Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans, New Edition by Richard Brent Turner

Author:Richard Brent Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Fragments of Black Christian Ancestral Memory from Congo Square: St. Augustine Catholic Church and the Sanctified Church

I felt the world swallow me up when I heard that Fred was gone…. They brought him back to be buried at our little church and the crowd that turned out for the funeral was a sight to see…. The wake went on all night long and lodge bands formed outside the church and played until I thought my heart would break. After the funeral was over, the bands began to blow it out without charge. People from everywhere formed “the second-line,” and they paraded back to the Sixteenth Ward—all the men who’d been Fred’s lodge brothers and the men and women who had known him—and took all the saloons apart in one big spree. Everybody said Fred would have loved it if he’d been there.

MAHALIA JACKSON, MOVIN’ ON UP

The central issue considered in this section is how St. Augustine Catholic Church and Sanctified Churches in New Orleans have influenced performative meditations of historical memory and ecstatic music and dance derived from Congo Square and West Africa in the second lines of jazz funerals. Jason Berry calls churches “the missing link in jazz history”20 because of the paucity of research on the synthesis of black religion and black music in the Crescent City. Although jazz funerals are dynamic, improvised performances that change over time to reinterpret new substitutions of religion, music, history, and politics from black America and the African diaspora, analysis of selected narrative accounts of the connections between churches and the Africanisms in early jazz funerals reveals the historical significance of St. Augustine Church as a site for Congo Square music and the ancestral rituals in Big Chief Tootie Montana’s contemporary jazz funeral. As we shall see, the historical memory of jazz funerals and Congo Square music and religion has been influenced by Black Christianity in New Orleans.

Mahalia Jackson, an iconic figure in the history of gospel music, was born in New Orleans in 1911, and she still remembered, in 1966, the healing power of the Black Church and African American community in the jazz funeral and second line for her favorite cousin Fred in the late 1920s. The procession for Fred, whose nickname was Chafalaye “after the river in the country near where he’d been born,”21 began at Mount Moriah Baptist Church. According to Jackson, in her childhood,

they didn’t play jazz at the funerals. The band would play as solemn as a choir on a big pipe organ—right out in front of the church where the funeral service was being held. Then they would march behind the hearse—all the way to the cemetery. They didn’t play jazz on the way either—that’s the bunk. After the family had left and the man was buried, then on the way back they would jazz it up. The musicians had been paid so they would play coming back from the cemetery, full of spirit—blow it out free of charge—and the folks along the way would have a good time.

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