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00:00:00 [Music]
00:00:24 Called Treme. Up until 1960s, they tore the houses down and they built this park.
00:00:34 Now, the jazz festivals, you guys have heard about festivals.
00:00:39 Well, those jazz festivals are held way out in the, at this city park, right?
00:00:45 The first jazz festival, New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival,
00:00:50 was held right here and over there and in that auditorium.
00:00:54 And I'm going to show you the grandmaster of that parade work.
00:00:58 19, I believe, 63. That is Duke Ellington, literally, and Mahalia Jackson.
00:01:05 And they're standing right over there.
00:01:07 So that tells you that you are in the place of music.
00:01:11 But this side here and all behind that building, that didn't come until 1945.
00:01:17 That was the Civic Auditorium. All that space and this space is called Congress Square.
00:01:23 Excuse me. Sorry about that. No, I'm sorry.
00:01:26 The drum was illegal for the slave to use.
00:01:31 But this was not America.
00:01:34 Ha ha, shit.
00:01:36 We got shade over here. You guys can have a seat over in this shade while I break this down to you.
00:01:40 And then we move through the park.
00:01:42 I think we got enough shade over here. If not, we go to the middle.
00:01:46 But in America, the drum was... That's enough shade.
00:01:50 Yes, that's shade.
00:01:52 In America, it was illegal to use the drum.
00:01:56 Because the slaves, or the West Africans didn't even have music in their vocabulary.
00:02:05 They used music to cook, clean, do everything.
00:02:09 And the drum was essential because it communicated a message.
00:02:12 Therefore, on that side, I like to say that side, the United States, turning into the United States, colonies and everything, they had slaves.
00:02:20 They did not even see the slave as having a soul.
00:02:24 Here, in the French territory, 1700s on, they baptize them Catholic.
00:02:31 That's important because you humanize the slave.
00:02:35 So the decisions they made between black and white, free and slave, etc., whatever, were a whole lot different than on that side.
00:02:40 I'm going to make a lot of references to this side and that side because this was France and Spain for the longest period of time.
00:02:47 You know the French founded this.
00:02:49 But they were not the French-Parisian type.
00:02:51 Right around here, when Scott Saunders said, "Oui, oui, oui."
00:02:54 No, no, no!
00:02:56 They were French-Canadian folks.
00:02:58 They settled in Quebec, above New Hampshire, 1603.
00:03:02 Came down the river and settled this.
00:03:04 The first settlement was Biloxi, not this place down here.
00:03:07 There was no Mississippi. There was Biloxi Indian tribes.
00:03:10 Then they jumped over to Mobile. There was no Alabama. There was a Mobilean tribe.
00:03:14 The party didn't start until they got back here, 1718.
00:03:17 Once they get here, they get their slaves off the dock.
00:03:20 They look at the way they cook and eat.
00:03:22 They say, "Wow, they got this okra plant they boil all the time.
00:03:26 They got this crushed red pepper in there.
00:03:28 They put rice. They brought rice to this region, part of America.
00:03:33 The black women swallowed the grains in their hair.
00:03:39 [laughter]
00:03:41 And the seeds for the okra.
00:03:43 And they planted it when they got it.
00:03:45 Come on now, right?
00:03:47 They were thinking ahead.
00:03:48 Right! And now, all of a sudden, you have the Native American here.
00:03:52 They're into the sassafras, which are dried up, boiled back in.
00:03:55 I ate the base of it. I love it.
00:03:57 I think the French government, the culinary experts,
00:03:59 they cut it in one piece and they eat it.
00:04:02 And they call this dish gumbo.
00:04:04 Gumbo is African, Bantu word means okra.
00:04:07 So we talk about America being a melting pot.
00:04:10 No, this was really the melting pot.
00:04:12 They're taking everything off that dock right away,
00:04:14 putting it into a microwave and shaking it up and serving it.
00:04:17 The race, the religion, and obviously the music was all mixed up.
00:04:21 Because if you don't let the drum be used on that side,
00:04:25 actually in Carolina, Virginia maybe, they had laws that said this.
00:04:30 You get your hand cut off if you use a drum.
00:04:32 And they exercised this in many cases to prove examples.
00:04:36 That's why tap dance developed the way it did in America.
00:04:39 Slaves would go to the porches, throw sand on the porches,
00:04:41 and work that out with their feet.
00:04:43 And then all the time later, you put taps on there,
00:04:47 you have what Fred Astaire was doing later.
00:04:50 So that was actually, but they didn't have to do that.
00:04:53 Because in this one area--
00:04:55 What's up, Mark?
00:04:57 They let them use the drum.
00:05:00 For 200 years, groups of 500 and 600 every Sunday, right here.
00:05:06 In America, it was illegal for more than five slaves
00:05:09 to be off the plantation and in the location.
00:05:13 Yet, you're going to let 500 and 600. You see the point?
00:05:16 This was a whole different trajectory.
00:05:19 So now if you let them do that,
00:05:21 the West African came in with three different musical techniques.
00:05:26 One was call and response in their music.
00:05:29 Are you aware of what call and response is?
00:05:31 Oh yeah, because it's like they had a speaker in West Africa,
00:05:36 a place where they speak in and they allow for interaction
00:05:39 between the audience and the speaker or the singer or performer.
00:05:43 It permeates into the music this way, the instruments.
00:05:47 That's not a European trait in music.
00:05:50 Now the other one was that you're thinking,
00:05:52 do them songs in the major scale.
00:05:55 See, if any of you play instruments, what do you play?
00:05:59 Ooh, that's a rough one.
00:06:01 Oh, but they use the pentatonic scale.
00:06:06 See, he knows.
00:06:07 When you flat that third and take out that fourth,
00:06:11 and you jump to the fifth and the sixth,
00:06:13 you have a whole different scale.
00:06:14 You're actually shorting it and stunting it.
00:06:17 Actually, it makes for a more mysterious sound in reality.
00:06:21 That makes up with soul music.
00:06:23 You can go to Marvin Gaye tunes,
00:06:25 particularly one, "Inner City Blues," the bass line that goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:06:30 That's in the pentatonic scale.
00:06:32 If you do the research and look at all the West African-American music,
00:06:36 if you call it that way, it's all within that.
00:06:39 But the major difference between European and the West African,
00:06:43 third African-American or whatever, is the use of rhythm.
00:06:48 Because the Europeans did their songs with emphasis on the major beats.
00:06:53 Western counting goes one and two and three and four.
00:06:58 The West African emphasized something on the "and,"
00:07:05 maybe during the third part of the measure.
00:07:08 Yes, and what it does is it throws things off.
00:07:12 It's more than da-da-da, da-da.
00:07:15 So to the European, i.e., white folks in America,
00:07:18 they say the sentence is named "That is some raggedy timing."
00:07:22 Raggedy timing!
00:07:24 Well, you know what ragtime music is.
00:07:26 You've heard it before.
00:07:27 That is how ragtime music got its name.
00:07:31 They perceived it as rag--
00:07:33 Now, most of us know who Scotch Alphorn was, right?
00:07:36 Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da.
00:07:39 That's ragtime music, but he did not create ragtime.
00:07:42 Ragtime already existed.
00:07:44 In fact, when you get into the conversation of jazz, blues, rock and roll,
00:07:49 no, that's West African syncopated music.
00:07:52 We'll call it jazz or blues for the moment,
00:07:56 but in reality, that already existed.
00:07:59 He was from Texarkana.
00:08:01 Have you heard of Texarkana before?
00:08:03 You have?
00:08:05 Well, help, Phil!
00:08:08 [laughter]
00:08:10 Ah!
00:08:12 Fort Reynolds!
00:08:14 Oh, he went there in his Trans Am.
00:08:16 Oh, get out of here.
00:08:18 Did he have a monkey in that too or something?
00:08:20 A chip?
00:08:21 No, that was the second one.
00:08:23 Oh, good Lord.
00:08:24 How sick were they in the '70s?
00:08:26 They were sick!
