Episode 45: The Good, the Bad, Everything

A scene from the Historic New Orleans collection, depicting African and Afro-Creole residents of the city, joined for celebration of traditional dance and music. Here was pastime, carved from the narrows of enslavement, that laid a seedbed for the city’s renowned musical history, and one that would inform generations of popular music and dance in post-slavery America. Louisiana was “thoroughly Africanized” during the early years of its settlement, writes historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and “in Lousiana, it is especially important to avoid treating the formation of slave culture in isolation, as if it were sealed off the from the rest of the society and the world. Culture is a dynamic process.”