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cleaned the stables and hosted parties from dusk until the predawn hours. Collections of youngsters playing mostly homemade instruments—the so-called spasm bands with their hodgepodge of music-making cigar boxes, pipes, gourds, and other ready-at-hand objects—could be found on the streets, cadging nickels and dimes from the passersby. Lincoln Park and Johnson Park were other favorite locations for crowds to gather and listen to New Orleans bands, and a wide range of other spots—including restaurants, saloons, and assembly halls—commonly featured music, as did virtually every major event, not just rallies and athletic competitions, or the celebrations of Mardi Gras and Easter, but even the solemn occasions of funeral and burial.
    The second-line participants who followed the family and friends (the first line), attracted by the music of the the New Orleans funeral procession, have become famous the world over—and so beloved in the Crescent City that no burial is required these days to justify their inclusion in a public event. As such traditions suggest, if you didn’t go to the music in New Orleans, it often came to you. Local residents during the early days of jazz frequently encountered performances on the move, in parades and marches and from strolling vendors—a number of sources testify to the importance of wandering rags-bottles-and-bones men who, in the words of Jelly Roll Morton, “would play more lowdown dirty blues” on the wooden mouthpieces of their cheap horns “than the rest of the country ever thought of.” 10 The Mississippi steamboats also served as important traveling showcases for early African American music, and jazz’s journey by river to other locales is often cited and romanticized by historians of jazz. Less celebrated, but also important, were the Sunday train excursions, promoted by the Southern Pacific and other railroads, which featured some of the finest local musicians. Given these precedents, who can doubt that, even from its birth, jazz was destined to spread its joyous sounds far and wide?
    One could perhaps imagine jazz developing in New Orleans even without the bawdy houses of Storyville, but the birth of this music would have been unthinkable without the extraordinary local passion for brass bands, an enthusiasm that lay at the core of that city’s relationship to the musical arts. Of course, the brass band phenomenon was by no means limited to New Orleans: in the years following the Civil War, similar ensembles were organized in many cities and villages across the United States, with some towns hiring a professional bandmaster to organize and rehearse the group, while in many other instances—especially with black bands— the units were sponsored by fraternal organizations, social clubs, or the musicians themselves. But the role of these groups was especially important in New Orleans, where brass bands played not only for Sunday afternoon concerts in the village square, as happened in many communities, but for almost every type of social event.
    The Excelsior Brass Band and the Onward Brass Band, both formed in the 1880s, were the best known of these ensembles, but there were many others, probably dozens, of varying degrees of fame and ability. Drummer Baby Dodds recalled the instrumentation for the marching brass bands:
There was a traditional line-up for the New Orleans parades. The trombones were always first. Behind the trombones would be the heavy instruments, like bass, tubas and baritones. Then behind them were the altos, two or three alto horns, and behind them were the clarinets. It was very good if there were two. Usually it was only one, an E flat. Then behind the clarinets would come the trumpets, always two or three, and they came next. Bringing up the rear would come the drums, only two, a bass drum and a snare drum. That was for balance. For funeral marches the snare drum is muffled by pulling the snares off. When the snares are off it’s the same as a