00:08:28 So the reality is, he was born there.
00:08:31 He had a German professor named Julius Weiss.
00:08:34 He learned classical piano by the time he was 14.
00:08:37 And when he moved out of there and went on a ragtime circuit
00:08:40 that already existed from Texas to this state to Mississippi
00:08:44 to Tennessee and back to Arkansas.
00:08:47 So it existed.
00:08:48 He got famous because he stopped in Sedalia, Missouri and lived.
00:08:53 And he lived there and he worked at a club called the Maple Leaf Club.
00:08:58 You ever heard of a song called Maple Leaf Rag?
00:09:02 Yeah, there we go. He's the musician.
00:09:04 That song, he was playing in the club one day at the Maple Leaf Club
00:09:10 and this older white gentleman walked in named John Stark.
00:09:13 And he sat down and heard it.
00:09:15 He said, "Wait a minute. You wrote this? That's your music?"
00:09:18 "Yes." He said, "I'm about to get into the music publishing business.
00:09:22 Why don't you come over here and meet with me at my candy store around the corner
00:09:26 and we'll talk business."
00:09:28 Well, what wind up from that is the first contracts signed between publishers and artists.
00:09:38 He became the first popular musician because they sold the song.
00:09:43 Maple Leaf Rag, that's the cover.
00:09:46 Those are the biggest cakewalk dances of the day.
00:09:49 This is probably about 1890.
00:09:51 A million copies in New York City.
00:09:54 When he went over to meet the man, he brought a little black child with him, 8 years old, right?
00:10:00 So he says, "What's he doing here?"
00:10:02 He says, "You'll find out."
00:10:04 The kid started doing these dance steps to the syncopated rhythms he was playing.
00:10:08 He was classicizing ragtime music no different than Mozart would with the minuet
00:10:14 or Beethoven with the waltz or whatnot.
00:10:17 He was very sophisticated because he could write this down
00:10:20 and he was doing the cakewalk dance.
00:10:22 Have you heard of the cakewalk?
00:10:24 You ever heard of the cakewalk?
00:10:26 I'm going to show you the cakewalk in 1909.
00:10:30 From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
00:10:33 These are black folks in 19th City, New York, by the way.
00:10:36 Madison Square Garden when it was down on 23rd Street and Broadway.
00:10:41 And that's the cakewalk.
00:10:43 See the cane that's high-packed?
00:10:46 It's sort of like ballroom dancing type thing.
00:10:49 They did this on the plantation 70 years ago.
00:10:53 Why? Because the slave that took him on that side was brought over here
00:10:57 and cut off from his African past.
00:11:00 He could not use his language.
00:11:02 He could not do the drum and et cetera.
00:11:04 He was being shaped and modeled to be what the master wanted him to be.
00:11:09 So what he did was he observed the master and his homies on a Saturday night.
00:11:15 See them get out of the carriage with the top hat and the cane and the leg?
00:11:19 And they're going to the crib and they're doing their ballroom.
00:11:21 They're getting up. They're doing it.
00:11:23 So they wanted to be.
00:11:25 So what they did is they went to the slave boy and said,
00:11:29 "Around the fire Saturday night, so let's do this."
00:11:32 You got the cane, that's the stick.
00:11:34 Boom, rock.
00:11:35 Maybe a dusty hat and a jacket.
00:11:36 And they're trying to work this out.
00:11:38 But they can't do it up the corner.
00:11:40 Because as they're working out that ballroom dancing,
00:11:43 every now and then, the singing comes in.
00:11:46 Oh, help me, Lord. Oh, help me, Lord.
00:11:48 Ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:11:51 Help me, Lord. Right?
00:11:52 So what you're looking at is a hybrid of a dance.
00:11:55 At some point, the master comes out and sees them doing it.
00:11:59 And his first response is, "I wish I could do that."
00:12:03 So, no, think about it.
00:12:05 It's more than a dance.
00:12:07 It shows you the cultural, intercultural transmission
00:12:10 between the two races that still exist today.
00:12:13 From the beginning, it was always them imitating them imitating them.
00:12:17 That is like a sociological study.
00:12:20 Now, the master got slick.
00:12:22 He said, "I bet my slaves could out dance the slaves of the National Day of Peace.
00:12:26 Let's have a contest."
00:12:28 It became southern-wide, eventually nationwide.
00:12:32 And the slaves did not win money, a trophy, or a shot on the Oprah Winfrey show.
00:12:38 No. They won a cake.
00:12:40 The prize was a cake.
00:12:42 Hence the cake walk.
00:12:44 Now, the cake walk became the basis of vaudeville, early American entertainment, 1890s.
00:12:52 And vaudeville was based on the cake walk and ragtime music.
00:12:57 Now, in the 1920s, in New York City, it becomes the Charleston dance.
00:13:01 You've ever heard of the Charleston?
00:13:03 The Charleston dance was named after black migrants migrating to Harlem
00:13:09 and doing that dance in Harlem where he basically lived.
00:13:13 Yeah, up 1818th Street.
00:13:16 Why? Because James P. Johnson, the great striped pianist of Harlem in the 1920s,
00:13:21 would see them in the club doing this dance.
00:13:23 What they were doing was a derivative of the cake walk they brought up from down south.
00:13:29 But now this new slick jazz in New York is swinging them in a different direction.
00:13:34 Hence the Charleston.
00:13:36 And now it becomes a country-wide dance.
00:13:39 But now, ten years later, I should say, it becomes something different.
00:13:46 Because now you have the swing era coming in.
00:13:50 And during the swing era, you had all these things going on in New York.
00:13:57 By the way, in Harlem again, look at this, I'm going through his neighborhood.
00:14:06 In Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom.
00:14:09 Now I'm talking 145th Street and Lenox.
00:14:14 145th and Lenox.
00:14:16 You know where this is too.
00:14:18 They were doing this.
00:14:20 Now, here's the Lindy Hop because it turns into the Lindy Hop.
00:14:23 Now you are hearing the syncopated rhythm and the call and response and everything.
00:14:30 And when they start to dance, you're going to see how this works out.
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00:16:44 This is black people's version of the ballroom dancing.
00:16:51 But it's the same concept of the K-pop.
00:16:55 Instead of doing ballroom dancing the European way,
00:17:01 they're throwing them all across the room.
00:17:03 This is the Lindy Hop.
00:17:06 But also, it's driven by swing music.
00:17:10 You hear those horn hits?
00:17:18 That's swing.
00:17:21 Swing music. Swing jazz.
00:17:23 So it's propelling them into these positions.
00:17:27 And the same thing happened on the plantation.
00:17:31 As they're doing the walks, the other thing's creeping in.
00:17:35 So again, it's a replication of...
00:17:37 Look at this face.
00:17:39 [laughter]
00:17:41 He will.
00:17:42 Did he throw up in there? Did she throw him yet?
00:17:44 She picked him up.
00:17:46 He's the same as now.
00:17:48 Yeah.
00:17:50 Not quite as organized.
00:17:52 That was really organized.
00:17:54 And they're doing this on Saturday nights
00:17:57 as a competition in Harlem.
00:17:59 But they're getting $10 for it now.
00:18:02 Ooh.
00:18:03 It wasn't 1941.
00:18:05 The whole point of American music is the mix.
00:18:13 And no other place is better than here.
00:18:17 Because that gumbo example I gave you
00:18:19 comes into play here.
00:18:21 First of all, Wynter Marsalis.
00:18:23 We've heard of Wynter Marsalis.
00:18:25 You heard of Wynter Marsalis, the trumpet player?
00:18:27 Jazz man?
00:18:29 I've probably heard of him.
00:18:31 He says, and he's from New Orleans,
00:18:33 you can trace all aspects of American music
00:18:35 back to Congress Square in New Orleans.
00:18:38 Now I actually heard him say this in New York City.
00:18:41 I was backstage at Lincoln Center where he ran the jam.
00:18:44 My father was working there as the drummer.
00:18:47 And I doubted him.
