical currents and racial economies that contributed to the making of New Orleans as a particularly Caribbean-esk site of early colonial North America. The course then considers the ways culture, race, and plays of social power gave rise to early “creolized” forms of cultural practice and artistic expression, foundational to the fashioning of black New Orleanian music and performance traditions. The syllabus then follows this conversation chronologically through a thematic exploration of various African American performance genres and spaces from Congo Square, to jazz, to brass bands and second-lines, to Mardi Gras Indians, through today’s hip hop and bounce musics. Additional attention will be given to the social impacts of tourism and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on black performance traditions, questions of citizenship, and related economies of consumption.

  • Marc D. Perry

    Marc D. Perry

    Sociocultural Anthropologist

    Dr. Marc D. Perry is a sociocultural anthropologist with a research specialization in race and racialization in the African Diaspora with a regional emphasis in Latin America and the Caribbean. His research and teaching interests include: black transnationalisms; comparative racial formations; Afro-Latino migrations; African American cultural history; and black musics and performative culture. He is currently completing a book project examining race and social transformation in late socialist Cuba through the ethnographic lens of Cuban hip hop, and is in the early stages of research exploring the changing socio-racial landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Course Chapters

  • 1 Early Colonial Formation, Cultural…

    Early Colonial Formation, Cultural Transformations and Creolization

    About This Chapter:

    Founded in 1718 as a French colonial trading post on the Mississippi roughly 100 miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico,…

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    Chapter 1 Early Colonial Formation, Cultural Transformations and Creolization

    Founded in 1718 as a French colonial trading post on the Mississippi roughly 100 miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans owes much of its history to its colonial relationship as a regional trading hub with the broader circum-Caribbean. Through successive French, Spanish, and ultimately U.S. control through the mid-nineteenth century, New Orleans evolved as an urban center of the Mississippi river plantation system founded on racialized slavery. Imported waves of enslaved Africans from the Senegambian and Congo regions of West and Central Africa as well an influx of French-speaking Haitians along with French, Spanish, and early Native American populations gave birth to a complex cosmopolitan city that, in contrast to the bi-polar black/white system of the Anglo-U.S., developed a three-tier racial system comprised of free whites, enslaved blacks and an intermediary class of free people of color, many of whom were racially-mixed creoles. These cross-currents contributed to a vibrancy of cultural mixing and transformation in which enslaved blacks and free people of color, compelled to accommodate impositions of European culture, created hybrid or creolized forms of expression through fusions of African and European cultural elements.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Ned Sublette (2009) The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. Lawrence Hill Books.
    • Lawrence Powell (2012) The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Harvard University Press.
    • Robert Baron and Ana Cara (2011) “Introduction” in Creolization as Cultural Creativity, Robert Baron and Ana Cara, eds. University Press of Mississippi. Pp. 3-19.
    • Early Colonial Formation, Cultural Transformations and Creolization: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans
    Charles "Buddy" Bolden
    Charles “Buddy” Bolden

    By Ben Sandmel

    The first documented practitioner of the music now known as New Orleans jazz was cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden (1877-1931). Legend has it that Bolden’s playing could be heard for miles around town when he would “call [his] children home.” Such anecdotes, combined with a relative dearth of solid information, combined to make Bolden a mythic figure. His musical innovations and tragic life story have inspired fictional works including David Fulmer’s Chasing The… read more

  • 2 From Congo Square to…

    From Congo Square to Early Jazz

    About This Chapter:

    It was in the “back of town” peripheries of the original walled city of colonial New Orleans (known today as the…

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    Chapter 2 From Congo Square to Early Jazz

    It was in the “back of town” peripheries of the original walled city of colonial New Orleans (known today as the French Quarter or Vieux Carré) that enslaved blacks and smaller numbers of free people of color gathered socially on Sundays, the one day the French colonial Code Noir (Black Code laws) officially prohibited the compulsion of slave labor. The most famed of these spaces became known as Congo Square, an open plain just north of the city’s ramparts where gatherings revolved around African-derived music and dance forms such as the calinda and the bamboula. These communions were ultimately tied to celebrations of freedom in which enslaved people could momentarily reclaim their bodies for pleasure rather than objects forced labor. In this sense, Congo Square served as a weekly space of psychic healing and affirmation of black humanity in the face of the dehumanizing violence of enslavement. Despite its forced closure in the mid-nineteenth century, linkages between music, pleasure, and embodied understandings of freedom remain deeply rooted and ongoing facets of New Orleans’ African American experience and collective memory.

