"Here in Louisiana, we make music. When I say we make music, I mean that we don't just play music--we invent it, too. We take the raw materials of music--of sound--and make something new with it." --From the introduction Music writer and cultural historian Roger Hahn provides an intimate glimpse into a music genesis and legacy that has spread across the globe. From creating new categories of music like jazz and zydeco to adding new sounds to older genres like rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, funk, and hip-hop, Louisiana has put her stamp on them all. With an introduction that includes an impressive overview of the state's contribution to America's music history, Hahn launches into biographies of twenty musicians and musical groups who have shaped--and are shaping--the face of our musical landscape. Included are well-known figures like Louis Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, The Boswell Sisters, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Connick, Jr., Li'l Wayne, and Hunter Hayes. Right beside them are lesser-known but no less significant or influential figures, including Jelly Roll Morton, Clifton Chenier, Steve Riley & The Mamou Players, Trombone Shorty, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Buddy Guy. The biographies present a small capsule of the artists' cultural inheritance, influence, and accomplishments. A full-color portrait by Louisiana artist Chris Osborne accompanies each profile in this testament to Louisiana's musical legacy.

Describes the history of the music of southern Louisiana and examines the influence of Cajun songs on American popular music

French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it. From the first recordings in the 1920s to the transformation of the genre by the 1970s, the spread of this regional sound was driven by local, national, and international elites who saw the music’s traditions and performers in the context of larger social, political, and cultural developments, including the folk revival and the civil rights and ethnic revival movements. Patricia Peknik illuminates how the music’s history and meaning were interpreted by a variety of actors who brought the genre onto a national and global stage, revealing the many interests at work in the popularization of a regional music.

A chronicle of the rise and development of a unique musical form. Inducted into the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame under its original title Walking to New Orleans, this fascinating history focuses on the music of major R&B artists and the crucial contributions of the New Orleans music industry. Newly revised for this edition, much of the material comes firsthand from those who helped create the genre, including Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Wardell Quezergue.

With Clifton Chenier's amazing life and career as the centerpiece, this collection of profiles gathered across two decades unites some of the world's most innovative creative forces.

Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers

Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

To borrow words from Stan “The Record Man” Lewis, Shreveport, Louisiana, is one of this nation's most important “regional-sound cities.” Its musical distinctiveness has been shaped by individuals and ensembles, record label and radio station owners, announcers and disc jockeys, club owners and sound engineers, music journalists and musicians. The area's output cannot be described by a single genre or style. Rather, its music is a kaleidoscope of country, blues, R&B, rockabilly, and rock. Shreveport Sounds in Black and White presents that evolution in a collection of scholarly and popular writing that covers institutions and people who nurtured the musical life of the city and surroundings. The contributions of icons like Leadbelly and Hank Williams, and such lesser-known names as Taylor-Griggs Melody Makers and Eddie Giles come to light. New writing explores the famed Louisiana Hayride, musicians Jimmie Davis and Dale Hawkins, local disc jockey “Dandy Don” Logan, and KWKH studio sound engineer Bob Sullivan. With glimpses into the lives of original creators, Shreveport Sounds in Black and White reveals the mix that emerges from the ongoing interaction between the city's black and white musicians.

An in-depth history of rock and roll's Louisiana roots. Taking the position that rock and roll started in New Orleans in 1947 when Roy Brown recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," Aswell provides an expansive history of this beloved American music form. By looking at the Louisianan influences of swamp pop, Cajun, zydeco, R&B, rockabilly, country, and blues music, the author explores the way these musical forms gave birth to rock and roll as we know it today.