00:18:49 I said, you're just saying that because you're from New Orleans.
00:18:51 But I've been here 10 years.
00:18:53 Came down here and found out my mother was raised
00:18:55 right here in Treme.
00:18:57 And my great-great-grandmother was a slave in the French Quarter.
00:18:59 Everything on my mother's side comes from New Orleans.
00:19:02 So now I understand what he's saying.
00:19:04 Because if you let them develop those three West African elements
00:19:09 and all that free experience here,
00:19:13 America owes this place a debt.
00:19:16 Because the French and the Spanish allowed them
00:19:19 to continue West African culture freely.
00:19:23 Now they got this thing that they say,
00:19:25 "Well, jazz, I hear jazz was born in New Orleans."
00:19:28 You've heard this, right?
00:19:30 Not just New Orleans, right where we're standing.
00:19:34 It narrows it down for them.
00:19:36 Because if they're allowed to participate in that for 200 years,
00:19:40 it gets refined.
00:19:42 Let's go this way for a second.
00:19:44 And I'm going to--
00:19:45 Now, they're liable.
00:19:48 What's a debt owe you?
00:19:50 What's a debt?
00:19:51 What is a debt?
00:19:53 I mean, if you're going to have a liable, you have a debt, right?
00:19:56 Nobody's telling me what a debt owe you.
00:19:58 [laughs]
00:20:02 I'm just going to tell you all about this.
00:20:06 Why?
00:20:07 Because.
00:20:09 Obviously, the Jamas Indians and other tribes met here
00:20:15 and celebrated the coming of the coin harvest.
00:20:18 And they also had marketplaces here for 400 or 500 years.
00:20:22 And they celebrated it through song and dance.
00:20:26 So this place has a strange, interesting history to it.
00:20:30 But in the West African times, or slave period,
00:20:34 or French and colonial Spain,
00:20:36 what you had here was something interesting.
00:20:39 You had a man by the name of George Washington Cable, a great writer.
00:20:44 He's from the Garden District.
00:20:46 His house is a landmark on 7th Street.
00:20:48 He was second only to Mark Twain with his pen.
00:20:51 And that says a lot.
00:20:53 Now, he was good friends with Mark Twain.
00:20:55 Mark Twain used to drink at Absinthe House.
00:20:57 His name is on the wall on Berta Street.
00:21:00 He wrote an article--this guy did--
00:21:02 because they brought him up here when he was 14 or 13 years old,
00:21:06 a little kid, 1840s, to see this on the South.
00:21:10 And it stuck in his mind.
00:21:12 And he becomes a great writer.
00:21:14 He's going to put it in print.
00:21:16 "Dance in a Place Called Congo Square," you can Google the article.
00:21:19 And it's an 1871 Century Illustrated New York magazine.
00:21:23 And these shots show up.
00:21:25 "Dance in a Place Called Congo Square" shows up.
00:21:28 And Edward Kimball, the one that did the artwork for Huckleberry Pimple, did this sketch.
00:21:32 In this sketch, there's a wall.
00:21:35 That wall is actually Burgundy Street
00:21:37 because when the Spanish inherited this place in the 1630s,
00:21:40 they built that wall around the city.
00:21:42 They did not get along with Indians the way that the French did.
00:21:45 Now, what does it appear to be behind that wall?
00:21:49 What's that look like?
00:21:51 [indistinct chatter]
00:21:55 That could be--you see what I'm saying?
00:21:57 That is that.
00:21:59 And that is a smaller version of that tree.
00:22:03 So this is empirical evidence that they were here.
00:22:06 That's an 1800s sketch.
00:22:08 And what I like to point out is that they're jumping over the wall after church.
00:22:13 Oh, they were baptized Catholics, I see.
00:22:17 The churches were integrated from 1720.
00:22:20 It took until 1950, '58 to be precise,
00:22:23 to even think about integrating churches.
00:22:26 And Billy Graham was the reason why in Charleston, South Carolina.
00:22:31 He actually brought a black minister from Cleveland, Ohio,
00:22:36 and entered him into his flock.
00:22:38 That's integration. But that's 1958.
00:22:40 They were already integrated in these churches.
00:22:43 So they're jumping the wall after church
00:22:46 and coming over here to do boogie.
00:22:49 After church!
00:22:51 And goes to five and six hundred!
00:22:53 You can't tell me the French and the Spanish don't know that.
00:22:56 And what I like to call it is a matter of winky-winky.
00:23:01 They're looking the other way.
00:23:04 Now, you're going to put a slave's hand off over there for using the drum.
00:23:09 Over here, they go, "I like it. Keep playing."
00:23:13 That sets the standard for the development of the music.
00:23:16 Now, you cannot separate the West African religion from its music.
00:23:23 Then or now, because of this.
00:23:27 They were doing voodoo.
00:23:29 You know what voodoo is about.
00:23:31 That's the adherence to the spirit world.
00:23:33 To a greater degree than a Christian or a Catholic.
00:23:37 Because they believed in a supreme being,
00:23:39 but they didn't really go to it that way.
00:23:41 They were relegated to the spirit world.
00:23:43 Where they have to sing and dance and ritual.
00:23:47 They summoned the spirits to enter the human body and then leave them.
00:23:51 That was not a European practice of religion.
00:23:54 So, they had a problem in these churches early on.
00:23:58 They said, "You can pray to Saint Peter. He's right over there."
00:24:00 No.
00:24:02 The voodooist says, "Wait a minute. I got like three saints in my oracle where I come from that do the same thing Peter does with you."
00:24:08 They syncretized the religions from day one.
00:24:11 They were voodooist and Catholic and in many cases still are today.
00:24:15 And it's the synchronization that's a heavy, high-falutin' education for us.
00:24:20 I call it Winky Winky.
00:24:22 It's Winky Winky.
00:24:23 Because this is Winky Winky land.
00:24:26 It's Winky Winky when you can drive up and get a daiquiri out of a damn window.
00:24:30 You know you're not supposed to be doing that.
00:24:32 This is Winky Winky land.
00:24:34 Don't drink it too far.
00:24:36 Well, here's the reality.
00:24:37 If they had that going.
00:24:39 Marie Laveau, by the way, was the voodoo queen.
00:24:41 Have you heard about this woman?
00:24:43 Her house was 1022 Saint Anne around that corner.
00:24:46 She was baptized in that church.
00:24:48 Isn't that odd?
00:24:50 She was baptized in that church and attended every Sunday under Father Antoine.
00:24:54 But after church, she would go to that house, come around this corner, change her church clothes with no shoes on,
00:25:00 a white robe and a white head wrap with two snakes around her neck right here and preside over the voodoo center.
00:25:07 And for 40 years.
00:25:09 That's pretty impressive.
00:25:11 For somebody that was standing here, I'd be freaked out.
00:25:13 Right.
00:25:14 And then after it finished, some of them back to church to partake in holy water.
00:25:20 This place was like a wall.
00:25:25 And see, it was so strange that they did not, they allowed things here that would never have gone on in America.
00:25:32 Case in point, this was a penal colony.
00:25:36 Now, were you guys aware of that?
00:25:38 Because a lot of it is not in our American history books, right?
00:25:42 They brought over here, Louis XIV said, I need settlers over here to make this a European country.
00:25:47 The people in France said, no, man, I'm not getting on the boat.
00:25:50 We want nowhere to do nothing like that.
00:25:52 So we went to the jails in Paris, released the robbers, rapists and murderers.
00:25:56 And then he teamed them with the prostitutes he got from the streets and put them in handcuffs.
00:26:01 And took them to Catholic churches in Paris and married these people in handcuffs.
00:26:06 And sent them over here to start a family and especially get a leave of the beaver out of that.
00:26:11 And it was so out of control that the governor here, the enviolator, right back to the king and say,
00:26:17 in 1725, we messed up. I'm going to have to kill some of these people.
00:26:21 They're out of control.
