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Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans. Richard Brent Turner. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Pp. 182. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0253353573. $21.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0253221209.
One of the most fertile areas of historical scholarship related to the South has focused on identifying African retentions within black southern religion and culture. Richard Turner's Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans combines the work of a number of recent scholars with his own personal story to highlight New Orleans' unique religious culture and its connections to West African dance and music traditions as well as Haitian Vodou rituals. Throughout he focuses on the second line-the somewhat impromptu procession of singers and dancers who follow the first line of official church leaders, club members, brass bands, and dignitaries that lead the city's numerous jazz street parades and funeral processions. By focusing on the second line, Turner seeks to uncover "how African diasporic religious identities and musical traditions from Haiti and West and Central Africa were reinterpreted over time in New Orleans jazz and popular religious performances" (5). Significantly, second line participants enabled him to grasp the unofficial religious traditions that have survived generations of discrimination within the cultural diversity that only the Crescent City provided. That unique cultural setting, he concludes, resulted in a population with "an African diasporic spiritual life that interacts with Christianity but is largely unknown by the mainstream order because its communal rituals are performed by jazz musicians and initiates of secret societies and social and pleasure clubs" (5).
Originating as far back as the mid-eighteenth century in what became the city's fabled Congo Square,...