“Where Dey At?”: Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

“Where Dey At?”: 

Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans, there were many high profiles efforts to raise awareness about the cultural legacy of New Orleans.  Many of those efforts centered on the exaltation of New Orleans Jazz, with many events aimed at providing shelter and support for Jazz musicians dispersed by the tragedy. New Orleans Jazz seemed the most important resource to be protected in the months after Katrina, more so than the people who made the city such a vital and important, ever evolving cultural outpost. Lost in the focus on New Orleans Jazz—arguably one of the nation’s most important cultural exports—are other forms of musical expression that were and continue to be crucial to the survival and spirituality of New Orleans and its citizens, including those who have yet to return.

Though Jazz was a critical component of Black political discourse and intellectual development throughout the 20^th century—jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln are some of the most resonate examples of creative intellectuals—New Orleans Jazz is often depicted as being tethered to some imagined past, in which race relations and the power dynamics embedded in them were far more simplistic. 

Indeed recent films like The Princess and the Frog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the television series Treme (despite it’s progressive political critiques) contribute to a nostalgic view that New Orleans Jazz as a dated, static musical form that offers an “authentic” alternative to more commercially viable forms of popular music like rap and R&B music.  Much of this has to do with the relationship between New Orleans Jazz and the leisure and tourist industries that were so vital to the city’s economy.  In this context, mainstreams desires to save New Orleans Jazz and to protect its musicians are less about strengthening the links between Jazz and Black cultural resistance—a resistance that historically fermented in New Orleans—but maintaining the economic vitality of what Johari Jabir calls the “theater of tourism” in which Black bodies are rarely thought of as citizens but laborers, servants and performers.

In the introduction to the  book, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, scholar Clyde Woods places New Orleans Jazz in a much broader context, as part of what Woods has famously described as a “Blues tradition of investigation.”  As Woods notes in his essay, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon and the Return to the Source,” historically the city of New Orleans and the region was “latticed with resistance networks that linked enslaved and free blacks with maroon colonies established in the city’s cypress forests swamps.” 

These traditions of resistance would manifest themselves after Emancipation and beyond in the form of “societies and benevolent associations; churches, second lines, pleasure and social clubs; brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians” and of course New Orleans Jazz. Two practices also linked to resistance in New Orleans are Bounce music and what Jabir refers to as the “sanctified swing,” embodied in the genres of Rap music and Gospel respectively.

Though Mahalia Jackson came to prominence in Chicago, the legendary Gospel singer was born and raised in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.  Jabir suggest that one of the reasons that Jackson is rarely thought about with regards to New Orleans has to do with “the ways the canon of New Orleans music is recognized exclusively through the lenses of blues and jazz.”  More importantly Jabir writes, in his essay “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing,” the impact of New Orleans music on Jackson—what she called “a rhythm we held on to from slavery days”—allowed her to bring an element of “swing” (associated with Jazz) to the decidedly anti-secular Gospel tradition of the mid-20^th century. 

Using the example of Jackson’s often-recalled performance of “Didn’t It Rain” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (for which she was heavily criticized by the “true believers”), Jabir suggest that Jackson’s performance of the song anticipates the Hurricane Katrina disaster that occurs more than thirty years after her death. Jabir is not so much suggesting that Jackson had the capacity to tell the future—though the history of the region might suggest otherwise—but that the “sanctified swing” that marked her music and others like Duke Ellington (or Wynton Marsalis if you listen to In This House, On This Morning) is “a heartbeat, a pulse driven by a persistent rhythm” adding that “if music were a living organism, the pulse would hold the music steady, sustaining life  in the midst of various rhythms.” Ultimately, according to Jabir, Jackson’s performance of  “Didn’t It Rain” is a “tenacious hope that finds the singer describing the disaster, accepting it, and living in spite of it”—a gift to those who would come well after Jackson who could grab hold to the “sanctified swing” when faced with their own survival.

