First Blog Post

            I took world history in my sophomore year of high school. My teacher was a young African-American woman from New Orleans who had just returned from several years serving in the Air Force, and she ran the class with a rigidity and formality that reflected the time she spent in service.

            One day, during what must have been a particularly exasperating lesson, she stopped speaking and gave the class a hard stare. “America is not a ‘melting pot’,” she said, “like the history textbooks are so eager to point out. The phrase ‘melting pot’ implies that all the ingredients have melded into a uniform substance, or identity. This is not the case.” She stared out the window for a few seconds. “You still look at someone and see white, black, Asian, Latino. America, in this sense, is not a melting pot. If America were a culinary dish, I’d say that it resembles a mixed salad. All the ingredients are there, next to each other and very much part of the same dish, but you can still pick out the carrots and the lettuce and the tomatoes. That’s the reality.”

            American history is rooted in questions of ethnicity and racial identity, and New Orleans figures prominently in that discussion. Today, metropolises such as Los Angeles and New York seem like the cultural hubs of the United States, while New Orleans remains largely a novelty figure, a relic of the past. In the 1800s, however, New Orleans was a cosmopolitan city that played a large cultural and economic role for the United States. After changing hands numerous times between Spanish and French rule, Napoleon eventually sold the port city of New Orleans as part of the huge mass of land that was the Louisiana Purchase (1803). The influences of Spanish and French culture can still be seen in New Orleans’ architecture and culinary arts. In 1804, the Haitian Revolution ended, and was the first revolution that the rebellion had won. Fleeing French colonizers arrived at New Orleans, further solidifying the French presence and culture in the port city.

            New Orleans was the main economic vain for the United States for over a century. The Mississippi River connected the Midwest and the east coast cities of Philadelphia and New York to Louisiana and the rest of the southern states. The New Orleans delta provided oceanic access to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. As a result, French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures developed and syncretized in Louisiana. Because of its climate and position on the Northeast, New York didn’t have the same ready access to Caribbean goods and peoples as had New Orleans. The Caribbean culture that came to the south had already begun to develop separately from its African roots, which had already taken a unique space in New Orleans culture.

            Gioia cites Congo Square, a plaza in New Orleans, as a primary source of African-American music culture. On Sundays slaves were allowed to congregate at a plaza in the center of the city, where they performed songs and dances that featured the musical styles of their African roots (flexible syncopation, time signatures, and rhythms). With the later proliferation of Catholicism and the Latin code that came with the arrival of the French, slaves took on the Catholic faith, and with that, Gospel music.

            Work and Gospel music coalesced and transition into blues, which is a unique genre of music that originated in America. The hope of escaping daily backbreaking labor, either through inconspicuously phrased lyrics about rebellion or belief that God will save them, proved primary themes in African-American music. The new musical mode that was the blues scale took these themes and transformed them into something new. Creoles of Color that were trained by in the French Classical tradition had a repertoire of different musical styles—ranging from classics to dancier tunes—often played their music for parties, where they were expected to be fluent in all types of musical styles. Ragtime originated from this tradition, where the classical modes were “ragged” on: the piano music was syncopated more, time signatures played around with. In the 1890s, a state-wide code of law was passed that caused increasing segregation between groups of various ethnicities. As a result, the Creoles of Color were no longer allowed to play for the white audiences they previously aligned themselves with ethnically, and were forced to play for African-American audiences. The ensuing blend of musical styles led to the creation of Jazz: the syncretism between blues and ragtime.

            Jelly Roll Morton claimed that, without the right inflection of Spanish music in your music, you’re not playing Jazz music. This paraphrased quote points heavily to the mixed salad nature of New Orleans jazz, where different cultures brought their traditions—in terms of human rights ethics and music—together. To me, the lightning-rod infusion of French culture into New Orleans that was brought on by the Haitian Revolution represents the single most important ingredient involved in the creation of jazz. Without the influx of Catholicism and the musical education that was part of the Latin code, the proliferation of music in the poorer and more segregated areas of New Orleans wouldn’t have happened. Storyville, the claimed origin point of jazz music, hinges on such a proliferation.