The Roots of Modern Music: Why Everything Leads Back to New Orleans
by Daniel Finn
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Could the roots of modern music in the US all trace back to one place?
I recently made a video on Tyler, the Creator’s 2024 album Chromakopia, where I highlighted samples from Zambia’s Ngozi Family, grooves echoing deep South second lines, bounce, and brass bands. That mix is not just influence, it is inheritance.
At the center stands New Orleans, a city shaped by an extraordinary convergence of geography, history, and culture.
The story starts with the Mississippi River. Stretching about 2,340 miles from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River is North America's longest. New Orleans sits at its mouth, making it a vital hub for trade and migration over centuries.
The river acted as a natural artery, transporting goods, but more importantly, it carried people. Enslaved Africans, European settlers, Indigenous peoples, and Caribbean refugees all passed through, creating a cultural crossroads unique to New Orleans.
Long before the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous nations such as the Chitimacha, Houma, and Choctaw had built complex musical traditions of drumming, chanting, and social dances. Their rhythms often featured cyclical beats and communal call and response patterns that resonated with West African musical sensibilities when the two traditions met. In some cases, Indigenous groups sheltered runaway enslaved Africans, creating communities where cultural exchange was deep and lasting. These interactions helped seed the rhythmic and ceremonial framework that would later underpin street parades, processions, and the communal spirit of music in the city.
By the early 1800s, Congo Square, located in what is now Louis Armstrong Park in Tremé, had become one of the few places in the United States where enslaved Africans and free people of color could legally gather on Sundays to drum, dance, sing, and trade. Here they preserved African traditions such as polyrhythm, call and response singing, and circle dances.
Following the Haitian Revolution, New Orleans received a wave of Haitian and Creole refugees who brought Afro Caribbean rhythms and spiritual traditions, further enriching the city’s musical and cultural landscape.
European brass band traditions introduced by French and Spanish colonists merged with African rhythmic practices in New Orleans, giving rise to second line parades. The processions were led by brass bands with community members dancing behind them, reflecting a fusion of European musical form and African improvisational energy, as well as Indigenous American forms of music and celebration.
Trade and migration also brought the Cuban habanera rhythm, a syncopated pattern Jelly Roll Morton famously called the “Spanish tinge,” into the local sound. This Latino influence became a defining ingredient in early jazz. By the early 20th century, African, Indigenous, European, Caribbean, and Latin American traditions had already been simmering together in New Orleans for over a century. The result was jazz, a uniquely American art form that blended blues, ragtime, spirituals, brass band marches, and Afro Caribbean syncopation.
Jazz did not just appear, it was born out of constant cultural exchange.
One of the clearest surviving examples of that African and Indigenous fusion is the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Emerging in the late 19th century, these African American “tribes” honored the Indigenous nations who had sheltered runaway enslaved people. Their performances fused West African drum patterns with Indigenous circle dance rhythms, layering chant based vocals and call and response.
These elements became the rhythmic DNA of funk, R&B, and later hip hop.
Then came the figures who carried this fusion to the world. Louis Armstrong, raised in the neighborhoods where brass bands marched and Mardi Gras Indians sang, transformed the local sound into a global phenomenon. His recordings spread jazz from New Orleans to Chicago, New York, and Europe, inspiring generations.
But the story did not stop with jazz. By the 1940s and 50s, New Orleans was birthing rhythm and blues with pioneers like Fats Domino whose rolling piano style directly influenced early rock and roll.
In the late 60s and 70s, The Meters gave us funk, syncopated, bass driven, and steeped in second line parade rhythms.
And in the 90s, bounce music emerged, high energy, loop heavy hip hop rooted in call and response chants that trace straight back to Congo Square gatherings.
Today, more as a metaphor than a physical route, the Mississippi River links the historic musical hubs of New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago. It connects the flow of musical innovation from the port city into America’s interior, spreading not just songs but a rhythmic language that still shapes American music today.
New Orleans was not just a port for goods, it was a crucible of creativity. It is where African diasporic and Indigenous traditions did not just endure, they evolved into the backbone of genres we take for granted now.
That is why when I hear Chromakopia, I do not just hear modern production and hip hop. I hear New Orleans, an archive of the African diaspora in sound, layered with Caribbean rhythms and European melodies, all beating alongside its Indigenous heartbeat beneath the brass, the bass, and the bounce.