00:26:23 He set this up in Jackson Square, fought the theocenic church,
00:26:28 and did it European style, broke them on the wheel, cut them up,
00:26:32 and let their bodies be there for five days at a time as a deterrent.
00:26:36 But this is more twisted.
00:26:38 They hired a slave to be the executioner.
00:26:42 Thank you. This is, she's in her face.
00:26:44 Exactly. Exactly.
00:26:46 His name was Louis Congo.
00:26:48 You could look, you could Google this man and you will find a lot of information on him.
00:26:53 They said, look, he had been a slave in the Portuguese system.
00:26:57 And therefore he was literate.
00:26:59 They took him off the plantation, offered him a contract.
00:27:03 They knew he could read. They said, look, $40 you get for everybody you execute for us on this wheel.
00:27:09 $20 if you just have to torture.
00:27:12 And then you get like a house on Bayou Road and you're free by the king's hand.
00:27:19 And he has the nerve to say, I don't know. I think I want more.
00:27:22 Like he's signing an NBA contract.
00:27:25 No one's bonus. This is wrong with you.
00:27:28 I want an endless supply of alcohol, wine and spirits into that house if I do this job because I got to get drunk after.
00:27:33 I was going to say probably. Yeah.
00:27:35 And they gave it to him. 15 years he was a state executioner right there.
00:27:39 There's stuff written about him. This is not, this is a real guy.
00:27:42 Do you see the priest giving the last rites to the person who's killing?
00:27:47 In Jackson Square.
00:27:49 Now he executed slaves, Native Americans, but mostly European settlers, which is more.
00:27:56 Wait a minute. What movie you want to see about slavery?
00:28:00 They got you already know. Think about this.
00:28:03 What you going to call your church, Miss?
00:28:06 I'm going to call it versus the guy.
00:28:10 You see how we're working it out. OK, it's cool.
00:28:13 So what next? I got to have music.
00:28:15 So I'm bringing my black jazz band in.
00:28:19 Are you crazy, lady? Have you lost your mind?
00:28:21 And the first people complain about it was black people because they said, wait a minute.
00:28:26 It's 1915. Slavery's over. We're trying to matriculate into mainstream.
00:28:30 So don't you be bringing that devil's music in here.
00:28:33 She said, devil's music. She whipped out the Bible on him quick and opened it to Psalm 150.
00:28:40 It says, make a joyous noise unto the Lord.
00:28:43 Now, back up. Hit it, boys. So they get it in.
00:28:47 They're working it out, baby. It's on, right?
00:28:50 But then she's up there on her own heart. And I see photographs of this.
00:28:54 She got a statue of Black Hawk. That was a great Native American war.
00:28:58 But now she done made him a saint.
00:29:00 And over on the left side, on the right side, she got a statue of Peter.
00:29:06 And she stands in the middle preaching, prophesying and medianship, if you will,
00:29:10 claiming to have Jesus Christ leanings.
00:29:14 And then in the middle of her sermons, snakes start falling out of her purse.
00:29:18 Look at her face. I love her expression. She's like, whoa, baby. But it's true.
00:29:24 All right, you had me until the snakes started.
00:29:26 No, but I'm saying, but that's what really went on. But she got around that.
00:29:29 Because here in Congo Square, and before they summoned the spirits with the voodoo queen or whomever,
00:29:36 and the music, they would put two snakes there.
00:29:40 They're pythons. They represent a bridge between heaven and earth for the human being, for these people.
00:29:44 The snake sheds its skin every two or three months. It's a pure specimen.
00:29:49 If you go back in ancient African thoughts, religiously, to Negroid Egyptians on the Nile,
00:29:55 who raised those pyramids, they had an Egyptian mystery system,
00:29:59 which was the first system of salvation of the soul known to mankind.
00:30:04 This is before Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, 3,000 years.
00:30:08 And they thought the snake was the first primordial being on earth, baby.
00:30:13 A life-giving force. The Pharaoh wore one on his head.
00:30:18 See, the African always had a different take on the snake than you do.
00:30:22 Because in the Bible, he's not a nice guy.
00:30:24 He's supposed to teach Adam and Eve how to make applesauce or something like that.
00:30:28 I'm in the right ballpark. Look. He said, no, man, no.
00:30:31 But the reality is, they're mixing it here.
00:30:37 She's making spiritual gold.
00:30:40 She goes to Chicago, Illinois, 1925, 21, and starts for these churches on the south side.
00:30:47 Then she goes to the north side and recruits white women in the Midwest and offers them a deal.
00:30:53 She said, listen, for a dollar less, I can teach you ladies how to become a medium.
00:30:57 They do it and they like it.
00:31:00 Then she says, wait a minute.
00:31:02 I can teach you ladies for another dollar less and train you to become a pastor of a church.
00:31:07 There were no female pastors in America.
00:31:10 She's creating them in the Midwest.
00:31:13 And now what you have is white folks in the Midwest, some of them, doing the reverse cakewalk.
00:31:19 They're emulating this religion.
00:31:22 You have the spiritualist movement of the '60s, '30s that starts to spread.
00:31:27 Then 10 revivals and all of that comes out of this.
00:31:30 And there's a thin line between what voodoo is, voodoo, holiness churches, all the way up to what a Pentecostal church is like.
00:31:38 You know what a Pentecostal church is like?
00:31:40 A lot of music.
00:31:42 About 80 percent, right?
00:31:44 They got a preacher. But is he just a preacher?
00:31:47 He's summoning the spirit. So people speak in what? Tongues?
00:31:52 That is achieving spirit possession in a voodoo ceremony.
00:31:56 That's really what that is.
00:31:58 They're not calling it that.
00:32:00 And in Kentucky and even in Manchester, England, they will be swinging snakes at you in church.
00:32:07 Yes, snake handlers.
00:32:09 Yes, they do.
00:32:11 That's voodoo. They're practicing Christianity under the guise of voodoo and don't even know it.
00:32:16 And black people are no different.
00:32:18 They call it Baptist churches in America, right?
00:32:21 Oh, they right, right.
00:32:22 I'm going to show you how voodoo was.
00:32:25 You ever see the movie The Blues Brothers?
00:32:28 James Brown was in that as Reverend Cleophus in a purple suit on the South Side of Chicago.
00:32:35 He's doing everything. Let's get out of here.
00:32:37 Let's let them use this.
00:32:39 That's a big crowd right there.
00:32:58 Did you see it?
00:33:00 Oh, wow.
00:33:02 That's my favorite.
00:33:12 Okay.
00:33:14 Reverend Cleophus is doing everything West African in that scene.
00:33:19 James Brown is. Why?
00:33:22 Because if you see it for what it is, if I can find it, if you see it for what it is,
00:33:28 James Brown is doing call and response as a preacher.
00:33:32 And when that music hits in that pentatonic scale, baby, those people start to lose control.
00:33:39 He begins to, they flip all over the place.
00:33:43 Is it Dan Aykroyd?
00:33:44 Yeah.
00:33:45 Right.
00:33:46 And now what happens next is even more bizarre.
00:33:50 James Brown was, I mean, Michael Jackson was asked this question.
00:33:54 When you were little, what made you get in the show business?
00:33:58 He said in Gary, Indiana, his mother would take him to, wake him up at nine at night
00:34:05 and put him in front of the television set to watch James Brown perform.
00:34:09 Well, wait a minute.
00:34:11 You watch James Brown perform. What did you think of that?
00:34:16 He said when James Brown did that stuff on TV like that, it looked like he was possessed.
00:34:23 He said that.
00:34:24 Now, here's proof of possession.
00:34:27 James Brown used to get on one leg and go all the way across the stage, right,
00:34:32 even in that movie and in his concerts, and his palm would not move.
00:34:36 It's proof of possession.
00:34:38 It's proof of possession.
00:34:41 Don't you see what I'm saying?
00:34:42 And even the greatest black entertainers, oh, they do the same thing.
00:34:47 Wait a minute. You've heard of Beyonce.
00:34:49 Oh, yeah.
00:34:50 You know she performs under another character they call Sasha.
