In New Orleans, the 2020 pandemic shutdown filled the city’s musical spaces with an eerie — and costly — silence. For the first time in half a century, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival would be absent from the city’s fair grounds. The eight-day, springtime, community-owned event, the largest of its kind in North America, had already booked hundreds of musicians to perform for a total expected audience of more than 400,000 people. New Orleans depends on the tourist dollars this event brings annually, and a large and inter-generational community of artists depends on proceeds from ticket sales to support their livelihoods and families as they keep the aural and material culture of the city alive. The shutdown also threatened the city’s main community radio station. WWOZ-90.7 FM sells elite “Brass Passes” to festival goers each year to meet its budget. The station’s survival was in doubt.

This Roundtable panel will discuss a unique exercise in digital history that saved the 2020 festival and the fortunes of most of the people connected to it. The non-profit New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation that runs Jazz Fest collected recordings and all sorts of ephemera for its Archive. This work began in 1989 and positioned the Archive and WWOZ to broadcast/stream a full, eight-day schedule of performances plucked from the best of their holdings. The presentation of this newly-curated “perfected” history, during which WWOZ fundraised on-air, saved the station financially while expanding the Festival’s reach worldwide.

And yet, the point of digital history is to use technology to identify and bring forward those who’ve been occluded in the public record and ecalibrate the public’s understanding of the past. The 2020 project allowed those who worked most directly with the concert files — and, by extension, the broader audience — to interrogate choices made by festival decision-makers over fifty years. The project also encouraged a fresh appraisal of the gendered and racialized politics of heritage. As with any example of digital history, what the public takes away from the experience is beyond the control of the creators. Critical listening can be difficult, especially when Ella Fitzgerald is singing a duet with Stevie Wonder, or Fats Domino is playing, or Carole King is bringing Aaron Neville onstage. But listening in total to the concerts with and against the grain, it’s possible to reflect on who was welcome at the fairgrounds and who wasn’t. The audio also problematizes the role that commercial interests may have played in representations of Louisiana heritage and culture.

This Roundtable panel features Rachel Lyons, who heads the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive, as well as Louisiana State University cultural anthropologist and festival ethnographer Helen Regis, WWOZ’s content director Dave Ankers, and Carrie Booher, who manages the station’s social media. Gwen Thompkins of Tulane University’s History Department will chair. A spirited Roundtable discussion will allow scholars to discuss digital history as public history and reflect on its particular power, through music, to deepen popular understanding of the past.