Beyond Memphis and Motown: New Orleans Soul

Through the first few years of the nineteenth century, New Orleans was under either French or Spanish rule and was predominantly Catholic. Catholic slave masters then, and later, took a different stance from Protestant ones towards some aspects of their slaves' lives. Equally brutal during the working day, Catholic slave masters chose to interfere very little with the recreation time of their slaves. The result was that in South America, the French and the Spanish Caribbean, and the southern part of Louisiana, African cultural retentions were much more substantial among slaves and their descendants than in other parts of the United States. These circumstances partially explain why, despite the purchase of Louisiana by the United States from Napoleon in 1803, the music of Black New Orleans has always exhibited a markedly different rhythmic sensibility compared to Black music in the rest of the United States.