00:34:57 She says, "I perform under--." That's the same concept.
00:35:02 Now, where do you think her mother's from?
00:35:07 Her mother's from here.
00:35:10 And she's a Creole woman.
00:35:12 She's got a house down here, isn't it?
00:35:15 Her sister got married in America.
00:35:19 Her sister lives here.
00:35:21 Oh, yeah, and they're always here too.
00:35:24 Therefore, they're doing that thing, but it's all a matter of this place feeding the rest of America this stuff.
00:35:38 Jazz grew up in a thousand places, but it was born in New Orleans,
00:35:47 which was in the early 1800s the most cosmopolitan and the most musical city in America.
00:35:57 But New Orleans was also a major center of the slave trade,
00:36:01 still tolerated in a country that had just proclaimed that all men were created equal,
00:36:09 and the descendants of the human beings who were its living currency
00:36:14 would eventually create the most American of art forms, jazz.
00:36:19 The whole conception of improvisation is a part of all of American life.
00:36:35 If you were a slave, you had to learn how to improvise.
00:36:38 You came on the land, you couldn't speak the language,
00:36:41 you had all kinds of foods and stuff you weren't used to eating,
00:36:44 you have another whole system to deal with.
00:36:48 If you can't improvise, you're going to be in a world of trouble.
00:36:51 You're not going to be able to survive.
00:36:54 Jazz is about freedom.
00:37:03 It's about a certain kind of liberation.
00:37:08 Other people, of course, have been oppressed in the United States
00:37:11 or have gone through brutal treatment in the United States,
00:37:15 but only African Americans were enslaved,
00:37:17 only African Americans were legally a people who have a legacy in history,
00:37:22 historical consciousness of having been unfree in a free country.
00:37:27 Beginning in 1817, slaves in New Orleans were permitted to sing and dance
00:37:34 every Sunday afternoon in a place called Congo Square.
00:37:40 To the curious whites, who sometimes turned out to see and hear them,
00:37:46 the slaves' music, filled with complex percussive rhythms,
00:37:50 seemed to provide an authentic glimpse of Africa.
00:37:55 But most of the slaves in Congo Square had never seen Africa.
00:38:03 Many were recent arrivals from the West Indies,
00:38:07 their music filled with the infectious pulse of the Caribbean.
00:38:12 Other slaves had been brought to the city from the interior of the American South.
00:38:31 Bringing with them work songs, spirituals,
00:38:35 and the call and response of the Baptist church.
00:38:40 Dark cloud rising, hey! Dark cloud rising, hey! Dark cloud rising, hey!
00:38:45 There's always time to go and die! That's the sign of the good man!
00:38:48 Hey! That's the sign of the good man! Hey! That's the sign of the good man!
00:38:52 There's always time to go and die!
00:38:56 I heard a disturbing sound.
00:38:59 What I heard was the jingle jangles of a thousand lost souls.
00:39:05 That's the call and response, right?
00:39:07 I'm talking about the souls of more than many women,
00:39:10 the part of them that's lying.
00:39:13 Wait a minute!
00:39:15 Those lost, angry souls roaming unseen over the earth,
00:39:21 seeking a divine light, they'll not find.
00:39:26 Because it's too late, too late,
00:39:31 for them to ever see again the light they once chose not to follow.
00:39:37 All right, all right. Don't be lost when the time comes.
00:39:40 Oh, and this music hits.
00:39:42 For the day of the Lord cometh, and a thief in the night.
00:39:48 Hey!
00:39:52 That's all call and response.
00:39:54 Look at that, man!
00:39:57 Well, well, well!
00:39:59 Here comes that pentatonic scale!
00:40:02 Now, look at what happens to these people.
00:40:05 They're losing it.
00:40:07 This is a brutal aspect.
00:40:11 You see where I'm going with this.
00:40:13 Now, they call this a Baptist church.
00:40:15 Hello!
00:40:22 Yeah.
00:40:24 You see that?
00:40:29 And now they're syncopating rhythms with the scale.
00:40:33 All of it. This is all West African.
00:40:37 Now, they're supposed to be in church.
00:40:40 Sounds like church to me.
00:40:42 This is a sanctified church, but it's voodooized.
00:40:47 [music]
00:41:00 This is what a voodoo ceremony looks like on Sunday evening.
00:41:04 And you can say you're here where it started.
00:41:06 Yeah, right.
00:41:08 Look at him. Is he out of control?
00:41:10 Okay.
00:41:14 Baptist, Pentecostal, whatever you want to call it, these are voodoo elements.
00:41:20 So, it's important to see that if they let these people do this,
00:41:26 what they did rubbed off on the Frenchmen and the Spaniards.
00:41:30 You can go into any church in Louisiana like this, right?
00:41:33 And guess what?
00:41:35 They have statues of saints everywhere in the church.
00:41:39 Jesus has a statue a third of the size tucked in the corner of the room.
00:41:43 He's not behind the altar.
00:41:45 He's supposed to be.
00:41:47 Not here in Louisiana.
00:41:49 Because they went to the voodoo aspect.
00:41:52 The spirit world. Half the streets are named after saints in the French world.
00:41:57 What's the name of the football team?
00:41:59 Saints.
00:42:00 They got Saints fever!
00:42:02 You understand?
00:42:04 So, people ask me about the music and the voodoo.
00:42:07 You do not separate it with duetta.
00:42:10 Because it permeates even the jazz that you see.
00:42:14 So, now, to show you that it still exists, right?
00:42:18 Here's proof of it. Once again, I'm going to use a football example.
00:42:22 Now, you know what it is? Have you seen the Superdome?
00:42:25 You know what that is?
00:42:27 I've never seen it on TV, but what do you know it is?
00:42:29 It's about four blocks, eight blocks from here.
00:42:32 And it's built on a graveyard.
00:42:34 That's a problem.
00:42:36 This is a spiritualized city.
00:42:39 And they realized in the year 2000, there was a problem.
00:42:44 This is...
00:42:46 Hello!
00:42:47 And that... Well, here's how it worked out.
00:42:50 Because the person that knew that was him.
00:42:53 Tom Benson. He owned the Saints.
00:42:55 A billionaire, a white man, and a Catholic!
00:42:58 And he realized...
00:43:00 We built on a graveyard with curse.
00:43:02 I pay these players, they work hard.
00:43:05 And there's no reason why we shouldn't have won a playoff game at least in my 31 years.
00:43:10 But he knew they're cursed.
00:43:13 Because the Gerrard Street graveyard on that side was the American side.
00:43:17 It was the Protestant side.
00:43:19 They said they moved the bodies in 1950, but they lied.
00:43:24 Because they built the Superdome in 1970.
00:43:27 In 1980, they were digging around and they found like 100 bodies in the yellow field pit.
00:43:31 All the upper upper-leagues in the world.
00:43:33 Rational, educated people came on TV and said, "You lied."
00:43:37 "You told us you moved the bodies."
00:43:40 "Why would you build a football stadium that could hold 100,000 people?"
00:43:44 "With bodies under it, with the dome on it, and expect to win a football game?"
00:43:48 "That's why the Saints suck!"
00:43:51 "That's what they told the owner."
00:43:53 And the city! And all the city had to say, "Well, you know, you're right."
00:43:56 "But we can assure you that no bodies buried past the 10 yard line."
00:44:00 "Is this going to help? This is about to help?"
00:44:03 "Look, right, right!"
00:44:04 "There's none in the red zone."
00:44:05 "Which side?"
00:44:06 "Or there's none in the red zone."
00:44:07 So now what happened was, they blew it.
00:44:10 They used to come to the games with bags on their heads.
00:44:13 The Saints. Remember that?
00:44:15 The Apes.
00:44:16 That's why they did it.
00:44:17 Because they knew they were cursed.
00:44:19 But all of that changed because in the year 2000, the owner said, "I've got to do something about this."
00:44:24 "I have no choice but to consult with the black voodoo queen of the whole region."
