Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (review)

There are times when producing a book “in record time” is called for, and this volume is one of several that emerged quickly after the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina (with assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers), including Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters (Regan Books, 2005) and Samuel B. Charters’s New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus (Marion Boyars, 2006). These books all share a sense of urgency infused with passion for what is one of the nation’s quirkiest and most productive “cultural wetlands.” What sets this book apart is the combined strength of the authors as specialists on the history of black music and creolization in the Americas and their mutual concern with the African “spirit tides” that nourish vernacular cultures there. Together they make a compelling argument for the singularity and importance of the city’s underclass couture de métissage, while also placing it within the broader context of the circum-Caribbean and Gulf Coast regions (as in theorizing the similarities among early jazz and the music of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba). One suspects, however, that three of the authors (Spitzer is the exception) have spent more time theorizing New Orleans from afar than experiencing its quotidian reality, as evident in various errors present in the text: discussion of the street culture within the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards (6) omits mention of the Sixth Ward (Tremé, with only minimal flood damage), which is the most active neighborhood for “second lines,” Black Indians, Baby Dolls, and Bonesmen; for Orleanians, Carnival beads and doubloons are not “throwaways” (15) but are hoarded to decorate fence railings, chandeliers, door knobs, and to serve as repositories of memory, possibly explaining why battles for trinkets are so intense; in “second line” parades, the “first line” is not the brass band (31) but the members of the benevolent association or marching club sponsoring the event (corrected on 69); the Louisiana Five never recorded in New Orleans (34); and blackface is currently worn by black and white members of Zulu (38). One might also argue that Carnival 2006 was eclipsed as a talisman of recovery by the successful resuscitation of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (with new corporate sponsorship) and by the Saints making the NFL playoffs that year, leading to the conclusion that Carnival does not rank as highly in the minds of Orleanians as the authors assert. Yet such quibbles do not detract substantially from the big message this little book conveys, and the amount of useful information contained therein serves as an excellent introduction on the meaning of New Orleans within the American experience, as well as offering a handy composite of the theories of four of the most qualified scholars working in the field today.