Black Music & Performance in New Orleans

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.