00:44:30 Her name, and they probably paid her $200,000.
00:44:34 This is Ava Kay Jones.
00:44:36 She's at the 50 yard line in year 2000.
00:44:39 The St. Louis Rams are on the other side of the field.
00:44:42 Kurt Warner's quarterback.
00:44:44 Playoff!
00:44:46 But this is the voodoo queen at the 50 yard line.
00:44:49 What does she have on her neck?
00:44:51 "A snake."
00:44:52 Hello!
00:44:53 I'm sorry.
00:44:54 She don't want anything.
00:44:55 She got, wait a minute, the voodoo band.
00:44:57 You see that?
00:44:58 Under her skirt she has Gordon's Dry Gin.
00:45:01 Of pints.
00:45:02 She's got to go to the 50 yard line and pour part of it out as an offering to the ancestors.
00:45:09 Because her whole reason for being there is to appease the ancestors.
00:45:13 To say, "We're sorry, we built it on top of you."
00:45:15 "And we played football on you, but please let us win this game."
00:45:18 Because they thought the Poltergeists were causing the fumbles.
00:45:22 The misdiction and the something.
00:45:24 Right to right is good, people believe that.
00:45:27 So she goes, "Done, right?"
00:45:29 And Kurt Warner's the quarterback.
00:45:31 He's looking at this like, "Wait, whoa, whoa."
00:45:33 And he's heavily Christian, right?
00:45:34 He said, "No, no, no, this ain't right."
00:45:36 So he runs up to the referee and tries to call a timeout.
00:45:39 The game didn't start yet.
00:45:41 Right? Exactly.
00:45:42 Timeout, right?
00:45:43 This has got to be a legal procedure.
00:45:46 But it didn't work.
00:45:47 She finished it, and she got in her car and drove to that church right down the street, St. Jude's.
00:45:53 To meet with the priest.
00:45:54 Why? Because Ava Kay Jones is a devout Catholic.
00:46:00 And that's her priest.
00:46:02 She left the snake in the trunk.
00:46:04 Yeah, because everybody's getting paid.
00:46:07 You got like a bottle of period water, maybe three mice.
00:46:09 These children, right?
00:46:11 But she's in there in front of St. Jude's statue.
00:46:14 The Patriot Saint of Lost Causes.
00:46:17 With the white priest, and a black voodoo lady.
00:46:21 Trying to win a football game.
00:46:23 Praying.
00:46:25 Yeah, she leaves there after an hour, comes here where we just stood,
00:46:30 and goes over more rituals.
00:46:32 Goes out more alcohol, and then goes to Marie Laveau's grave in that cemetery, and finishes up.
00:46:37 She goes again in the car on Basin Street, turns the key, the radio says the saint's just won.
00:46:42 Oh, wow.
00:46:43 CNN sends their plane down here.
00:46:45 And they pick her up and fly to New York.
00:46:47 You can punch this up on YouTube.
00:46:49 She's sitting on CNN.
00:46:50 You know how they have the captions of written language of who's talking?
00:46:53 It says, "Ava Kay Jones, Voodoo Queen of the NFL."
00:46:56 She is documented in Time Magazine and Newsweek for this.
00:47:00 And when she gets back, she goes back to the church, and to the rectory, and hangs out with the priest.
00:47:05 They have pizza and beer.
00:47:08 And they go, "We did it."
00:47:10 We did it!
00:47:12 So they're serious about this.
00:47:14 Therefore, when they take it out to Chicago where her church is,
00:47:19 or it goes out with Louis Armstrong and the rest of them with jazz to Chicago,
00:47:23 I'm telling you that the jazz spread from here and the voodoo, I'm going to tell you that too.
00:47:28 All spread from right where we are.
00:47:30 Let's go this way.
00:47:32 Any questions?
00:47:33 Adewale Adem, and he is the sculptor of this.
00:47:37 He's from Nigeria, and he completed this, I think.
00:47:41 I know it was 2011.
00:47:43 That's me posing in front of this statue with him.
00:47:46 He made this.
00:47:48 He did.
00:47:49 And he actually did that one with his wife that we're going to go check out in a minute.
00:47:53 Oh, wow. That's beautiful.
00:47:55 Crazy.
00:47:56 They do not even speak the same language.
00:47:58 But if they're here early in the period, and the groups of five and six hundred on a Sunday,
00:48:03 they are communicating because they have those three Western African musicals.
00:48:08 I know he's out. The night we got him.
00:48:11 But the reality is, allow them to do that.
00:48:15 And then I asked him, why would he have the scratch?
00:48:18 Those are scars that would put him in that person.
00:48:21 I think he was either a voodoo king or a chief of that tribe.
00:48:26 Have you heard of the singer Seal?
00:48:28 Yeah.
00:48:29 He's got that on his face too.
00:48:31 That's what that is.
00:48:32 I thought it was just a bad concoction.
00:48:34 Or some people say an accident.
00:48:36 Yeah, like he's burned.
00:48:38 No, that's what that was.
00:48:40 He's from Senegal.
00:48:42 Senegambia region to be precise.
00:48:44 And in his tribe, in his order, that's what he represented.
00:48:51 Something significant in his culture.
00:48:53 Then I asked him, okay, you got these drums.
00:48:56 They called this place Congo Square because for a large period of years, or decades even,
00:49:02 the slaves they got were from the Congo region.
00:49:05 Hence, that's their drumming style.
00:49:07 They would sit on this big cylinder drum and they took over the influence of the bamboo rhythms and the things coming out.
00:49:14 That is a talking drum.
00:49:16 So, they're trying to do that with it.
00:49:18 So, that's all theirs.
00:49:20 Then I asked him, why is the woman at the centerpiece in this?
00:49:25 Because this is actually voodoo and slash music and a festive day.
00:49:31 Why the woman is in the center is I had to do my research and I found this out.
00:49:36 I actually came into this world through a woman.
00:49:39 Who knew? Who knew?
00:49:41 Look.
00:49:42 He's validating. You got it, man.
00:49:44 Thanks for the information.
00:49:46 Thank you.
00:49:47 No, the reality is the concept of that is the woman is necessary.
00:49:52 That's her role.
00:49:53 Because the spirits are more likely to come and inhabit with her there.
00:49:58 Because we do come through women and women are our first teachers in life.
00:50:02 You teach us how to walk and talk because we're coming out of it.
00:50:06 And they have the same concept with the spirit.
00:50:09 And it blew my mind when he's explaining all this to me.
00:50:12 And I'm talking to the man who made it.
00:50:14 He also made that with his wife.
00:50:17 That is a second line band.
00:50:20 You know what a second line is?
00:50:22 You seen one before in the city?
00:50:25 I don't know.
00:50:26 What does it look like?
00:50:27 We don't have anything like that, if that's what you mean.
00:50:29 No, no.
00:50:30 Because they do them here.
00:50:31 Oh, no. We haven't seen any here.
00:50:33 Two line band.
00:50:35 Okay.
00:50:36 First of all, that is specifically a black Tremé second line band.
00:50:42 Yeah.
00:50:43 Tremé. Have you heard about Tremé?
00:50:45 Yeah, they told us a little bit on one of our other tours.
00:50:48 What did they say?
00:50:49 First neighborhood, then Marie Laveau, then Alton Start.
00:50:53 Here's what they called it.
00:50:54 See, now I'm going to break it down.
00:50:56 [Laughter]
00:50:57 They called it the first free African American neighborhood.
00:51:02 I have a problem with that term African American.
00:51:04 I'm African American, damn it.
00:51:06 The reality is that over in this area, at a certain point, 1790s on,
00:51:12 you had a strange collection of free black people speaking French.
00:51:17 That's what it was.
00:51:19 Because the French, I should say the French code set by Louis XIV, 1790s,
00:51:24 said slaves didn't work on Sundays.
00:51:27 If they did, the master had to pay them.
00:51:29 Now, you're not going to see a movie about slavery here.
00:51:32 1720s, '40s, whatever, 1830 even, and the slave is in Virginia,
00:51:38 and he's carrying cotton in his hand.
