New Orleans Creoles of colour, who were the mixed-race descendants of black and white ancestors, typically identified more with European culture than with Africa’s.
The musical DNA in Livery Stable Blues comes from black artists and shows that jazz is a fundamentally African-American music, even if an all-white band was first to record it. The particular mix of African-style drumbeats and the Caribbean rhythm, found in this song but so common to jazz as a whole, points to the time from 1817 to 1843, when black slaves – some from Africa, some from the Caribbean, some from the interior of the American South – would gather on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square to play music and cross-pollinate their traditions. New Orleans Creoles of colour, who were the mixed-race descendants of black and white ancestors, typically identified more with European culture than with Africa’s. After the Jim Crow laws of 1890 classified the city’s mixed-race Creoles as ‘black’, they were only allowed to play with other black musicians and this brought a greater musical fluency and technical skill to black music because many Creoles of colour were trained in classical music. Jazz emerged from this merger of forms.