Black Music in New Orleans: A Historical Overview

Abstract

Long before more prominent metropolitan centers of today (e.g., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) could claim distinction, New Orleans qualified as nation's music capital. Historian Henry A. Kmen's Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791-1841, published by Louisiana State University Press in 1966, tells story of America's first music In his preface, Kmen makes reference to Crescent City as a cultural center, one which in its own way, rivaled fabled 'flowering of New England.' As Professor Kmen intimates, nineteenth-century New Orleans possessed a rich and varied musical product ranging from philharmonic to popular sensibility and including both sacred and secular involvement. The growth of vernacular idioms is, however, most characteristic of musical development indigenous to New Orleans in its history. Based upon an acculturative process quite probably at work already in colonial period, band music and dance music have especially defined sound of New Orleans, contemporaneously as well as historically. A plurality of ethnic influences has blended in a pattern of shared traditions forged within context of common urban folk experience. Preeminent in this melange of ethnic influences, a seminally important chapter in black music history took shape in Crescent City. Kmen (1966, viii) states that nineteenth-century New Orleans gave residence to the largest Negro population, both slave and free, of any American city. Accordingly, it served as site of some of earliest and most extensive Afro-American music development of any urban community in nation. Black musical activity in New Orleans dates back to at least last decade of eighteenth century. In keeping with cultural character of community, and consistent with an overriding motif of black musical heritage, it began primarily in connection with dance activity. Moreover, it had strong association with growth of a pervasive street and saloon ambiance.

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