00:51:40 And the master comes in the middle of the scene and says, "Hold up, man.
00:51:42 It's Sunday. Here's that $20 I owe you."
00:51:44 You're not going to see that stuff there.
00:51:46 They cut him a freaking check here.
00:51:48 It's more Quentin Tarantino stuff.
00:51:50 They cut him a check.
00:51:52 Now, if you get paid over time, you can save money.
00:51:55 There's court records of them going to the presbytery in Jackson Square
00:51:59 and petitioning for their freedom by law.
00:52:02 So little by little, you get an attriculation of some free black folks.
00:52:07 Then when General Jackson got here from Tennessee in 1813 maybe,
00:52:11 to save the country, by the way, the Battle of New Orleans took place
00:52:14 five miles down this river, and he beat the British 4,500 strong.
00:52:18 He came here with no troops from Tennessee.
00:52:20 He built an army of pirates, Cajuns, so on and so forth,
00:52:23 and he used a lot of slaves to fight.
00:52:25 He promised them their freedom.
00:52:27 There are people buried in that graveyard, slaves, who became free.
00:52:32 He was true to his word.
00:52:34 So now--and a bulk of the colored people, if you will,
00:52:38 came from the Haitian Revolution.
00:52:41 When San Domingo broke up and the slaves took over,
00:52:47 thousands of white Frenchmen, mulattoes and slaves, came here in the '00s.
00:52:51 The people of color were free.
00:52:54 No one's explaining this.
00:52:57 So you got a strange collection of free black people speaking French.
00:53:01 Now how it becomes Treme's neighborhood is because there was actually a Claude Treme.
00:53:06 He's buried in Cemetery 2.
00:53:08 His grave is in a bilingual stone.
00:53:11 It's in French. It says he was a white Frenchman
00:53:14 from Saugundy, France, in 1775, and he lived on Burgundy Street.
00:53:18 We're talking two blocks.
00:53:20 He was a hatter for a living.
00:53:22 So when he did the hatter thing, a slave on a Sunday in 1787 left this place.
00:53:28 He had his freedom.
00:53:30 He went to visit his mother on Burgundy Street.
00:53:33 She was a domestic slave in a building.
00:53:36 He leaves her house at 4 a.m. in the record state,
00:53:39 and he goes down the street, and he's carried stick with meat wrapped in a white cloth
00:53:43 and a mosquito net around him.
00:53:45 He's trying to make his way back to the Benaudy Plantation where he lives,
00:53:48 or where he works on Sunday morning across the river.
00:53:50 He's passing by this white Frenchman's house.
00:53:53 He thinks he stole something because the dog's barking at him.
00:53:56 He comes down and says, "Stop thief,"
00:53:58 before the slave turns around and blows him off.
00:54:00 He shot him 20, once in the leg, maybe the back.
00:54:03 The records say he fell to the ground.
00:54:05 The meat and everything in the stick fell.
00:54:08 And then Claude Treme walks up and says, "Oh, damn. I should have done that too late."
00:54:12 He grabs himself up off the ground with the bullets in him
00:54:15 and walks back to where his mother is, bangs on the door,
00:54:18 and they take him to the college to get a doctor.
00:54:20 They cannot save him. He dies by 7 in the morning.
00:54:23 Somebody left that house and went to the building on Jackson Square.
00:54:26 And they told the governor, Esteban Miro at 7 in the morning,
00:54:30 that Spanish governor had that white Frenchman arrested for shooting that slave.
00:54:35 This ain't going to happen in Virginia, New York either.
00:54:38 And he lost his court case and did 5 years in jail.
00:54:42 He gets out in 1793, and he marries a woman by the name of Julie Moreau,
00:54:48 a white Frenchwoman whose grandmother owns this land
00:54:52 from St. Louis Street to St. Bernard all the way to Broad Street.
00:54:56 It's the Moreau Plantation.
00:54:58 He marries her, and then the grandmother dies like 6 months later.
00:55:05 So guess who now owns a plantation after getting out of jail for killing a slave?
00:55:11 Claude Tremé.
00:55:13 And he very quickly tells his wife, "Baby, let's stay out of the slave business.
00:55:17 Let's carve this land up."
00:55:19 "Let's carve the land up and sell it to people to build houses on."
00:55:24 But what he had under his sleeve was he was going to sell it out of guilt to people of color.
00:55:30 That's how it became Tremé.
00:55:32 This is 1800. These people have a damn dog.
00:55:37 A family dog, and they own the property.
00:55:41 A family dog, and they own the property. Who does this?
00:55:45 And you know what? It's probably H.E. Wawa.
00:55:50 You see what I'm saying? This is unheard of.
00:55:53 If you came down to New York City of the South by 1810, 2013,
00:55:58 you had 3,000 free black people owning 80% of the land from Beth Phi Dauphine.
00:56:06 Called Tremé.
00:56:08 And if you came down here to do business in New York City of the South,
00:56:12 and you happen to be white to do business, you get off the boat,
00:56:16 and you go, "What the hell is this?"
00:56:20 You would feel like you was in a Halloween party.
00:56:23 You go to Tremé and pass by them in 1840.
00:56:26 You come under their house. You see what I'm saying?
00:56:29 That's what Tremé became because of that strange allotment.
00:56:33 And I'm going to start showing people this.
00:56:36 Because this actually tells you how confusing--
00:56:39 not confusing, but crazily mixed this place was.
00:56:43 You have all sorts of people here.
00:56:48 Look at it in 1840.
00:56:54 Hence, slavery still existed.
00:56:57 And now you have them standing in front of the churches.
00:57:03 Look at this array of people.
00:57:06 You got black nuns.
00:57:08 You got politicians.
00:57:10 You got musicians.
00:57:12 From dark to light. This is crazy.
00:57:15 And that's what Tremé was.
00:57:17 Hence, they had in Tremé, during slavery periods,
00:57:23 they started the second line.
00:57:26 Because these musicians had access to influence.
00:57:30 And what they're going to do is the reverse--
00:57:33 Come on, you might take a picture of this.
00:57:35 They did the reverse cakewalk.
00:57:37 They tried to imitate a white marine band in the 1850s and '40s.
00:57:44 They have uniforms on.
00:57:47 But guess what? They can't do it right.
00:57:51 They can't! Because they can't do--
00:57:53 "We're a grand old--"
00:57:55 They can't do it!
00:57:56 Because this drummer's throwing it off.
00:57:58 He's syncopating on that third beat.
00:58:01 He's kicking it off.
00:58:03 And these dudes, they're calling and responding with the ancient.
00:58:06 All those West African elements are coming out.
00:58:09 Look at that bass drum player. Come on.
00:58:12 Right! They're swaying through all of their West African elements.
00:58:18 Just like the cakewalk became that band.
00:58:21 So now, what they did in maybe 1860s, they said,
00:58:25 "Listen. We're going to pay these guys some money,
00:58:30 and they're going to walk the family to the graveyard."
00:58:34 And right up there you go.
00:58:38 She said it. Hopefully you guys can see this.
00:58:40 This is it happening.
00:58:42 That's a dern.
00:58:44 And in--
00:58:46 Isn't that fascinating?
00:58:49 The casket is going down the street in 1975,
00:58:52 but they did this early.
00:58:54 And the band is hovering in the back playing the sad and somber song.
00:58:58 That's the first line.
00:58:59 They're lamenting the life.
00:59:01 When they get to the graveyard, the band is getting paid.
00:59:04 So they're outside smoking cigarettes,
00:59:07 maybe having a cup of coffee.
00:59:10 They wait.
00:59:12 And then, oh, time to work.
00:59:14 They come in at the graveyard, and they buried them.
00:59:16 Now they got to play the second line.
00:59:18 That's what the second line is.
00:59:20 Now they go marching all through the city or the area in self-determination.
00:59:25 And who's happy or who's not?
00:59:26 Celebrating the life.
