World Rhythm Birthplace: Congo Square

The Birth of African American Music:

The gathering of enslaved African vendors in Congo Square originated as early as the 1740s during Louisiana’s French Colonial period and continued during the Spanish Colonial era as one of the city’s public markets. It had been an area outside of the fortified walls of the original city where Native Americans and later slaves had sold their wares in an open market by the Bayou St. John, the major avenue for transportation of goods into the city. At the other end of Orleans street, hid only by the old padre’s garden and the cathedral, glistened the ancient Place d’Armes.

In Louisiana’s French and Spanish Catholic colonial era of the 18th century, slaves were commonly allowed Sundays off from their work. They were allowed to gather in the “Place de Negres”, “Place Publique”, later “Circus Square” or informally “Place Congo”at the “back of town” (across Rampart Street from the French Quarter), where the slaves would set up a market, sing, dance, and play music.

Congo Square is in the vicinity of a spot which the Houma Indians used before the arrival of the French for celebrating their annual corn harvest and was considered sacred ground.

Free Coloreds:
More importantly, slaves were allowed to purchase their freedom and even own slaves themselves. The Spanish had a law known as “Coartación” which gave the enslaved person the right of self-purchase. You could insist on a hearing with the slave owner–where a price for their purchase would be set. More than 20% of New Orleans population was believed to be free coloreds before the Protestant administration took over at the beginning of the 19th century. The misunderstood term Creole has been used to describe free coloreds as well locally born as the unique cultural stew the Cresent City was simmering.

The tradition continued after the city became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. As African music had been suppressed in the largely Protestant American colonies and states, the weekly gatherings at Congo Square became a famous site for visitors from elsewhere in the U.S. Many visitors were amazed at the African-style dancing and music. The gatherings in the square themselves were amazing as well to the participants as they shared cultural histories from throughout the Caribbean and Africa.

Saints & Festivals Belt:

Observers heard the beat of the bamboulas, the wail of the banzas and saw the multitude of African dances that had survived through the years. But there was more brewing here than African drumming. From the first arrival, in Nouvelle-Orléans, of two slave ships from Benin carrying the Ardra people, from whose foddun spiritual practice derives the core of Louisiana voodoo; to the influx during the early French period of Wolof and Bambara people from the Senegal River in West Africa, whose emblematic singing and stringed instruments were crucial forerunners of blues and the banjo; to the Spanish era’s preponderance of slaves from the Central African forest culture of Kongo, whose hand-drummed polyrhythms came to undergird dance rhythms from Havana to Harlem for this was the birthplace of African-American music.

E.W. Kemble 1885

The 1804 liberation of Sainte Domingue, later to become Haiti, brought the largest influx of Afro-Caribbean drums and musical sensibilities to the scene, as thousands of those freed slaves ended up in New Orleans, many after a stop in Cuba or being pirated on their way to Cuba to be sold in North America’s largest slave market in New Orleans. Then in 1809, some 9,000 refugees who had a spent a decade-plus in eastern Cuba were being expelled by the island’s Spanish governor, most made their way to New Orleans. The large influx of French speakers would significantly temper the cultural dominance of the fast arriving northern Protestants to the big City.

Louisiana Purchase:

As Louisiana became the 18th state in 1812, New Orleans was a city we would recognize. Townsfolk continued to gather around the square on Sunday afternoons to watch the dancing. In 1819, the celebrated architect Benjamin Latrobe, awoke upon his first night in New Orleans to a foggy on the “Isle of Orleans.” He wrote in his journal:

Although he found them “savage”^, he was amazed at the sight of five or six hundred unsupervised slaves who assembled for dancing. He described them as ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts, with fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirting about the performers’ legs and arms. The women, one onlooker reported, wore, each according to her means, the newest fashions in silk, gauze, muslin, and percale dresses. The males covered themselves in oriental and Indian dress and covered themselves only with a sash of the same sort wrapped around the body. Except for that, they went naked.

One witness noted that clusters of onlookers, musicians, and dancers represented tribal groupings, with each nation taking their place in different parts of the square. The musicians used a range of instruments from available cultures: drums, gourds, banjo-like instruments, and quillpipes made from reeds strung together like pan flutes, as well as marimbas and European instruments such as the violin, tambourines, and triangles.

Latrobe later recorded his impression of the music and dance taking place on Sunday in Congo Square. The dancers, Latrobe noted, were formed into two circular groups

Writer H.C. Knight on visiting the city in 1819 wrote:

According to author Nick Sublette, this is the first use of “rock,” as verb and metaphor, in the manner that would a century and a half later become common to music and youth culture worldwide and places New Orleans at the nexus of not only the birth of jazz but rock music as well. A fitting citation for where the first synthesis of African American music was being formed.

African versus American born slaves

During the 1810s the pirate Jean Lafitte and his men, robbed the slave ships headed for Cuba, beating the embargo imposed by the political powerful Virginians who controlled the domestic market for slaves in the wake of their critical support to the USA outlawing the importation of slaves directly from Africa.

The Drums are Silenced

As the northern protestant culture clashed with the French Spanish Creole synthesis of New Orleans a crackdown beginning in the 1830s on Congo Square sharpened until, in the 1850s, when the city council banned beating drums, blowing horns, and even public dances held without the mayor’s permission. The great influx of French speaking refugees from the Haitian revolution had forestalled the Protestant clampdown on the Congo Square jams, afterall Congo Square wasn’t opposite the English-speaking part of town; it was opposite the French- and Spanish-speaking part of town. However, by the start of the Civil War, most historians believe, Congo Square had fallen silent.

Congo Square could not have been the slaves’ only dancing place. The entire City loved to dance and courtship was inextricably tied to dancing at the numerous New Orleans balls. Despite a battery of ordinances meant to keep them quiescent and confined at home, New Orleans slaves drank and danced nightly in so many illicit taverns, the editor of the Bee complained in 1833, that “Not a street, nor a corner can be passed without encountering [them]. The noise and disturbance is very disagreeable to the neighbors, though it may be profitable to the proprietor.” The New Orleans good-time tradition, the city’s near-universal fondness for music and dancing, combined with the surprisingly porous nature of its racial walls, made every kind of music available to every resident.

In the late 19th century, the square again became a famous musical venue, this time for a series of brass band concerts by orchestras of the area’s “Creole of color” community. Toward the end of the century, the city of New Orleans officially renamed the square as “Beauregard Square” in honor of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. While this name appeared on maps, most locals (especially in the African American community) continued to call it “Congo Square”.

Today we remember the rhythms of these saints through their most famous dances– the Bamboula, the Calinda and the Congo kept alive through Mardi Indian traditions, the 2nd Line and performing companies. The experimental improvisation and polyrhythmic might of this original African cultural synthesis became the shoulders that would make so many 20th century New Orleans musicians immortal. The later musical forms can be heard throughout the world as Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, New Orleans funk and early rock and roll.