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When you’re raised in a town where grown-ups wear costumes and toss beads from floats rolling along the avenues, it plants a certain optimism for the human experiment. The high school marching bands gave the Mardi Gras parades a booming pulse. Carnival season was filled with fantasy and wonder.
In my 20s, I discovered something more mythic in the “second line” parades of Black people, and some white folks, following “jazz funerals.” Over time, I came to see a powerful spirituality in the fusion of African ritual dancing with marches of European-styled military bands, creating a life force of cultural memory.
Many of these burial parades were sponsored by Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, groups in working class neighborhoods whose members spent months making costumes for their annual march. After the service in church or mortuary, Black people in radiant colors danced farewell to a departed member with lots of gyrations behind the brass band.
In a city ruled by white supremacy, parading was an act of freedom.
The first jazz funeral I saw was in November of 1973. De De Pierce, a trumpeter and grand old man of Preservation Hall, the temple of traditional jazz on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter, died at the age of 69. Pierce’s sendoff was at Corpus Christi Church, a hearth of Black Creole culture in the Seventh Ward, downriver from the Quarter.
After the Mass, I went outside, watching Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band members in black suits, white shirts and dark ties raise their instruments, forming an arch like a military honor guard. Sunlight glinted off the dark clarinets, silver trumpets, golden trombones and saxophones as they unfurled a slow, mournful dirge. The pallbearers came down the steps, beneath the raised instruments, escorting the coffin to the hearse. The band moved ahead of the limousines carrying the family.
The musicians in a stately procession intoned a slow-tempo hymn, “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” as a few hundred people shuffled along the sidewalk. The woodwind’s peeling sound carried such sorrow. Several years later, Dr. Michael White, a professor and clarinetist, told me: “In the funeral march my instrument captures a female voice, the widow’s wail, a sobbing sound of lamentation and loss.”
On that milky November afternoon in 1973, the band halted at a point where the hearses departed to a distant cemetery. The musicians ignited the up-tempo music that drew people off porches and out of bars, many of whom never knew De De Pierce but joined the rest of us in spontaneous choreography for a soul cut loose from earthly ties.
I had never seen such a beautiful event. Where did all this come from?
Over the next dozen years, I interviewed musicians for articles, read heavily and studied oral histories of the earliest players at Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive. The stories of how jazz sprouted in map-of-the-world neighborhoods gave me a visual sense of the town to match the music. Revisionist accounts of slavery, notably by the scholars John Hope Franklin, Herbert Gutman and Sterling Stuckey, in his monumental Slave Culture, opened my lens on the impact of Congo Square, an antebellum park in New Orleans where African-blooded people of many countries gathered on Sundays to perform elaborate ring dances.
“The circle is linked to the most important of all African ceremonies, the burial ceremony,” writes Stuckey. “[I]t is called the ring-shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods.”
Funeral spirituality
In the mid-80s, I sidelined this research for investigative reporting on the Catholic clergy child abuse cases. I left the city on assignments that sent me into a dark personal space. Back home, jazz became my soundtrack; the funerals pulled me toward a source of spirituality that took years to fully grasp.
In the mid-90s, Dr. White, the clarinetist, and his trumpeter, Gregg Stafford, worried over changes to the beauty of a tradition they carried. The crack epidemic was sending teenage boys to early funerals, and second lines were marked by fiery, hard-edged dancing, expressing rage. The dirges were gone; the driving, heavily rhythmic music of younger bands was short on melody, long on riffing.
In 1996, with Ford Foundation support, I spent two years filming interviews with musicians and several funerals, exploring the clash between continuity and change.
When the gospel singer Lady Linda Lucen died in 1997, her husband, Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, stood after the service in the mortuary and said, “The wake is now open. You’re free to express yourselves; that’s what Linda would want.”
Gregg Stafford and other musicians began “When the Saints Go Marching In” as people did some robust dancing. One man in a burgundy suit did an alligator number on the floor. A man with a saxophone advanced to the open coffin where Lady Linda lay beneath a thin shroud, and he let out a throbbing stream of notes as if singing her into another world.
I began to see each of these rites as an epic in miniature, an episode in the life of a family, a neighborhood, a church, each funeral linked to a larger narrative about the life of the city. I considered the funerals as memory caravans, holding a mirror to New Orleans at a given point in time.
Over the next 20 years, in time away from writing about the Vatican, I filmed funerals whenever I had funds. I otherwise worked on a companion book on how the burial parades reflected New Orleans history.
‘Let the healing begin’
Carnival season gave rise to a tradition of Black men paying homage to Indians who had harbored fugitive slaves. In this tradition, the Big Chief led his tribe wearing spectacular hand-crafted suits, marching for miles on Mardi Gras and several other times throughout the year. The tradition dates to the early 1880s.
Twenty years after Lady Linda’s wake, in the same Charbonnet Funeral Home in the Tremé neighborhood, I attended a service for Collins “Coach” Lewis, a Black Masking Indian. I took notes as a folk preacher of Lakota Indian descent, Goat Carson, gave an invocation.