    In conversation with this early music history, interplays of African, European, and Caribbean cultural currents in early twentieth century New Orleans gave rise to a new innovative music style known today as jazz. Drawing on musical antecedents like Ragtime, the Blues, military marching bands, and traditions of Black Church music, and emerging through artistic exchange between black, creole, and “ethnic” white musicians in peripheral mixed-raced spaces like New Orleans’s famed Storyville neighborhood, artists like Buddy Bolden, Jellyroll Morton, and King Oliver fashion a music style grounded in the improvisational polyphonic play of European instruments infused with a percussive rhythmic “swing.”

    Suggested Readings:

    • Jerah Johnson (1991) – “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early African-American Culture Formation” Louisiana History 32/2 (Spring 1991): 117-157.
    • Court Carney – (2006) “New Orleans and the Creation of Early Jazz” Popular Music and Society 29 (3) (July 2006): 299-315.
    • Christopher Washburne (1997) – “The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of African-American Music” Black Music Research Journal 17(1) (Spring 1997): 59-80.
    • King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band
    • African/Caribbean Based Social and Vernacular Dance Forms 6
    • Bamboula Drum, Photo: Latrobe
    • Charles "Buddy" Bolden
    Trumpet

    A trumpet is a musical instrument. It is the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BC. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a “buzzing” sound that starts a standing wave vibration in the air column inside the instrument. Since the late 15th century they have primarily been constructed of brass tubing, usually bent twice into a rounded oblong… read more

    Dixieland
    Trombone

    The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips (embouchure) cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Nearly all trombones have a telescoping slide mechanism that varies the length of the instrument to change the pitch. Special variants like the valve trombone and superbone have three valves like those on the trumpet.

    The word trombone derives from Italian tromba (trumpet)… read more

    Piano

    The piano is a musical instrument played using a keyboard. It is widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment and for composing and rehearsal. Although the piano is not portable and often expensive, its versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the world’s most familiar musical instruments.

    The piano usually has a protective wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings. The metal strings are… read more

    Paul Barbarin 1
    Drums

    The traditional drum kit consists of a mix of drums (classified as membranophones, Hornbostel-Sachs high-level classification 2) and idiophones (Hornbostel-Sachs high-level classification 1, most significantly cymbals but also including the woodblock and cowbell for example). More recently kits have also included electronic instruments (Hornbostel-Sachs classification 53), with both hybrid and entirely electronic kits now in common use.

    * A standard modern kit (for a right-handed player), as used in popular music and taught in many… read more

    Cornet

    The cornet is a brass instrument very similar to the trumpet, distinguished by its conical bore, compact shape, and mellower tone quality. The most common cornet is a transposing instrument in B♭. It is not related to the renaissance and early baroque cornett.

    Source: Wikipedia

    read more
    Clarinet

    The clarinet is a type of woodwind instrument that has a single-reed mouthpiece, a straight cylindrical tube with an approximately cylindrical bore, and a flaring bell. A person who plays the clarinet is called a clarinetist or clarinettist.

    The word clarinet may have entered the English language via the French clarinette (the feminine diminutive of Old French clarin or clarion), or from Provençal clarin, “oboe.” It “is plainly a diminutive of clarino, the Italian for… read more

    Bass Guitar

    The bass guitar (also called electric bass, or simply bass) is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, by plucking, slapping, popping, tapping, thumping, or picking with a plectrum.

    The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length, and four to six strings or courses. The four-string bass — by far the most common — is usually tuned the same… read more

  • 3 Musical Apostles: Louis Armstrong,…

    Musical Apostles:  Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, and Fats Domino

    About This Chapter:

    Among the many celebrated prodigies of New Orleans’ music traditions, probably the single most influential innovator and global emissary of its…

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    Chapter 3 Musical Apostles: Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, and Fats Domino

    Among the many celebrated prodigies of New Orleans’ music traditions, probably the single most influential innovator and global emissary of its jazz linage was Louis Armstrong. From his Storyville childhood, to his early work and travels with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, to his rise as an international pop icon, Armstrong’s pioneering virtuosity as a soloist was foundational to the development of improvisation techniques so central to modern jazz. Rooted in the musical vibrancy New Orleans’ Black Church traditions, Mahalia Jackson similarly played a prominent role in the development of modern gospel music as the internationally acclaimed Queen of Gospel, while committing her talents as a commanding voice during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Drawing on New Orleans’ eclectic musical landscape including the Blues, boogie-woogie stride, and rhythmic resonances from the Caribbean, pianist Roy “Professor Longhair” Byrd was an instrumental and wide-ranging innovator of New Orleans’ rhythm-and-blues music. Native and longtime resident of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, pianist Fats Domino similarly drew from New Orleans’ deep musical currents as one of the foundational figures in the development American rock-and-roll in the 1950s.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Gary Giddins (2001) – Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. Da Capo Press.
    • Johari Jabir (2009) – “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing” American Quarterly 61(3): 649-669.
    • Jason Berry et al (2009) – “Professor Longhair” and “Fats Domino,” in Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II. University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.
    • Musical Apostles: Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, and Fats Domino: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans
    Louis Armstrong "Satchmo" 4
    Louis Armstrong “Satchmo”

