On page one of his engrossing back history of New Orleans, Ned Sublette writes that his book “is not about music per se, but music will be a constant presence in it, the way it is in New Orleans.”  So begins a vivid account that will forever shape the way the reader hears the music not only of New Orleans but of the Americas.  Sublette’s task is to explain exactly how it is that by 1819, New Orleans had become “the most diverse town in the South by far.”  This was the heyday of Afro-Louisiana culture on Congo Square, a time when Africans on the city’s streets spoke Spanish, French, and English—sometimes all three.  

Sublette quotes from a description of music in Congo Square in the early 19th century, a revealing and rare account written by Englishman Henry Latrobe, who is essentially horrified by the performances he so usefully chronicles.  With that scene clearly in mind, we go all the way back to a time when New Orleans was a scarcely inhabitable swamp, and Sublette begins his chronicle of the people who made that swamp a city, and a wellspring of American culture.  What follows is an exhilarating narrative of history, musicology, economics and biography, skillfully blended to enhance received wisdom, ridden as it is with simplicities and clichés.  Vaudeville, voodoo, the bamboula, contradanse, and quadrille (French and English), masked balls, swing, the dawn of the piano forte, even the art of rapping, and the moniker “Dr. John” are all explained and contextualized as part of a global narrative, one in which the Spanish tinge, as well as the ancient cultures of Africa, and the hybrid ones of the Caribbean, are at last given standing next to the French and American players who generally dominate the New Orleans story.  This is more than a matter of multicultural fairness.  It literally makes sense of the city’s jumbled history.

Sublette lavishes us with racy and colorful details about French nobility, notably the regency of Louis XIV’s nephew, Philippe II, Duc d’Orleans, whose taste for debauchery set the mood for at least one aspect of life in the American city that would bear his title.  The Bourbons (immortalized in the French quarter’s most famous street name) established dissolution as an enduring tradition in the city.  More importantly, the French brought Africans from the Senegal River region (Senegambians) to Louisiana in the early 18th century.  During that century, more slaves from this part of West Africa were settled in the U.S. than in any other part of the Americas.  The musical legacy of this period includes the introduction of fiddles (which also came from Europe), as well as African precursors of the banjo, and crucially, the swing feel.  

Spain took control of the Louisiana Territory in 1762 as “a buffer zone between the aggressive British colonists and his silver mines in New Spain (Mexico).”  Over the next two decades, the Spanish infiltrated Louisiana’s largely Senegambian African population with an influx of Africans from a very different region of the continent, broadly speaking, the Kongo.  Kongo people introduce new cultural elements—drums, rhythms, languages, and spiritual ideas, including a powerful tradition of holding funerals with plenty of music.  Among other fateful consequences of Spanish rule in Louisiana was the establishment of “a current of music flowing between Havana and New Orleans.”  Hence the four-note habanera/tango rhythm (DOMM, DA DOM DOM) finds its way into the piano accompaniments of Jelly Roll Morton and W.C. Handy and into floods of New Orleans  (and American) music ever since.  

Sublette traces the ancestries of cultural artifacts with intelligence and care.  His research, personal experience, and omnivorous background as a musician allow him to offer compelling conjecture when the evidence trail goes cold.  Latrobe’s seminal account of Congo Square music includes a description of a drummer who sits on his drum while playing.  Sublette marshals historical accounts as well as first hand observations in Haiti and Cuba to persuasively explain this unusual sighting as a direct consequence of the revolution in Haiti (then Saint Domingue) at the end of the 18th century.  It turns out the drummer who sits on his drum is a phenomenon that could not have occurred in any other American city.  

The harsh realities of the early American economy are never far from center stage.  The sugar industry—which Sublette calls a “nation all its own”—exhibits levels of human abuse and cruelty that stand out even in this brutal tale.  Sugar sets the scene for a central drama in New Orleans’s back history, that revolution in Haiti.  Sublette calls the successful Haitian uprising “the most radical revolution of a revolutionary era” for it sought to produce a post-slavery, multiracial society.  On the heels of this insurrection, Jefferson is elected president and is blessed with the good fortune of Napoleon Bonaparte’s hasty decision to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803.  The Louisiana Purchase—a decisive event in American history—is here another direct consequence of the Haitian revolution, which Sublette notes has too often been dismissed as “a footnote.”  

The Haitian revolution also led to a new influx of French-speaking, Kongo-Creole refugees to both Cuba and New Orleans.  Moreover, the revolution terrorized the leaders of slave societies throughout the Americas and motivated all sorts of fateful choices, from the suppression of cultural expressions to a bias in favor of domestically raised slaves, as opposed to those imported from Africa.  This bias helped pave the way for the rise of a “slave breeding industry” in Virginia and the Carolinas.  Sublette rolls up his sleeves and delves fearlessly into this neglected chapter of American history.  He lays out the cold economic calculations that led to slave breeding, and also ponders the appalling human tragedy of families raised and torn asunder like livestock.  This dirty little secret of American history inevitably tarnishes prouder American narratives, notably Jefferson’s life and presidency, and it too has lasting cultural impact.  Sublette writes, “Breaking up the families and communities of the slaves was of a piece with destroying the language, religion, and drum.”

During the early decades of the 19th century, when foreign slave importation was gradually “banned” in the United States, it continued in Louisiana, where piracy and other off-the-books operations continued to introduce Africans to  New Orleans.  Even among the last legally imported slaves, writes Sublette, “it is possible that some … had been born in Africa.”  By the time Sublette returns to Congo Square, the reader has gained a rich sense of New Orleans’s particular brand of exceptionalism.  The changes of local government—French, Spanish, American—and the influx of corresponding and similarly contrasting African populations make for a fruitfully chaotic environment where African language, religion, and even the drum, have survived in ways found nowhere else in the Americas.  Henry Latrobe’s account of that “most extraordinary noise” in Congo Square artfully bookends a breathtaking arc of history and humanity.  

Sublette concludes with a poignant chapter about his efforts to penetrate the secretive and mysterious realm of the Mardi Gras Indians.  In the story of these African Americans donning the imagined garb of Native Americans and playing out ritualized dramas of celebration, rivalry and conflict we come to appreciate the majesty and lingering conundrums of New Orleans, even as the city’s riveting history continues in the pages of our daily newspapers.  The Mardi Gras Indians story leaves the reader with a haunting sense that for all Sublette has teased from so many sources, there is much we will never know about New Orleans.  

Contributed by: Banning Eyre