“Sing Us Back Home”: Music, Place, and the Production of Locality in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between place and music in New Orleans. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it proposes that New Orleans musical practices are shaped by the combination of three pivotal factors: economic contingencies, a rich interactive network, and a deep-seated attachment to New Orleans. By focusing on musicians' agency, we examine how music is grounded in place, how displacement is incorporated in the place-making process, and the contestations at stake in the production of locality.

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible with a special grant from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris). Additional funding was provided by the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We are very grateful to Rebecca J. Scott from the University of Michigan and François Weil from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales for their support and assistance in funding our fieldwork. We would also like to thank Bruce B. Raeburn and Helen Regis for their very helpful comments and suggestions on a former version of this paper, as well the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

^[1] Other indicators have also been followed to track the progress of the recovery. In addition to tracking population and employment levels, re-openings of popular restaurants and attractions, such as the return of the Saints football to the Superdome and streetcars resuming their routes, have been publicized as positive signs that New Orleans was “coming back.”

^[2] We realize that our limited sample does not cover the whole range of music production in New Orleans which includes well-established and successful artists as well as other professionals such as street musicians.

^[3] Although disaster research is relatively new field, methodological challenges have been identified early (Killian) and continue to be thoroughly addressed (Stallings Methods). They consist mostly of lack of time (to develop theory and hypotheses, to fashion research instruments, to identify areas and topics of research) and unique circumstances of data collection. This being said, disaster researchers rely on the same qualitative and quantitative tools as their colleagues in the social sciences. As Stallings (“Methods” 21) puts it, “it is the context of research not the methods of research that make disaster research unique.”

It is then a question of circumstances or how the disaster context is related to pre-disaster conditions. There is wide consensus within disaster research that there is much continuity between the two. Although the “essence of disasters is disruption,” research has convincingly shown that the “pre-disaster behavior is probably the best indicator of trans- and post-disaster behavior” (Stallings Methods 11), a reformulation of the principle of continuity originally proposed by Quarantelli and Dynes (34). Furthermore, Tierney (32) explained that “human behavior in emergency situations is generally adaptive and that considerable continuity exists between pre- and post-disaster behavior patterns.” Similarly, at the societal level, there is little evidence of significant social change following a disaster (see Passerini for a review). If there are indeed extremely negative consequences for some persons and significant changes ushered in by a disaster, they tend to follow pre-event patterns, such as the disproportionate impact experienced by disadvantaged groups and the continuation of land-use practices in rural and urban areas for example (Pelling; Revet).

Another strand of disaster research, in fact a major paradigm, expands on this finding of continuity. The vulnerability approach challenges the exceptionalism of disasters and shifts the line of inquiry from “‘what events interrupt the social dimension’ to…‘how do some types of social relationships produce risk?’” (Duclos 263). It proposes to look at disasters as the predictable outcomes of the “normal” processes of inequality and subordination at play in modern risk societies (Beck; Wisner et al. ). As Hewitt (27), one of its early proponents, put it, the material conditions of daily life “prefigure” disasters.

^[4] In December 2005, the organization Habitat for Humanity, with the support of New Orleans musical icons Harry Connick, Jr., Branford and Ellis Marsalis, announced plans to build a Musicians' Village. By February 2007, thirty-six homes had been completed on land acquired in the Ninth Ward and forty more were under construction in other areas of the city.

^[5] John Boutte's rendition at the 2006 Jazz Fest was particularly intense. The audience responded enthusiastically at every chorus and even more as Boutte changed the original line “President Coolidge came down in a railroad train with a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand” to “President Bush flew over in an airplane with about twelve fat men with double martinis in their hands.”

^[6] Souther shows how music came to be the focus of the tourist trade, highlighting the role of outsiders in the revival of an interest in jazz, which had practically disappeared from the city's tourist venues after the war. Now a must-see tourist venue, Preservation Hall started in 1961 as a jazz cooperative named at one point Authenticity Hall, explicitly illustrating the alternative to the gaudy Bourbon Street clubs it was intended to provide. It was then run by a couple of jazz enthusiasts, the Jaffe from Philadelphia, who succeeded in making Dixieland jazz highly visible through news media and worldwide tours. Their initiative stimulated local interest and provided steady employment to forgotten jazz players (Souther 113–15).

^[7] The second-line parade epitomizes for many of our informants the essential role of the public and the necessity to “enter” it by singing, dancing, interacting on many levels, a point made by Regis (“Blackness” 757) in her analysis of the social meaning of the second-line tradition.

^[8] “Bounce is a form of rap music that is heavily oriented towards dancing, which uses particular sonic markers in the form of samples and tempi as well as a call-and-response form of rapping based upon hooks or chants” (Miller 15).

^[9] The boundaries of the wards were originally drawn in 1852 when the city was reorganized from three separate municipalities into one centralized government. Used for electing public officials, the ward system was discontinued in 1912 but continues to have cultural significance.