Empire of Sin by Gary Krist Page A

it began to draw attention from some unwanted quarters as well. Police would show up at so-called cutting contests (where two bands would meet and try to outplay each other) and begin “whipping heads” to restore order. And eventually the city’s reformers began to take notice, and they did not like what they heard. To their ears,the new sound was dangerous, an affront to their notions of respectability, restraint, temperance, and civil order. This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values. Perhaps most perniciously, it promoted contact—much of it of the most scandalous type—across the color line, and in a context of social equality that was simply intolerable to most Southern whites.
    Even before Bolden began to make his mark, reformers had already started protesting about the detrimental effects of so-called coon music. In 1890, the Mascot had railed against a “nigger band” then playing in one of the city’s more notorious venues: “Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.” Soon the Daily Picayune was also taking up arms against the new sound, calling it “demoralizing and degrading”—something “wholly forced and unnatural.”
    And now, with the rising popularity of Bolden and his peers, black music in New Orleans had taken an ominous new turn.“Jazz,” as one historian would later put it, represented the equivalent of “musical miscegenation.” In the context of the city’s ongoing crusade for order, racial purity, and respectability, that meant it had to be suppressed.

    F OR black New Orleanians—particularly for those old enough to remember the days of Reconstruction—the last few years of the nineteenth century had seensome dismaying changes in the city. The New Orleans of their youth had beena relatively accommodating place for people of color. In the Louisiana of the early 1870s, black citizens could vote and serve on juries. Schools were desegregated, and interracial marriage was legal. Blacks and whites rode on the same streetcars, frequented the same parks and lakeside beaches, and often lived side by side in the same neighborhoods. Of course, racial prejudice did exist—as it always had, in New Orleans as in most places both North and South—and some of these freedoms were often denied in the day-to-day conduct of life. But as one historian observed, “For at least two decades after the war, many residents from the rank and file of both races played and worked together on amicable, harmonious, even equalitarian terms.”
    In fact, New Orleans had hada long tradition of interracial fraternity extending back into its French and Spanish days. Relatively liberal manumission laws under the old colonial slave codes, combined with substantial immigration from Haiti, Cuba, and Martinique, had given the pre-American city a large and often prosperous community of free people of color. They often intermarried with their white French and Spanish neighbors, giving rise to a significant population of mixed-race children and grandchildren. These so-called Creoles of Color, most of them French-speaking Catholics, came to occupy a position in the city’s social hierarchy somewhere between whites and their African American slaves;Creoles of Color often took up trades like cigar making, carpentry, ironwork, and shoemaking (some of them even owned slaves of their own).
    In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of nineteenth-century New Orleans, social and sexual relations between these people of color and white New Orleanians were not unusual, even engenderinga widely accepted system known as placage , in which a married white man would establish his mixed-race mistress in a separate household of her own. So-called quadroon balls—widely anticipated and often quite formal and luxurious—would bring these couples together, providing a