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Second-line Marching Clubs: Inside New Orleans' Black Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs
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18271 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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10 / 1990 |
3,061 Words |
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William Jankowiak, Helen Regis, and Christina Turner
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New Orleans is a city of festivals: Irish clubs parade on St. Patrick's Day, Italian groups on St. Joseph's Day, and krewes (carnival societies) on Mardi Gras. These celebrations contrast with second-line parades situated entirely in the city's black neighborhoods. The second-line parade style is completely unlike the aesthetic traditions embraced by other racial and ethnic groups. When a brass band swings down a street, a line quickly forms behind it with a crowd marching behind. The club, band, and second-liners are so tightly bonded together that the name of the parade derives from the nonclub participants who fall in with the club and join in the melee.
Second-lining is a unique syncretization of African and American cultural themes, but remains largely unknown to most scholars. Renowned musicians from Louis Armstrong to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band made their start playing for the anniversary and funeral parades of New Orleans' black social clubs.
While Mardi Gras is the city's premier tourist attraction, the second-line parades are ignored even by most New Orleanians. New Orleans celebrates Mardi Gras with a Romanesque extravagance, displaying wealth and social rank. The second-line marching clubs - formally known as social aid and pleasure clubs - are not part of Mardi Gras and never parade during the carnival season; they usually appear on the club's anniversary of founding day. During the autumn and late spring, there is at least one parade every other week. Unlike the playful inversion of reality created by the Mardi Gras krewes, who wear masks, dress in odd costumes, and give away plastic colored beads to the crowds, an image of stunning respectability is presented by the second-line clubs. Members wear expensive three-piece suits and fashionable leather shoes, and they demonstrate skill in dance.
Second-line parades are fundamentally interactive, unlike the Irish and Italian parades. Although St. Patrick's Day paraders may stop to exchange a flower for a kiss from a pretty lady in the sidelines, such exchanges are intermittent and constitute a break in the parade. Interaction at second-line parades, however, is constant. Parade observers are participants: Dance and song are drawn out of them by the infectious rhythm of the music. Unlike interaction in the Irish parades, in which those in the parade hand out something to the onlookers, in the second-line parades the exchange is through dancing together.
The distinct style of the second-line parade, similar to the call-and-response pattern of African-American church services, is characterized by a persistent, albeit good-willed, antagonism between the club members and the second-line participants. This antagonism is expressed in the dance and lyrics improvised to the sound of the brass band music. This dialectic crosscuts all other themes in the second-line parade - community, continuity, celebration, homage to origins, having fun, and just "doing right."
Since the early nineteenth century, if not earlier, there has been some kind of festival celebration unfolding in the streets of New Orleans' black neighborhoods. Louis Armstrong comments in his autobiography that the clubs were always "trying to outdo each other and they certainly looked swell;…when all them clubs paraded it took nearly all day to see them pass, but one never got tired watching." He reminisces of the parades of his youth: To watch those clubs parade was an irresistible
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