Basin Street Blues:Sex and Segregation in New Orleans's Storyville District, 1897–1917

New Orleans has long been known as the birthplace of jazz, and when people say that jazz was born in a brothel, they are referring to Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district.  Storyville, which opened in 1898 and operated for about twenty years, was a rollicking sex and entertainment district; it welcomed and nurtured jazz, provided it an ideal gestational milieu, and stamped it indelibly with prostitution and the sporting life.  Storyville has thus been imagined as both a rebuke to the prim moralizing of the progressive era and an exception to the politics of white supremacy and Jim Crow; the district symbolizes the laissez-les-bon-temps-roulez attitudes towards sex and the laissez-faire attitude toward race that New Orleans has always been famous for.

 Yet, this image of the New Orleans and Storyville is largely a myth.  As the “birthplace of jazz,” Storyville has been romanticized.  The business of Storyville, prostitution, and the women who engaged in it, have lost their central role to become supporting characters in the more palatable story of art overcoming adversity.  It was, after all, a commercial sex district where poor women turned tricks for loose change.  Many musicians in the district were also pimps.  What remains of the seamier side of Storyville adds only the frisson of transgression to jazz music.  Additionally, the celebration of jazz as an African-American art form—and the only authentically American art form—has obscured rather than highlighted the force of racism and the imposition of Jim Crow in early twentieth-century New Orleans.  This paper will re-position Storyville within its historical context.  I will show that the establishment of Storyville and the flourishing of jazz there grew out of and supported both the moralizing imperatives of progressive reform and the segregationist policies of Jim Crow.