Entry · catalog no. 8885
jazz funeral
/ /ˈdʒæz ˈfjuːn(ə)rəl/ /JAZ FYOO-nuh-ruhl
noun · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
A Black New Orleans burial procession in which a hired brass band walks the body from the church or funeral home toward the cemetery playing dirges and hymns, then, once the body is cut loose, breaks into up-tempo music while the crowd behind — the second line — dances the rest of the way home. Traditionally arranged by benevolent societies and social aid and pleasure clubs for their members, and most often held for musicians and neighborhood figures.
“They buried him with a jazz funeral — dirges to the corner, then the band cut loose and the whole street danced him home.”
Origin & Attribution
The practice is old, Black, and local: brass-band burial processions were commonplace in New Orleans after emancipation, and the architect Benjamin Latrobe recorded a Black New Orleans funeral in 1819 that moved from loud lamentation into noise and laughter. Benevolent and burial societies institutionalized it, collecting dues that paid for a member's band as well as his grave. The phrase jazz funeral, though, is much younger than the rite and was applied from outside, by visiting writers and jazz enthusiasts around the middle of the twentieth century. Older New Orleans musicians resisted it for decades and said funeral with music instead, on the grounds that jazz was one element of the service and not its point. Younger brass-band players took the term up in the last quarter of the century, and it is now standard even among practitioners. The archive records that the phrase's exact first printing could not be fixed to a year.
1819
Latrobe records a New Orleans Black funeral turning from lamentation to laughter
1973
Live and Let Die opens with a New Orleans funeral procession, exporting the image worldwide
2004
Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen's funeral draws one of the largest processions in living memory
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1950s
Spoken by
Black New Orleanians — brass-band musicians, social aid and pleasure club members, and benevolent society families
$JAZZFUThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady207 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1819
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Matt Sakakeeny, "Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades," 64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2017
encyclopedia entry
■
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, journal description of a Black funeral in New Orleans, 1819
manuscript journal
■
Richard Brent Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans, Indiana University Press, 2009
book
■
+ Cite a sourceLive and Let Die, dir. Guy Hamilton, 1973
film
See also