New Orleans Music: a Reappraisal

University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO Midlo Center Publications Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies 1997 New Orleans Music: A Reappraisal Connie Zeanah Atkinson University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/midlo_pub Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Atkinson, Connie Zeanah, "New Orleans Music: A Reappraisal" (1997). Midlo Center Publications. Paper 3. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/midlo_pub/3 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Midlo Center Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. New Orleans Music: A Reappraisal By Connie Zeanah Atkinson PhD Dissertation University of Liverpool, 1997 Institute of Popular Music Liverpool, UK 1 Introduction ‘I’m not sure, but I’m almost positive, that all music came from New Orleans.’ -- Ernie K-Doe, 1979 New Orleans – for many people the very name means music. Arguably one of the most recognised music cities in the world (Cohen and Atkinson, forthcoming), this place variously called the ‘Land of Dreams,’ the ‘Big Easy,’ ‘The City that Care Forgot’ has been the source of much comment and speculation by music scholars, and is often cited in popular music research -- as the origin of musical styles, such as jazz; as a contributor to the early days of rhythm and blues and rock and roll; as the inspiration for musicians as diverse as Louis Gottschalk, Antoine Domino, and Sidney Bechet. Meanwhile, there has been a dearth of study of the community behind the musicmaking, and of the social, cultural and economic context in which the city’s expressive practices sit. It is a primary aim of this study to test the hypothesis that the contemporary city has much to say to popular music research that has not been said, and could be the site of exciting and innovative work by contemporary scholars. In ignoring the contemporary city, in looking at it merely as an aberration in the wider research on African-American music, popular music scholarship is repeating the mistakes of a half century ago, when theorising on New Orleans music was passed over, for political and social reasons, thus leaving a void in the understanding of US- American culture, and the city's contribution to it, that still exists. The result has been that much of the discourse associated with this predominantly African- 2 American city has it shrouded in myth and romanticised notions. In addition, the penchant of popular music studies to disregard issues of ethnicity and class within African-American communities, as well as to reify recorded music at the expense of live performance, are factors that have led popular music discourse to banish to the cultural fringes the musical activities of contemporary New Orleans. At the same time, literature on the ‘globalisation’ of music1 that has considered the pressures of international music industries on small countries, has not often dealt with the peculiar problems faced by a local community reacting under these same pressures without a national government working to protect its interests. This study proceeds on the principle that through looking at music and musical activities in this locality (as opposed to structures, texts, and products), asking such questions as how New Orleans came to be a centre of innovative musical styles, how the city is represented and used by music historians, by the popular press, by the music industry and by the city itself for economic development and place marketing, and the manner by which tradition and cultural forms of expression are documented and passed down within the community, not only could much be learned about music’s role in producing society, but also wider patterns of social fragmentation and reassembly may be revealed which may help to explain how this community has embraced change, duality and contradiction, promoting a versatility that perhaps has contributed to the survival and durability of their complex cultural activities in an urban setting. It is argued that here in New Orleans, as elsewhere, any attempt to create generalities about musical expression of a people must take into account manifestations of historical and cultural differences within particular places. Through looking at music, it is possible to elaborate the intricate interplay of ethnicity and class relations in New Orleans. In addition, focusing upon New Orleans musicians, rather than ‘structures, texts or products,’ may contribute to a further understanding of the multiplicity of practices 1 See, for instance, Wallis & Malm (1984). 3 used by African-Americans to cope in a racially biased nation, and may shed some light on how processes of innovation have taken place in the Americas. This work builds on the excellent research done recently by University of New Orleans historians and urban studies scholars, particularly Jerah Johnson, Joseph Logsdon and Arnold Hirsch. In revising and broadening the scope of New Orleans within the discipline of urban studies, they have helped to remove from mystification the complex cultural practices of the city and to explain them in the context of the city’s continued dominant Franco-African culture and its lingering resistance to Anglo-American domination, factors that affected the evolution of the city in the past and continue to affect the contemporary city. These reappraisals of the city’s past have resulted in a more solid historical foundation for researchers working in the area of Louisiana cultural histories, including popular music research, or for those who have hitherto avoided New Orleans because of the dearth of useable text, and my work has benefited from their contribution. Henry Louis Gates has said that a literary tradition holds within it a way to study itself (1988). His work in African-American literary criticism inspired me to search for a way to look at the music of New Orleans through a model drawn from the cultural practices of the community itself; one which would allow the people of New Orleans, particularly the musicians, to tell their own story within an academic framework. I have also drawn from Deborah Cameron’s work on the social distribution of knowledge.2 Cameron suggests that knowledge about a group is often collected by people from outside the group, who usually share the knowledge with each other but not with the group being researched, and as a result, the ideas and arguments produced by these researchers never get back to the community (1992, p. 113-130), remaining a discourse of experts talking to other experts. Cameron suggests that most of the time this ‘expert talk’ may be of little interest outside the academic world, but she adds that some expert information may be of great interest and use 4 to the people researched. In those cases, a flow of knowledge from the researched to the researchers and back could be seen as important. The effect of this ‘non- circulation’ of knowledge is to marginalise the community’s knowledge while denying it other knowledge that might be interesting and useful. The research strategy that I chose, therefore, was one which placed great importance on listening to what people say, on valuing their opinions as ‘experts’ on their own community, and on a commitment to local ownership of research, emphasising the redistribution of knowledge so that the community could speak to a wider audience. It laid an emphasis on oral histories, participant observation, and ethnography. The results revealed the extent to which music is at the centre of debates on power, ownership, creativity, and economic regeneration in the city of New Orleans. In addition, the information that I have collected has been discussed intimately with the people that I have interviewed, and the community was consulted in many ways on the theoretical and historical research that I have drawn from academic work. In my search for a way to allow the people to speak, however, I consistently came up against the contrast between the community described in existing historical texts and the community that I was studying. Here I drew from a rising development in anthropology, that of ‘historical ethnography,’ whose aim as stated by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is to ‘synthesise the field experience of a community with an investigation of its archival past’ (1993, p. 1).3 Sahlins argues that an ethnography with ‘time and transformation built into it’ is a distinct way of knowing the research object; for him, it served as a theoretical justification for looking again at some areas, such as North America, that he felt had been ignored by anthropologists since the 1930s and 1940s. This approach was useful in my research because it was necessary, I believe, to listen also to the voices of those New 2 Particularly the idea of empowering knowledge, defined in Cameron, et al. (1992, p. 11) as that research ‘on, for, and with,’ rather than merely research ‘on’ a group or community. 3 See Cohn (1993) Comaroff (1991), Turner (1991) and others on the development of historical ethnography in anthropology. 5 Orleanians of the past who had come together from so many disparate cultures to forge a new way to live in this geographical place, and whose resultant way of life was the legacy to the New Orleans of today. This necessitated a search for scholars who had listened for those voices, often speaking in French or Spanish, Bambara or Choctaw, often buried in ancient archives in distance places, voices that have been ignored in the agenda of creating a homogeneous history of the development of the United States. In a city where the ancestors are an important part of the mythology and spirit of the present, this attempt at ‘historical ethnography’ seems only fitting.

Load more