Music, Style & Culture

NOLA: Second Line

In New Orleans, salvation is still a booming business. And so is the party that comes afterward.

It’s a drunken brass band type of parade, with dancing, and drinking, and whooping and dancing, on on down the street in the endless sidestep of its forefathers. There are feathers everywhere, and some kind of a float just float floating behind a pick up truck. There’s kids in tuxedos and bowlers, with long silk sashes running lengthwise across tiny chests, and everywhere, always, the endless squock squocking of the trombones.

God damn I cannot believe it took me this long to see one.

Faithful readers may recall that upon arriving in New Orleans, swampy eyed and lost, I took it upon myself to carry the torch left guttering by such greats as Edward R. Murrow, Tokyo Rose, and Storm Field with Weather. That is, respectively, to report, propagate, and forecast.

But sometimes the thrust of life is too strong, and we fall forgotten by the wayside, dearly wondering what it was that must have gone wrong. Well I’m hear to tell you, and it’s music; the lack of it, its missingness, its temporary vacancy from my bones. You see, I’ve learned something, and it’s that music at its most potent is a sort of a sickness. It’s a niggling little worm in your ear, or the fever stomp of infectious rhythm. It can be so many things, but when it’s in you you know it, and you can’t help it.

You can also have some beer in you, if you want, and maybe another one after that, if you manage to get thirsty in the churning dust and moving dance floor of the parade route. No need to stop dancing, cause the guy with the cooler is rolling over, holding up two fingers, two bucks, against the wail of a brass band. Two bucks and no tip, though this is America, and he’s off again, a rubber duct tape shark, swimming against the current.

Silly though, really, to buy your beer from a Second Line. Most are sidestepping past that guy, bouncing into the corner stores, the gas stations, coming out with big 40 ounce dance partners, twirling again into the heat and sun. The exuberance is catching, and as the parade and the booze take their course, men leap on cars, or spin ceaselessly round and round the wooden pillars of some shotgun shack, breathless.



The Sunday afternoon ritual of the Second Line, following hard on the heels of Saturday night, seems debauched even for New Orleans, hive of scum and villainy that it is, but look closer. When was the last time you sat in church for two hours? Christmas? Never? In New Orleans, a city as hot as Hell, salvation is still a booming business. And so is the party that comes afterward, to balance out all that piety and work some life back in dem legs.

But let’s take a moment to be frank. The Second Line does not belong to me. It doesn’t even belong to you, or your friends. It belongs to New Orleans. And New Orleans belongs to its people. And for the most part, New Orleans is black people.

As a white boy with a camera, I am acutely aware of this, and vaguely embarrassed. Probably 1 in 20 at a Second Line are white, and probably all of them are taking pictures, snapping headshots, on safari.

The residents of this place are long used to out-of-towners and tourists. Relaxed folk coming in to slum it, suck down some culture and, much later, recall the whole thing like a dream; half understood, forever out of reach of their hometown reality. With a camera in front of your face it can never be real. It will never be more than a memory. You’ll never be healed, never shimmer with the heat and the joy of it, never bump bums with a complete stranger, and never, ever forget that you’re a visitor.

Because for the Second Line, that long laughing parade that follows the leader, it’s all one. The colors, the feathers and the music and the drinking, the hot air and the cold beer in your throat. Everything that makes New Orleans New Orleans; all the traditions, the people and the pageantry; it’s all blended into this one afternoon, this one Sunday evening, melting in the swelter and swirl of bodies and the long, loud march to nowhere, to next week, to the next Second Line.