Thomas Stubbs: The Mississippi River drains 31 states and two Canadian provinces. It collects the rain that falls on the Appalachian and the rain that falls on the Rockies and carries it, all of it, south through 2,320 miles of American geography until it arrives at a city that should not exist. New Orleans sits below sea level in a swamp at the bottom of a continental funnel. The French founded it in 1718 because somebody had to control the mouth of the river, and the mouth of the river was here. This is the sound of a drum.
It was also the sound of the foundation of American music. The city that should not exist became the city where this drum survived, and every musical tradition in The United States is produced. Jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, r and b, funk, hip hop traces back to a Sunday afternoon in a square at the back of town where enslaved Africans gathered to keep his feet alive. This is Groundwater. I'm Thomas Stubbs.
Episode one, Below Sea Level. This is the first of three episodes about New Orleans, the city at the mouth of the river, the place where American music came from. Today, we're starting where the music started. Geography, slavery, a French slave code with a loophole. One Sunday a week, a square at the edge of town.
The city that should not exist. Jean Baptiste, Lemoyne des Bienville picked this spot in 1718 not because it was good, but because it was necessary. You cannot run an empire without controlling the place where the river meets the sea. So they built a city and a place where cities do not belong. A subtropical flood zone infested with yellow fever surrounded by water on three sides, sinking slowly into the mud, and then they filled it with people from everywhere.
The French came first, then the Spanish, who governed from 1763 to 1801 and left behind a legal system, an architectural style, and a fundamentally different relationship to the concept of race. Then the French again briefly. Just long enough for Napoleon to sell the whole territory to Thomas Jefferson in eighteen o three for $15,000,000, less than 3¢ an acre for a quarter of the continent. Then the Americans who arrived with their Anglo Protestant certainties and promptly discovered that New Orleans did not operate on Anglo Protestant principles and never would. But before any of them and alongside all of them came the Africans.
The first ship carrying enslaved people arrived in 1719, one year after the city's founding. Within a decade, 5,000 had been trafficked to the colony. And from the Caribbean, from Saint Dominique, from Cuba, from Martinique, from Guadalupe came free people of color, enslaved people with different expectations about what slavery meant. And the cultural memory of West Africa preserved through one more ocean crossing than the direct middle passage allowed. Then the Germans up the river, the Irish fleeing famine, Sicilians who turned the French Quarter into little Palermo, Croatians who ran the oyster beds, Filipinos who settled in the bayous, Hondurans and Cubans who followed the fruit trade, Choctaw and Chitimatro who had been there all along since before Bienville stepped off his boat and declared the swamp suitable for civilization.
Everything poured in. The city sat at the bottom and took it all. A roux is the foundation of Louisiana cooking. You take two things that aren't anything by themselves, flat and flour, and you cook them together slowly with heat and patience, stirring constantly, and what you get is something entirely new. Something that didn't exist before the combination and the heat.
Something that transforms everything it touches. A roux is not a mixture. A mixture you can separate back into its parts. A roux is a chemical transformation. The original ingredients cease to exist.
What replaces them is darker, richer, more complex and irreversible. New Orleans is a rue. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Choctaw, German, Irish, Sicilian, Filipino, Honduran cooked together in the heat for three hundred years. The music that came out of it transformed everything it touched. And like a roux, it is the foundation of everything else.
You cannot have gumbo without it. You cannot have jambalaya. You cannot have etouffee. And you cannot have American music, not jazz, not blues, not R and B, not rock and roll, not funk, not hip hop without New Orleans. The geography is the argument.
Everything flows down the Mississippi. Cotton flowed down, timber flowed down, people flowed down, enslaved people on flatboats, immigrants on steamers, grifters and gamblers and preachers and whores, all of them carried by the current to the city at the bottom. But culture reversed the current. Music flowed back up from New Orleans to Memphis, from Memphis to St. Louis, from St.
Louis to Kansas City, from Kansas City to Chicago. The river carried commerce south and culture north, and the city at the mouth of it all, below sea level, perpetually threatened by the water that made it possible, produced the sound that became the sound of America. No other city could have done it. Not because of some musical quality, mystical quality in the air, though New Orleans will tell you there is one. Because of the specific unrepeatable collision of colonial law and geography and human trafficking in Caribbean revolution and Catholic feast days and Protestant work refusal and subtropical heat that made people want to dance and drink and play music rather than go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Because the city was French, when the rest of the South was English and Spanish when the rest of the South was still English and Creole when the rest of the South was binary and below sea level when the rest of the South was on solid ground. The city is still sinking and music is still rising. The Sunday exception. In 1724, the French government issued the Code Noir for Louisiana. 55 articles regulating every dimension of enslaved life.
Who could be baptized? Who could be beaten? Who could be sold away from their mother? Who could be burned at the stake for running away a third time? The document is a bureaucratic horror.
The administrative language of human trafficking rendered in the passive voice. But buried inside it, almost as an afterthought, was a provision that changed the history of music. Enslaved people were not to labor on Sundays. The intent was religious. The code noir mandated Catholic conversion for all enslaved people in the colony and Sundays were for worship.
The French crown was not granting kindness. It was imposing a faith. But the practical effect in a colony where enforcement was haphazard and the swamp made everything porous was that enslaved Africans in Louisiana had one day a week when they were not working, and they used it. They gathered in an open space at the back of town behind the rampart that gave Rampart Street its name, in what was then called the Place Public. Later, it would be called Congo Square.