    Trumpeter, cornetist and singer Louis Armstrong is often erroneously regarded as the sole inventor of jazz. This honorific is intrinsically impossible, because the evolution of any musical genre is a complex and gradual socio-cultural process. It is quite appropriate, however, to state that Armstrong made vital, indispensable contributions to the emergence of jazz, in New Orleans, which was one of such music’s prime points of origin. (It is similarly erroneous — although equally prevalent —… read more

    Henry "Professor Longhair" Roeland Byrd
    Henry “Professor Longhair” Roeland Byrd

    Henry Roeland Byrd (December 19, 1918-January 30, 1980), known professionally as Professor Longhair – and in New Orleans street-lore simply as Fess – was an R&B pianist whose style drew heavily on Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Byrd’s career started in the late 1940s, and from then through the early ‘60s he recorded several of the city’s perennially favorite celebratory anthems, including “Tipitina,” “Big Chief,” and “Mardi Gras In New Orleans.”

    Byrd first performed in public as a… read more

    Fats Domino
    Fats Domino

    If Mount Rushmore ever adds on a “Founding Fathers of Rock Music,” section, look for New Orleans pianist and singer Fats Domino to be prominently featured. Domino has profoundly influenced the popular music of the past 60 years, ever since his first hit, “The Fat Man,” scaled the national R&B charts in 1950. Domino differed distinctly from his seminal rock colleagues – including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis in one important sense.… read more

    Mahalia Jackson

    Mahalia Jackson (October 26, 1911 – January 27, 1972) is renowned as one of the most powerful singers in African-American gospel music. Extremely popular and influential, Jackson was a pioneer in performing gospel on the national stage, where it was heard far beyond its African-American community of origin. Jackson has profoundly affected generations of sacred and secular singers alike, Aretha Franklin being one notable example.

    Jackson grew up in New Orleans’ Carrollton neighborhood, and was… read more

  • 4 Brass Bands, Jazz Funerals,…

    Brass Bands, Jazz Funerals, and Second Lines

    About This Chapter:

    New Orleans’ brass band lineage can be traced to parading traditions of eighteenth century military marching bands, including those organized by…

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    Chapter 4 Brass Bands, Jazz Funerals, and Second Lines

    New Orleans’ brass band lineage can be traced to parading traditions of eighteenth century military marching bands, including those organized by free black militias, during French colonial period. Through histories of cultural synthesis involving European instrumentation and composition fused with African and Caribbean-derived polyrhythmic cadence and parading traditions, New Orleans’ brass bands have evolved as a dynamic component of black public life in New Orleans. One important expression is linked to black Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs; African American benevolent organizations dating back to the late ninetieth century whose annual second line parades are organized around the music of hired brass bands and move through the streets of black working-class neighborhoods. Another related tradition are jazz funerals in which brass bands lead public funeral processions for prominent community figures through neighborhood streets. In the case of both second lines and jazz funerals, brass band music helps fashion mobile community in often healing, body-centered celebration of black life and transcendent freedom.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Michael White (2001) – “The New Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural Tradition,” in The Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of African American Music. Ferdinand Jones and Arthur Jones, eds. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
    • Matt Sakakeeny (2010) – “”Under the Bridge”: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans,” Ethnomusicology 54(1) (2010): 1-27.
    • Helen Regis (2001) – “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 757. 29
    • Brass Band Second Line: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans
  • 5 Black Mardi Gras: Zulu…

    Black Mardi Gras: Zulu and the Mardi Gras Indians

    About This Chapter:

    New Orleans’ annual Carnival festival known popularly as Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), emerged in many ways from the post-Civil War period…

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    Chapter 5 Black Mardi Gras: Zulu and the Mardi Gras Indians