Even less regarded by the mainstream consumers of New Orleans music is rap music, as most popularly represented by figures such as Lil’ Wayne, Juvenile, Master P, Mystical and others.  Yet Woods suggest that even Hip-Hop culture in New Orleans is an articulation of the “Blues tradition of  investigation” particularly in the form of the regionally specific genre of Bounce music.  The New York Times recently chronicled a contemporary strain of Bounce known as Sissy Bounce, though the genre’s roots go back to the late 1980s. It was the 1990 song “Where Dey At” by MC T. Tucker that helped give the style some prominence beyond New Orleans.  Woods connects Bounce to earlier forms of New Orleans musical expression, citing the refrain “Fuck David Duke, Fuck David Duke, I say, I say” from “Where Dey At” (in response to the KKK leader who was elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1990), as harkening back to “critiques of the plantation bloc found in the Calinda song and dance tradition perfected on Congo Square [the “birthplace” of Jazz] during the 18^th century.

In her essay, “‘My Fema People’: Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora” Zenia Kish pushes the connection between Bounce and New Orleans Hip-Hop more explicitly.  As Bounce created an autonomous New Orleans based riff on Hip-Hop, it informed Hip-Hop’s responses to Katrina including Mia X’s “My Fema People,” 5^th Ward Weebie’s “Fuck Katrina (The Katrina Song)” and The Legendary K.O.’s now famous “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.”  Though mainstream rap artists like Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Mos Def, and Juvenile (“Get Your Hustle On”), offered responses to Katrina, Kish suggest that tracks like those from Mia X and 5^th Ward Weebie offered a “collective first-person perspective” of the “frustrations, humiliations, and pleasures grounded in specifically local knowledge of the multiple socioeconomic disasters that intersected with Katrina.”

As so many of the Power brokers in New Orleans and the State of Louisiana draw on a distorted vision of New Orleans music, to cultivate a connection to an imagined past, Bounce, the “sanctified swing” and the “Blues tradition of investigation” all conspire to keep the “people” of New Orleans—what I call the Katrina-politans in reference to Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s concept of Afropolitans (Africans of the world)—connected across time, history, space and place.

Jumping the Broom to Equality

Jumping the Broom to Equality

by Mark Anthony Neal | HuffPost BlackVoices

My wife and I recently marked our 20th Wedding Anniversary, only days after same-sex marriage was legalized in our home state of New York. When we married 20 years ago, many in our generation were enamoured with re-connecting with our West African heritage. As Kente cloth became the rage on 125th Street and other centers of urban blackness, and leather Africa medallions with red, black, and green replaced the trunk jewelry of the mid-1980s, more than a few of us chose to mark our matrimonial rituals with symbolic gestures like jumping the broom.

"Jumping the Broom," which mainstream Americans were introduced to after the groundbreaking mini-series Roots was broadcast in January of 1977, highlights the enduring faith that enslaved Africans had in the power of family and commitment. Denied access to legal marriage, jumping the broom was a symbolic act of defiance; indeed even after blacks could legally marry, the act of marriage, with or without the broom, was an act of resistance within a society that denied blacks their full humanity.

The belief that blacks held in marriage and life-time partnership was part of the mantra of "making a way out of now way" -- a mantra that Black communities shared with the world during the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

That symbolism was not lost on my wife and I at the time of our marriage; yes, it was a chance to unite in the eyes of the law and within the tenets of our Christian beliefs and our parents' values --they were collectively married 86 years -- but it was more than anything an act of faith. That symbolism is not lost on thousands of New Yorkers who are now to also share in such acts of faith -- also in the eyes of the -- law -- thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriages in New York State.

There are those, of course, who claim that same-sex marriage is a sign of the continued demise of the black family. Christopher Arps of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network and founder of Move-on-Up.org, asks for example, "with the black family in freefall, why define and diminish the value of marriage?" Arps suggest that homosexuality is an abomination, citing the requisite example of Christian doctrine, ignoring that that same Christian doctrine was invoked to justify the enslavement of blacks in the first place.

Even as so many will cite that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, a closer view of those numbers suggest that very often there are two parents present in the household and even when that isn't the case, both parents continue to see themselves as co-parents. The genius of black survival in this country, whether during chattel slavery or the economic crisis of today, has been their willingness, time and time again, to re-interpret doctrine -- whether legal or biblical -- in ways that best served their humanity, and ultimately the humanity of the nation.

Jumping the Broom was one of the best examples of blacks to buck the status quo in the pursuit of what was right -- to make a way out of no way. In legalizing same-sex marriage, New York State has also done the right thing and will allow many more to jump the broom into full equality.

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.