It sat at the edge of the French Quarter, where the quarter met what would become the Trinh, the oldest African American neighborhood in The United States. And there on Sunday afternoons, enslaved and free people of African descent did something that was happening nowhere else in North America. They drummed. They played bamboole drums made from empty barrels and carved out logs. They played kalimbas and banzas and gourd rattles and panpipes made from reeds.
They danced the calinda and the bamboole and the Congo. Witnesses, all of them white, all of them oscillating between fascination and revulsion, described clusters of dancers representing different tribal groups, each nation taking its place in a different part of the square. The British architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe sketched what he saw there in February 1819. Drums lying on their sides, players sitting astride them, pressing one heel on the drum head to change the pitch. An old man of 80 or 90 playing a stringed instrument he brought from Africa.
Latrobe's drawings are clinical, his racial attitudes predictable for the era, but what he documented was unprecedented. This was West African musical tradition maintained openly in public under the legal protection of a Catholic slave code in a city governed at that point by three successive colonial powers, none of whom had managed to stamp it out. Nowhere else in slaveholding North America did this happen. Not in Virginia where the codes were English and the restrictions were total. Not in South Carolina where enslaved people vastly outnumbered whites and the fear of insurrection kept every gathering under suspicion.
Only in New Orleans, where French and Spanish colonial law had created a specific paradoxical crack in the architecture of slavery through which African culture could survive. What made New Orleans different from the rest of the South was not that it was less racist, it was brutal. The Code Noir authorized the branding of runaways with the fleur de lis, the severing of ears, the cutting of hamstrings. But the racial architecture was different, more complex, with more categories, more ambiguity, more scenes through which culture could leak. Everywhere else in America, race was binary.
You were right or you were black. The line was absolute and the law enforced it with the simplicity of a light switch. In New Orleans, there was a third category. The gins de calur libris, free people of color. They were mixed African, European, and sometimes native American descent.
Many were Creole, French speaking, Catholic, property owning, and educated. Some were artisans and architects. Some were poets and musicians and nuns. Some owned plantations and in the grim arithmetic of the era, enslaved people of their own. They occupied a genuine middle stratum in a society that was supposed to have only two levels, and their existence complicated every assumption that the rest of America held about what race meant and how it worked.
This population exploded after the Haitian revolution. Between 1791 and 1804, the enslaved people of Saint Dominique overthrew the French colonial government and established the world's first black led republic. The revolution scattered refugees across the Caribbean and The Americas. Many landed in Cuba. Then in eighteen o nine, when Spain expelled the Saint Dominique refugees from Cuba, more than 10,000 of them arrived in New Orleans in a single year.
They doubled the city's total population. They tripled the number of free people of color. They brought with them the French language, the Catholic faith, Voodoo, Caribbean cooking, architectural traditions that still define the French Quarter and the Fallberg Marignet And Trine, and critically, musical practices that reinforced and extended the West African traditions already surviving in Camdoche Square. The Haitian refugees didn't create New Orleans culture, but they ensured its survival at exactly the moment when the American purchase of Louisiana in eighteen o three threatened to Americanize it out of existence. They slowed the Anglo Protestant tide by twenty five years, and twenty five years was enough.
The Spanish had contributed something else. A legal custom called cortacion, which allowed enslaved people to purchase their own freedom even over a master's objections by petitioning the courts to set a price. Louisiana, alone among slave states, had a legal pathway from slavery to freedom that did not depend entirely on a master's goodwill. The free black population grew. The seams and the architecture widened.
None of this made New Orleans a good place to be black. The violence was real. The exploitation was constant. And the American takeover after eighteen o three began immediately tightening the screws, stripping rights from free people of color, banning the free black militia, restricting manumission. By the eighteen fifties, wealthy Creoles of color were leaving for France and Haiti reading the writing on the wall.
But the music had already gotten through. The crack in the architecture, French colonial laws, Spanish self purchase rights, the three tiered racial system, the Haitian reinforcement, the sheer ungovernable density of the place had held open long enough for West African rhythmic tradition to root itself in American soil. Nowhere else in the country had this happened. Nowhere else could it have happened. By 1817, the city government had restricted these gatherings to Congo Square specifically and limited them to Sunday afternoons before sunset.
By 1856, people of African descent were legally prohibited from playing drums or horns in the city at all. The square was renamed Beauregard Square in 1893 after a confederate general, an explicit attempt to suppress what the space had meant. But the tradition didn't die. It moved indoors, into yards, into the neighborhoods. The rhythms that had played openly in Congo Square went underground and resurfaced in the brass vans, the second lines, the Mardi Gras Indian chants.
The Sunday exception was not a gift. It was an accent of empire. But the people who walked into Congo Square on their Sunday afternoons turned the accent into the foundation of a musical tradition that would outlast every empire that tried to contain it. The city could rename the square. It could not rename the beat.
This has been Groundwater episode one, Below Sea Level. I'm Thomas Stutz. The book this episode draws from is called Race Records, The Lie That Split American Music, and The Blues That Ran underneath. Next episode, a kid from the battlefield, a Lithuanian junk dealer, and a $5 cornet from the pawn shop. Storyville, Buddy Bolden, little Louis Armstrong.
Thank you for listening.