"The New Orleans Second Line: A Tradition on the Move"

In New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every occasion is marked with a celebratory parade, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that seemingly take over the city during Carnival Time. But throughout the year, there are jazz funerals and parades known as "second lines" that fill the "Backatown" neighborhoods of New Orleans with the jubilant sounds of brass band music. Despite this, and the rapidly growing body of well-researched and well-meaning literature by "new jazz studies" scholars, second line culture remains excluded from jazz history courses the world over in favor of a single text that provides an "easier read" for undergraduate students. The resulting texts provide incomplete surveys that do little to correct previously held assumptions about jazz and are now deeply embedded within American culture, serving as an indoctrinating canon that limits the brass band's role and its practitioners within the jazz tradition. Those scholars that do mention brass bands—past or present—spend little time discussing them. In this paper, I will argue that jazz historians—with near surgical precision, and the use of past tense—have relegated the brass band and second line culture to the dust bin of history, extirpating a tradition that was not only seminal to jazz, but one that continues to this day.