Music
New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz. Jazz is a kind of music with strong rhythms and much syncopation, often improvised. Brass bands and piano players helped create this new sound. Jazz has spread across the planet, an ambassador for Louisiana culture.
The blues is also a link to the past. This music style is based on black folk music, especially on the chants of the black workers on the plantations. Those rhythms were memories of their African culture and made the slaves' lives and the work more bearable. The instruments most associated with blues music are the guitar and the harmonica. Later, when horns were added and the tempo changed, the new style was known as rhythm and blues.
The early Cajuns often held dance parties at their rural homes. Entire families came, and the young children were put on blanket pallets in the bedroom. They were told to go to sleep, which in French is fais-do-do. This became the name of these dance parties, and today the term fais-do-do refers to a Cajun dance.
Zydeco is the special type of music of French-speaking African Americans of South Louisiana. It is much like Cajun music; the song is sung in French and played on an accordion. An added instrument, the rub-board is used for rhythm.
Country music is part of the heritage of North Louisiana. In the days before television, when people gathered for entertainment, musicians brought their instruments. Their string bands usually usually included a guitar, a fiddle, and a mandolin. This traditional southern country music developed into bluegrass music and then into modern country music. This heritage continues with a state fiddling championship held each year at Marthaville in Natchitoches Parish.
Many early rock-and-roll musicians started out singing gospel music. Gospel is church music that blends elements of folk music, spirituals, hymns, and popular music. You can hear gospel music in churches throughout Louisiana every Sunday morning. Songs sung in African-American churches preserve the old spirituals and add contemporary music. Rural churches in North Louisiana feature gospel quartets.
More formal classical music also contributes to the musical sound of Louisiana. Orchestras have created musical culture since colonial days. Young musicians today continue this tradition as they audition for the Louisiana Youth Orchestra in Baton Rouge.
Community brass bands were popular at the turn of the century. Today high school bands perform concerts and provide the marching bands for local parades. Music continues to add a tempo to life everywhere in Louisiana.
Another variety of music that is heard commonly between the Gonzales, Baton Rouge and Hammond areas is called Swamp Pop. The songs are easily recognized by the saxophones, guitars and drums. The songs tend to focus on life in Louisiana.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Louisiana
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“And in the next instant, immediately behind them, Victor saw his former wife.
At once he lowered his gaze, automatically tapping his cigarette to dislodge the ash that had not yet had time to form. From somewhere low down his heart rose like a fist to deliver an uppercut, drew back, struck again, then went into a fast disorderly throb, contradicting the music and drowning it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)