    New Orleans’ annual Carnival festival known popularly as Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), emerged in many ways from the post-Civil War period as a ritualized performance of the city’s local hierarchies of power and place. Organized historically around secretive “krewes” of wealthy white men who, in addition to coordinating lavish private balls of the city’s social elite, parade masked on elevated floats through more affluent thoroughfares, Mardi Gras evolved as a spectacular projection of New Orleans’ social lines of racial, class, and gendered privilege. Founded in 1916 as the first African American Carnival krewe, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club represented one of the earliest challenges to Mardi Gras’ racial exclusivity. Yet in a complex play on dominant racial typecast, Zulu members traditionally parade in a minstrel-like blackface attire. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian tradition stands as a more explicit historical rejection of Carnival’s social ordering. Rooted in groups of working-class African American men, Indian “gangs” or “tribes” emerge on Mardi Gras day in elaborate beaded, sequined, and feathered suites crafted over a year or more as embodied homage to histories of collaborative resistance and freedom shared between blacks and Native Americans dating back to enslavement. Apart from the institutionalized and highly regulated parading of mainstream of Mardi Gras, Indian gangs run in the marginal “back-a-town” streets of black working-class New Orleans involving symbolic battles through artistic virtuosity, verbal play, music, and dance. Similar to the gendered lines of the original Carnival krewes, both Zulu and Mardi Gras Indians remain largely male-centered communities.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Ned Sublette (2009) – “King Kong” in The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. Lawrence Hill Books. Pp. 253-256.
    • Felipe Smith (1999) – “King Zulu’s Two Bodies: Racial Masquerade in a Black New Orleans Carnival Performance,” in Caribbean 2000: A Gathering of Poets and Players: Voice and Performance in Caribbean Culture(s). Lowell Fiet and Janette Becerra, eds. San Juan, Puerto Rico: University of Puerto Rico. Pp. 127-152.
    • Rachel Breunlin and Ronald Lewis (2009) – “Mardi Gras Indians” in The House of Dance and Feathers. UNO Press/Neighborhood Story Project. Pp. 62-123.
    • Zulu: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans
  • 6 Katrina's Impacts

    Katrina's Impacts

    About This Chapter:

    While officially classified as a nature disaster, the induced social trauma and devastation wake of hurricane Katrina in the 2005 had…

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    Chapter 6 Katrina's Impacts

    While officially classified as a nature disaster, the induced social trauma and devastation wake of hurricane Katrina in the 2005 had particularly profound impacts on New Orleans’ communities of poor and working-class African Americans. The accelerated dismantling of social services and resources in realms of public housing, healthcare, transportation, and education and ensuing urban gentrification worked to displace and further marginalize black New Orleanians while contributing to the making of a whiter and wealthier post-Katina New Orleans. African Americans continue, however, to recover, heal, and reconstitute community through vernacular cultural practices such as second line parades and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Joel Dinerstein (2009) – “Second Lining Post-Katrina: Learning Community from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club,” American Quarterly 61(3): 615-637.
    • Cherice Harrison-Nelson and Clyde Woods (2009) – “Upholding Community Traditions,” American Quarterly 61(3)
    • Richard Campanella (2013) – Gentrification and its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans,” New Geography.com.
    • Post-Katrina Flood Waters: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans
  • 7 New Orleans Hip Hop…

    New Orleans Hip Hop and Bounce

    About This Chapter:

    Taking distinctive shape in the early 1990s, New Orleans’ local hip hop landscape emerged in important part from the cultural intimacies…

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    Chapter 7 New Orleans Hip Hop and Bounce

    Taking distinctive shape in the early 1990s, New Orleans’ local hip hop landscape emerged in important part from the cultural intimacies of the city’s patchwork of public housing projects like the Melpomene, Magnolia, Callipoe, and St. Thomas houses. Independent record labels such as Cash Money and No Limit, and local producers like Mannie Fresh and Beats By the Pound were instrumental developing artists like Soulja Slim, Magnolia Slim, Juvenile, Mystikal, Lil Wayne, and Mia X among who pioneered New Orleans’ local hip hop sound. During this period there was a significant amount of cross-fertilization with the rise of bounce music in which artists like DJ Jubilee and local label, Take Fo’ Records played foundational roles. Moving away from the “gansta-soldier” persona and swagger central to much New Orleans’ hip hop, bounce celebrated the party along with body-centered pleasure and sexuality. With the rise of queer and transgendered artists like Katey Red, Sissy Nobby, and Big Freedia, however, bounce took a turn towards non-normative expressions of black gender and sexuality and embodied critique. While the policy driven aftermath of Katrina shuttered the last of New Orleans’ public housing projects and, with it, the cultural roots of much of local hip hop and bounce, so-called sissy bounce has enjoyed a commercial ascendance thanks in large part to a national market receptive to its spectacular performance non-normative blackness.

    Suggested Readings:

    • Matt Miller (2012) – Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans. Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
    • Jonathan Dee (2010) – “New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap” New York Times 7/22/2010.
    • Alison Fensterstock (2010) – “Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans,” Norient 8/19/2010.
    • Bounce: Black Music & Performance in New Orleans