In making this brief survey, another locality of the South is now approached, which is so rich in musical culture as to occasion (at least to the writer) delightful surprise, and warrant special mention of the circumstances connected with the same. I refer to the city of New Orleans, which will be treated in the next chapter.
III.
NEW ORLEANS.
THE MUSICAL AND GENERAL CULTURE OF ITS
COLORED CITIZENS.
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"Though last, not least." Shakspeare. |
BEFORE the late war, the city of New Orleans was often styled "the Paris of America." The Province of Louisiana, originally settled by the French, and until 1812, when it became a State of the American Union, contained a population naturally distinguished by the same general characteristics as those which marked the people of France. The Frenchman has for a long time been proverbially a devotee of the fine arts; and of these that gay and brilliant city Paris—which has ever been to its enamoured citizens not only all France, but all the world—became for France the centre.
Here, then, a love of that beautiful art, music, since the days, hundreds of years ago, of the courtly ménestrels, has been a conspicuous trait in the character of the people. Of course, in leaving Paris and France, and crossing the seas,—first to Canada, and then to Louisiana,—the Frenchman carried with him that same love of the arts, particularly that of music, that he felt in fatherland. And so New Orleans, which in time grew to be the metropolis of Louisiana, became also to these French settlers the new Paris. In fact, even for years after the State was admitted into the Union, and although meanwhile immigration had set in from other parts of the country, New Orleans remained of the French "Frenchy." The great wealth of many of its citizens, their gayety, their elegant and luxurious mode of living, their quick susceptibility to the charms of music, their generous patronage of general art, together with certain forms of divine worship observed by a large number of them,—all this served for a long time to remind one of the magnificent capital of France.