New Orleans: The City That Invented American Music

If you had to pick one city that contributed most to American music — and therefore to global popular music — the answer is not New York, not Los Angeles, not Nashville. It is New Orleans. A subtropical port city at the mouth of the Mississippi, where African, French, Spanish, Caribbean and Native American cultures collided for centuries and produced something the world had never heard before.

The Birthplace of Jazz

Jazz was born in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the brothels and dance halls of the Storyville district. Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city's poverty, became the first international star of an art form that was uniquely American — and uniquely New Orleanian.

What made New Orleans jazz distinct was its collective improvisation — the way multiple musicians could simultaneously improvise without colliding, creating a spontaneous conversation in sound. This was rooted in the Congo Square tradition, where enslaved Africans had been permitted to gather and play music on Sundays, preserving rhythmic traditions that would eventually form the foundation of all popular music.

"New Orleans is the only city in America where music comes out of the ground." — Allen Toussaint

Blues, Funk and Beyond

Jazz was only the beginning. New Orleans gave America the blues piano tradition — Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Dr. John — and the second line brass band tradition that continues to this day. Allen Toussaint produced and wrote some of the greatest R&B records of the 1960s and 70s, shaping the sound of soul music nationally.

The city's unique musical character comes from its geography. As a major port, New Orleans absorbed musical influences from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from the French and Spanish colonial traditions. The result was a musical culture more hybrid, more creolised, more genuinely multicultural than anywhere else in America.

After Katrina

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 devastated New Orleans, displacing hundreds of musicians and threatening the continuity of its musical traditions. But the city's musical culture proved resilient — perhaps because it is so deeply embedded in the social fabric of community life, in second line parades, in jazz funerals, in the very way New Orleanians mark birth, death and celebration.

Key Artists from New Orleans

• Louis Armstrong — the first great jazz soloist, changed what music could be
• Fats Domino — bridged jazz, blues and early rock and roll
• Professor Longhair — the foundation of New Orleans piano blues
• Allen Toussaint — the city's great songwriter and producer
• Dr. John — the definitive sound of New Orleans' mystical side