“Jockomo Fee Na Nay!”

Abstract

This chapter examines the history of music and tourism in New Orleans from the perspective of New Orleans as an aurally and historically Afro-Caribbean city, in which the audibility of Afro-Caribbean sounds have long been not supplemental to but constitutive of New Orleans’s “uniqueness” and, concomitantly, to tourist production, desire, and consumption. The chapter explores three intertwined Afro-Caribbean vernacular practices—the second line parades associated with Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, second line brass bands, and the Mardi Gras Indians—all of which concretized in the late nineteenth century with strong aesthetic, linguistic, and religious ties to Cuba and Haiti. Importantly, these sonically and visually rich practices have been inextricably bound to the emergence of a music-based tourism industry in New Orleans since the 1960s, including in the creation of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (1970), the WWOZ New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Radio Station (1980), and other print magazines and touristic media. The “revival” of what were considered to be ailing or disappearing traditions in the 1960s and 1970s via commodified tourism is then paralleled with the similar resurgence of these three aesthetic practices in the wake of the perceived cultural losses of Hurricane Katrina.