Congo Square and the Second Line

Abstract

In New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every occasion is marked with a celebratory parade, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that seemingly take over the city during Carnival Time. But throughout the year, jazz funerals and parades known as "second lines" fill the Backatown neighborhoods of New Orleans with the jubilant sounds of brass band music. Despite this, and the rapidly growing body of well-researched and well-meaning literature by "new jazz studies" scholars, the second line culture that derives from Congo Square remains excluded from jazz history courses the world over in favor of a single text that provides an "easier read" for undergraduate students. The resulting texts provide incomplete surveys that do little to correct previously held assumptions about jazz and are now deeply embedded within American culture, serving as an indoctrinating canon that limits the brass band's role and its practitioners within the jazz tradition. Those scholars that do mention brass bands—past or present—spend little time discussing them. This article highlights these oversights and problematizes the monolithic narrative proliferating jazz texts today. Herein, I will discuss the New Orleans second line culture and its relevance to shifting narratives about jazz history in relation to Congo Square and its historical implications: what is Congo Square, what about it is missing from the jazz narrative, accepting practitioner's beliefs and social actions as proof, and why it is crucial that we (scholars/educators) implement practitioners' beliefs and community and new jazz studies scholarship to create a better, more nuanced picture of jazz as a whole.