Search Results

The first half of the nineteenth century was, for New Orleans, a seminal period. Based on a voluminous correspondence, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection, the present book draws a chronicle of the Crescent City in the 1820s and 1830s. Starting in 1818, six years after Louisiana became a state, the 1200-page correspondence of Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans, to Henri de Sainte-Gême, a former inhabitant of the city returned to his hometown in Southwestern France, describes at length the extraordinary changes the city underwent during the early American period. A small provincial frontier town in the early nineteenth century, it was the third largest city in the United States in 1840. Over these three decades, the city grew and modernized, taking advantage of its strategic geographical position at the mouth of the Mississippi River to become a bustling crossroads of the Atlantic World, connecting the young American Republic, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It also welcomed, in numbers unheard of until then, new migrants from the United States, Europe, and the former colony of Saint-Domingue, which became, in 1804, the Haitian republic. These migrants changed the face of the city and established with the Creole population complex relationships that eventually shaped the original identity of the city. The book, following Boze's eyes, draws an original chronicle of one of the most unusual cities in the United States, trying to understand and explain the process that turned the city into the Creole capital.

Edward “Kid” Ory (1886–1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. This book tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, and captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, Ory returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career. Drawing on oral history and Ory’s unpublished autobiography, the book is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory’s personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of Ory’s most significant recordings.