Creole music

One possible definition of Creole folk music is this: melodies, sometimes including dance-related instrumental accompaniments, sung in Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole by Louisiana Creole people of French, Spanish, Native, and/or African.

In America's Music (2nd edition, p. 302-3),Gilbert Chase describes the cultural setting in which Creole folk music developed. To summarize, in 1803 the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, including New Orleans, from France, and in 1809 and 1810, "more than ten thousand refugees from the West Indies arrived in New Orleans, most originally from [French-speaking Haiti]. Of these, about three thousand were free Negroes." At the time of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's birth in 1829, 'Caribbean' was "perhaps the best word to describe the musical atmosphere of New Orleans."

Although the inspiration for Gottschalk’s compositions, such as “Bamboula” and “The Banjo,” has often been attributed to childhood visits to Congo Square, no documentation exists for any such visits, and it is more likely that he learned the Creole melodies and rhythms that inform these pieces from Sally, his family’s enslaved nurse from Saint-Domingue, who Gottschalk referred to as “La Négresse Congo.”9 Whether Gottschalk actually attended the Congo Square dances or not, his music is certainly emblematic of the crossroads that formed there. Born in New Orleans and reared in the culture of Saint-Domingue, he toured throughout the Caribbean and was particularly acclaimed in Cuba. Gottschalk was closely associated with the Cuban pianist and composer, Manuel Saumell Robredo (1818–1870), a master of the contradanza, widely popular dance compositions based on the African-derived habanera rhythm, a first cousin to the bamboula. It is likely that contradanzas composed by both Gottschalk and Saumell were an antecedent to the ragtime compositions of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton.10 The Smithsonian Folkways catalog features Gottschalk’s music, Louis Moreau Gottschalk: American Piano Music Played by Amiran Rigai (1992), and two collections of Creole songs that very likely reflect the music he learned as a youth from Sally: Creole Songs of Haiti (1954) by Haitian singer, dancer, and folklorist Emerante de Pradines and Street Cries and Creole Songs of New Orleans (1956) by Adelaide van Wey, a classically trained singer and folklorist.

Adelaide Van Wey sings Creole songs on Street Cries and Creole Songs of New Orleans (1956). Creole folk songs originated on the plantations of the French and Spanish colonists of Louisiana. The music characteristics embody African-derived syncopated rhythms, the Habanera accent of Spain, and the quadrilles of France.

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