00:59:28 And the people pointing their hearts is the family.
00:59:32 They're walking down the street.
00:59:33 "Yeah, baby! Yeah, baby!"
00:59:35 And they're sending the loved one off in a positive way.
00:59:39 But I found that there's another element to this.
00:59:42 They're making sure that the family, the spirit of their loved one,
00:59:47 doesn't come back to haunt them.
00:59:49 So it's like Geico insurance.
00:59:51 It's early Geico, baby!
00:59:53 So now they say, and a hundred years ago today,
00:59:58 they say, "Wait a minute.
00:59:59 We don't just have to second line when somebody dies."
01:00:02 So they started the second line at St. Augustine's Church,
01:00:06 which is two blocks from here,
01:00:08 the first black Catholic church, and it still exists.
01:00:10 Every Sunday, afterwards, they start a second line.
01:00:13 COVID stopped it.
01:00:15 On a Sunday, you would see them coming down here by 3 o'clock like this.
01:00:19 Coming down the street playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but they swing it.
01:00:23 They're giving the city a chance to celebrate life with a heli.
01:00:27 And now you see how the emanation of the West African music started there.
01:00:33 And then it trickles right over to this man.
01:00:37 Tremé.
01:00:38 So jazz came from, boom, into this neighborhood right out there.
01:00:43 And it's that simple to see.
01:00:46 Now, again, this was where my mother was raised in the '50s as a child,
01:00:52 in this neighborhood.
01:00:53 I even dug up a photograph of it.
01:00:57 And this is what this place looked like in the 1950s.
01:01:00 That is that building.
01:01:03 See that building right there?
01:01:05 That's that building.
01:01:07 Oh, and that's St. Claude Street coming down to that building.
01:01:10 These were houses here.
01:01:12 This is a 1950 photograph.
01:01:14 And that was Tremé.
01:01:16 And that's what they tore down because my great-great-great-great-grandmother
01:01:21 was a slave in the French Quarter in one of those slave houses.
01:01:25 My people on my mother's side migrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1920s.
01:01:32 So I've been here 10 years.
01:01:34 And when I came down to play music, I found this out.
01:01:37 I was like, "Whoa, where the hell am I? I haven't left since."
01:01:40 Because I'm examining the stories and things.
01:01:42 But that is a black Tremé brass band, and it comes out of this neighborhood.
01:01:47 See, and you could make a big mistake if you lived in this community then
01:01:52 or even five years ago.
01:01:55 And that band's coming down the street, and they bury somebody.
01:01:57 And you're in your house, and you're like, "What's going on?"
01:01:59 If you open the door, you get snatched out of the house,
01:02:02 and you're in a line like this.
01:02:04 You're going down the street.
01:02:06 They catch you.
01:02:07 And then you may not come to your senses for an hour later.
01:02:10 You come way down there in the Garden District, and you may stop and say,
01:02:14 "What is that? How the hell did I get here?
01:02:17 I don't even know who the hell died.
01:02:19 Oh, I got this drink in my hand."
01:02:21 That's the power of the second line.
01:02:23 Therefore, the rest of the city--this is the best city to get married in,
01:02:28 in America.
01:02:29 You can second line your wedding.
01:02:31 That's why I asked if you guys seen it,
01:02:33 because we have, like, 20 weddings a week in the French Quarter.
01:02:36 People fly in, and they come out, and they get second line all throughout the French Quarter.
01:02:41 It's time and traffic for you.
01:02:42 That's a hell of a--let's go this way.
01:02:44 That's a hell of a wedding picture.
01:02:46 And that's the nature of the music of this place.
01:02:50 They seem to blend it with everything else in life.
01:02:55 They go out of their way to blend it with everything.
01:03:00 [indistinct chatter]
01:03:02 Now, we're going to stop up here, skip through monuments,
01:03:06 and get a water break and some air conditioning break, and that's it.
01:03:12 And then I'm going to take you to where Storyville was.
01:03:19 Oh, I should scoot right here, though.
01:03:24 Man.
01:03:28 Louis Armstrong people.
01:03:30 Now, where's my musician at?
01:03:33 Hey, you play the trumpet.
01:03:35 You going to play music?
01:03:36 Oh, yeah.
01:03:37 Yeah, I'm going to play some Louis stuff, because here's his monument.
01:03:41 Now, you play the trumpet.
01:03:42 You got to appreciate this.
01:03:44 [indistinct chatter]
01:03:47 That dog is--now, look at him.
01:03:50 He's knocked out.
01:03:51 He's--he looks like he's in a case of fits.
01:03:55 [indistinct chatter]
01:04:04 Oh, we got shade and that.
01:04:07 Money from 100 different countries built that statue.
01:04:12 That's what he meant to the world.
01:04:14 They sent donations in.
01:04:16 1971, they built that.
01:04:18 He died--no, '72.
01:04:19 He died in '71.
01:04:22 Now, Louis had a rough life.
01:04:26 Louis was from the back of town.
01:04:30 That means that's North Rampart.
01:04:32 It turns to South Rampart on the other side of the canal.
01:04:35 That was the back of town.
01:04:36 Black folks had it.
01:04:38 In 1909, because he was born in 1900, he got in trouble.
01:04:43 He got ahold of a gun from his cousin or something,
01:04:47 and he shoots it in the air in celebration of New Year's Eve.
01:04:51 You know, five, four, three, two, one type of thing.
01:04:54 Well, the police grabbed him by his little underwear
01:04:56 and threw him in the paddy wagon.
01:04:57 He got arrested, and he got sent five, four, three miles from here
01:05:02 to the Colored Waves Home, juvenile hall, jail for boys,
01:05:07 black boys to be precise.
01:05:09 Best thing that ever happened to him.
01:05:11 He spent like two or three years there, and somebody--
01:05:16 hmm, somebody taught him music.
01:05:21 That was the silver lining.
01:05:23 He's about nine or ten years old.
01:05:25 That's him sitting there with a cornet at nine or ten.
01:05:29 Look at his little face.
01:05:30 He's all serious.
01:05:31 He's learning music.
01:05:32 And gail.
01:05:34 That's something that he didn't foresee was going to happen for him.
01:05:38 [music]
01:05:40 I got a frown, you got a frown,
01:05:46 all got children got a frown on their face.
01:05:53 Take no chance with that frown, a song and a dance turned upside down.
01:05:59 Oh, zazu, zazu, all got children got rhythm,
01:06:07 all got children got swing.
01:06:11 Maybe haven't got money, maybe haven't got shoes,
01:06:15 all got children got rhythm, so push away their blues, yeah.
01:06:20 All got children got trouble, trouble don't mean a thing.
01:06:28 When they start to go, ho, ho, ho, ho, all your troubles go away, say,
01:06:33 all got children got swing.
01:06:38 All got children got rhythm, yeah.
01:06:48 All got children got rhythm, yeah.
01:06:56 Maybe haven't got money, maybe haven't got shoes,
01:07:00 all got children got rhythm, so push, so push, so push,
01:07:05 away their blues.
01:07:09 All got children got trouble, trouble don't mean a thing.
01:07:17 Oh, zazu, zazu, all got children got rhythm, all got children got swing.
01:07:35 Yeah.
01:07:37 [music]
01:07:52 All got children got rhythm, yeah.
01:07:58 [music]
01:08:16 [screams]
01:08:18 [music]
01:08:39 [whistles]
01:08:41 [music]
01:09:01 [screams]
01:09:03 [music]
01:09:26 All God's children got to sing! All God's children got to sing!
01:09:33 Ho ho! Ho ho! Ho ho! Hey hey hey! Ho ho! Hey hey! Ho ho!
01:09:41 All God's children got to sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!
01:09:48 All God's children got trouble! Trouble don't mean a thing!
01:10:02 When they start to go, "Ho ho! Ho ho!" Your troubles go away! Say, "All God's children got swing!"
01:10:10 All God's children got rhythm! Ba da da da da! Ba da da! Ba da da da da! Ba da da! Yeah!