A Conversation with Ned Sublette
by Habitus · 09/16/08
Because they were Islamized?
Yes, precisely. The Spanish Catholics had spent eight centuries throwing Muslims out of Al-Andalus. But you could easily call the French period in New Orleans the Senegambian period.
When the Spanish came, though, as many as twenty-five percent of the Africans brought in by the Spanish were Kongo. What they encountered in New Orleans—what they had to make peace with, fuse with, or do battle with—was very strikingly different from what existed elsewhere in the United States or, for that matter, the world.
Here’s an example: The banjo is unknown in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. But it’s in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue [the colonial-era name for Haiti], Barbados, Virginia. And its first mention in New Orleans was from Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1819, but for certain it was being played in some form in the early eighteenth century, when so many people from the Senegambia came to Louisiana.
I also strongly suspect that, in the Senegambian days, we already had swinging rhythm. One of the most obvious differences between Afro-American music and Afro-Cuban music is the presence or absence of “swing.” African-American music swings and Afro-Cuban music does not. Swing is a very common feature in the Senegambia.
I also think it’s interesting that the French Baroque style of music that was taught in New Orleans by the Ursuline nuns was commonly played as something called notes inégales [uneven notes, alternating long and short], something rather similar. They would swing a little. Both the Africans and the French were very plausibly playing this similar style in New Orleans.
This is a point you make over and over in the book: Things that have really endured in New Orleans culture are those that have resonance in both the African and the European traditions.
Not only in New Orleans, up and down the New World. This also begs the larger question of what African influence was on European culture all along. Seville in Spain was about five to ten percent black before Columbus even sailed. These worlds were never entirely hermetic.
In general, though, we can certainly say that, between the Ursuline nuns and the enslaved Africans, there was some kind of cultural collision going on, which nonetheless found some points of commonality. New Orleans was the valve. It was the place where stuff entered.
So how can we most clearly understand what happened musically in New Orleans that didn’t happen elsewhere? And how can we hear that legacy in music today?
I went to see a show by [New Orleans musician] Walter “Wolfman” Washington. You couldn’t say if it was blues, funk, or jazz—it was at the intersection of all three. And if you closed your eyes it might have been 1976 or it might have been…tomorrow. In New Orleans, all the genres of African-American music, if they didn’t originate or a take a major step forward there, they came there to try out for the most demanding public in one of the great black urban centers.
I’ve started to think that New Orleans has this peculiar way of defying the laws of temporal physics. Normally things have a beginning, middle, and end. But in New Orleans it seems that, once something starts, it just keeps happening over and over again. So many things converged there.
Congo Square is one of the most enduring images of New Orleans, this great marketplace where Africans enacted their traditions through music and dance in a way that didn’t occur anywhere else in the United States. What do we know about what happened there?
If you want to guess what music sounded like at Congo Square, take five or six different types of African music and play them all at once. I strongly suspect you would have heard something similar to the bomba from Puerto Rico or the tumba francesa from eastern Cuba. We even likely heard something like the rhythm called habanera or tango, not to be confused with the Argentine dance.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s description of Congo Square, which also has drawings of the instruments, shows a drum that was sat upon and held between the knees of the drummer. This is something you see all over the Haitian [Domingan] Diaspora. From Trinidad, even down to Venezuela and Colombia. Latrobe also has pictures of a banjo. He doesn’t call it a banjo, but what he draws is the most African-looking version of the banjo ever pictured in the United States. And what is so interesting is that he has these two instruments, which come from totally different parts of Africa, being played together.
Is this what you mean when you say that Congo Square was both a memorial space and a laboratory?
It was where the past met the future, through the exigencies of the day. It was a market that turned into a dance. People were making deals. There was an aesthetic side, but there was also a practical side that was very much lived in the here and now. It was a place for remembering the past, but also a place in which a new African-American music was being born.
It’s also important to remember that there probably wouldn’t have been a need for a place called Congo Square in the Spanish days, because the Spanish didn’t try to contain African culture. One of the remarkable things about Congo Square was that it could exist in antebellum Louisiana, during the American period, since nowhere else in the South were black people allowed to gather in public. One reason was that they could keep an eye on it, and shut it down when they wanted, the way they do with second-line parades in New Orleans even today.
