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French penal colony in 1719), financed by a charismatic adventurer and swindler (John Law, famous instigator of the Mississippi Bubble), and came of age as the Big Easy, a place where the rest of world flocks for a fast and loose time. Given this quasi-mythic history, who can be surprised that music writers have been tempted to describe the birth of jazz as a product of vice, paying more attention to bordellos, gambling, and liquor than to the contingencies of culture and economics? 5
    The standard accounts focus on Storyville, a red-light district in New Orleans that existed for a scant twenty years—created by the city aldermen on October 1, 1897, and closed by the U.S. Navy on November 12, 1917—as the birthplace of jazz music. Close investigation of the facts casts more than a few doubts on this colorful lineage. Donald Marquis, a leading expert on New Orleans jazz who painstakingly researched the life of Buddy Bolden—commonly credited with being the first jazz musician— was forced to conclude that Bolden “did not play in the brothels. None of the musicians who were interviewed remembered playing with a band in a whorehouse, nor did they know of anyone who had.” 6 Even the name Storyville, now enshrined in the jazz lexicon, was largely unknown to jazz musicians at the time. As jazz bassist Pops Foster recalled:
Long after I left New Orleans guys would come around asking me about Storyville down there. I thought it was some kind of little town we played around there that I couldn’t remember. When I found they were talking about the Red Light District, I sure was surprised. We always called it the District. 7
     
    Other sources suggest that piano music was often featured in the bawdy houses— although in many instances player pianos were used—and that only a few locations employed larger ensembles. Certainly prostitution was big business in Storyville: at its peak some 2,000 women and more than 200 brothels were involved in the trade. Yet jazz bands were more commonly found in the cabarets and dance halls in the district, rather than in the bordellos themselves. Hence, even if one agrees with historian Bill Russell’s assessment that Storyville was “kind to hot music,” the conclusion that jazz music was born in the brothels or had some special relationship with prostitution sacrifices scrupulous accuracy for a tawdry tabloid sensationalism. 8
    Chastized as the devil’s music, jazz may have even deeper ties with the house of God. “You heard the pastors in the Baptist churches,” explained Paul Barbarin, one of the finest of the early New Orleans jazz drummers, “they were singing rhythm. More so than a jazz band.” “Those Baptist rhythms were similar to the jazz rhythms,” concurred Crescent City banjoist Johnny St. Cyr, “and the singing was very much on the blues side.” Kid Ory, the most famous of the New Orleans trombonists, claimed Bolden drew inspiration from the church, not the nightlife of Storyville: “Bolden got most of his tunes from the Holy Roller Church, the Baptist church on Jackson Avenue and Franklin. I know that he used to go to that church, but not for religion. He went there to get ideas on music.” 9
    But sporting houses and Baptist churches, for all their significance, were only a small part of the broad musical panorama of turn-of-the-century New Orleans. String trios of mandolin, guitar, and bass, sometimes joined by banjo and violin, performed at Saturday night fish fries. On Sundays, city residents migrated to Milneburg and the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where as many as thirty-five or forty bands of varying instrumentation would entertain. On Mondays and Wednesdays, lawn parties—which, like the fish fries, were typically private fund-raising ventures comparable to the Harlem rent parties of a later day—were thrown all over New Orleans. Milk dairy stables provided another common setting for dances, organized by the owner or hired for the night by locals who