New Orleans Marching Brass Band

After emancipation in 1865 the first Black brass bands played funerals, baseball games and business openings, and by the early twentieth century bands such as Excelsior and Onward anchored a Black community living under Jim Crow. At a jazz funeral the band moved from slow dirges to fast tunes once the mourning ended, and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs later hired bands for Sunday second lines. Bunk Johnson's 1945 album and the Eureka Brass Band's 1951 recordings documented the tradition, and the Dirty Dozen's 1984 album My Feet Can't Fail Me Now sparked its renaissance.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.2 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away
• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• Charles "Buddy" Bolden — steps away