In The Flow of Time – August 21, 2024
Oh my god. Sometimes imagination becomes real.
Back on July 7, I wrote about my plan to have a jazz funeral in the story. With only a little twitch, I can have a jazz funeral when her husband dies. Cool.
Today I was tracking down and mapping where locations would be. I run across the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle again. It turns out, it was founded in her father’s living room! Well, neat! So I went down the rabbit hole, what was that organization, and what did they do?
In 1857 (in the time of my story) the society built a large meeting hall. They’d already been around for twenty years, a community organization. They brought people together, had meetings, dances, brought in musicians. The place was called Economy Hall. It was a birthplace of jazz.
Legendary musicians played here, night after night: Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong. For real, it was 1875 when the society passed a resolution to parade through the streets en masse for every occasion—from celebrations to funerals. I’m moving it twenty years. When I thought up that little twist, I had NO IDEA that this particular mutual aid society, created in her father’s living room, had anything specific to do with jazz. It turns out…
“Their grand headquarters built in 1857 became world renowned for jazz music in the early 20th century. But over Economy Hall’s 108-year history, the building also hosted an important and largely undocumented social and racial cross-pollination of New Orleans. From black benevolent associations to German laborers to Cuban cigarmakers to Republican Radicals to jazz musicians to undertakers and many others, their mixing created a strong cultural inheritance that is still being felt today.”
Fact.