“We ask the ancestors of the West to remember him for singing ‘Indian Red,’” said Carson, referring to the prayer sung on Mardi Gras morning as the Indian tribes begin to parade.
“We ask the ancestors of Africa to welcome him. We ask the grandfather earth to let his spirit stay with us. Now repeat, four times, Let the healing begin.”
The refrain rang through the seats of about 250 people. The open coffin rested by a platform for speakers, and a table with photographs of Coach and examples of his Indian beadwork with shells and sequins.
Then came the rolling rhythms of African drummers from Bamboula 2000, the percussion-and-dance group led by Luther Gray. As four dashiki-clad men worked the congas— two hitting hands on conga drums held between their knees, three using curled sticks on the percussive skins—a man in sunglasses and Muslim head cap rattled a tambourine.
Three barefoot women made dancing swirls into the center of the room. A white-robed lady shaking a calabash melded into the tonal currents as a lady wrapped in yellow moved to the quickening tempo or the drummers. Two more women, then a man, joined the circle. When the drumming reached a crescendo, the music and dance suddenly stopped. The room fell quiet.
“Coach, where are you?” called Cinnamon Black, a lady in a resplendent African headwrap.
“Coach, are you here? Some people may not know Coach the way I did. He was an ambassador of the second line. Every Mardi Gras, he was at Hunter’s Field”— a park under the shadow of the I-10 overpass along North Claiborne Avenue.
“You cannot say when it’s your time, you only get what your time is. An ambassador is someone who keeps things in balance…. That man had a heart. He is coming back through all of us. He brought Africa to New Orleans. He brought Congo Square to New Orleans.”
“Coach loved the second line,” Cinnamon Black continued. “He had a phrase from the Indians, ‘Needle and thread, kill ‘em dead.’ Remember Coach Collins Lewis.”
As several others from the second line clubs voiced praise songs to Coach, a woman in a chair fell into sobbing convulsions. People came close, enfolding her in hugs, calming her as she wept.
The trumpeter Marlon Jordan, who had spent days on the roof of his house in New Orleans East during Hurricane Katrina before he was rescued, sent up a sweet version of “I’ll Fly Away.” People danced in the aisles, several women swirling decorated umbrellas.
The music shifted back to tambourines and hand drums advancing from a courtyard behind the parlor. Into the room came the Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi, a Black Indian ancestral presence embodied by Big Chief Victor Lewis. His Indian gang with three women, two children and several men in various many-feathered suits arrived to tambourine jangles and slapping percussions and sent a bolt of energy through the room.
“Coach! Coach!” cried Big Chief in an oversized African head mask with square-slitted eyes and brown raffia fringe. He stood as if in linkage to the fabled engungun from Yoruba tradition, the figures in shimmering outfits who dance the memory of ancestral spirits. The engungun signify a cosmos made of the living, the dead and the unborn.
“Coach Collins Lewis, bringing Africa to the spirit of Mardi Gras!” cried Big Chief. “Out of the darkness you’ll see the light! You can’t delay God’s will, so you better lie ready!
“Gird yourself! That’s what Coach did—he made his confession! It won’t be long. Remember Coach, Remember Coach! I feel the spirit of Congo Square.”
Come back home
As the tambourine rhythms laced with percussive thunder swelled around the Chief, the force of his presence galvanized dancers in the aisle around him. “They took the jungle beat to Basin Street!” he cried. “Coach carried the sound.” In a voice breaking like glass, Big Chief Victor Harris wailed: “He was more than a friend, he was my brother!”
“That’s all right, dawlin,” called a lady in the aisle.
“We still have people in bondage,” came the Chief. “Arkansas, Alabama, New Jersey, Mississippi, people trying to come back to New Orleans since Katrina. Come back!”
“Speak the truth, darlin’,” called the lady.
“The Lord has prepared a better place for Coach,” rasped the Chief, energy draining from his voice. “No more bills, no more sorrow.”
As the Chief led the Spirit of the Fi-Yi-Yi on a sinuous procession around the chairs and into the courtyard, the crowd was calling: Coach! Coach! Coach!
Time and again, in my search for meaningful liturgies, I found myself at Black funerals where the mourners dramatized a closeness to God far from the passive nature of faith as I have known it. If faith is a gift, as we were taught early on, the weight of institutional corruption turns faith into a search for what that gift means.
The movement of street dancers in the second line gathered force in the late 19th century as it joined the linear procession of military bands, rooted in French and Spanish colonial traditions. By the time jazz flowered, the funerals showed the coming together of the ring and the line, the African ancestral circle dancing and the linear progression of the brass bands’ marching music.
That metaphor seems equally to encapsulate the city where jazz began, a city of migrants in the truest sense. Funerals with music carried a life force of the city as it took shape, and a powerful pulse today.
Jason Berry’s documentary “City of a Million Dreams” airs in August on Louisiana Public Broadcasting and WYES New Orleans, with a VOD streaming release later this year.
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