A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music
by Michael Peter Smith, Alan Govenar
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About
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company, July 2000
Details: Hardcover (also in Paperback), ISBN: 1565546822
Review
From Jazz Journal (May 1991)
Joyful Noise is primarily a photographic study of New Orleans ghetto culture. Over two decades, Smith has infiltrated the Afro-American community’s churches, clubs, funerals and street parties, and has become an intimate of the Mardi Gras Indians, the bandsmen and the many fraternal groupings which about in the city.
It’s clear from folklorist Alan Govenar’s excellent introduction that Smith, a white photographer, has carved out a unique role for himself among black New Orleanians. He has returned again and again to document their activities, always giving copies of his pictures to his subjects. Through this superb book, he offers insights into the cultural mores which have influenced Crescent City music.
Govenar provides a good account of the origins of social organizations which date back, in most cases, to Emancipation and cites names like the Scene Boosters Social & Pleasure Club, the Young Men’s Olympian and Money Wasters Marching Club, all presently active….They parade through black neighborhoods and Smith’s brilliant pictures, superbly reproduced, capture the musicians, the club members and the famed Second Liners.
Govenar’s earlier book, subtitled The Rise of the Texas Sound is a kind of compendium of Lone Star state musicians – jazzmen, blues players in abundance, r&b sidemen and singers – predominantly from the black community. It is packed with interviews, memorabilia and super archive photos, all beautifully reproduced. Although heavily slanted towards the blues, much of its content will intrigue and inform the open-minded jazz reader.
These two volumes represent music and folklore scholarship at its best.
Peter Vacher
