New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.

Black musicians rhythmicized the contredanse, creating musical styles which evolved into the habanera (also known as the tango) and, later, ragtime, as well as the danza, danzón, and ultimately the danzón mambo and its offspring the cha-cha-chá.

Every farm with slaves was a slave-breeding farm. Raising slaves was mostly a cottage industry.

New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.

Up through and including Lincoln, American politicians nursed a fantasy of repatriating blacks to Africa.

One often reads that the 1950s was the golden age of Cuban music, but it was really one long phase, from 1937 to 1958, each year with its own splendour.

Like slaves on the sugar plantations of the Antilles, ...the sugar slaves of southern Louisiana had negative birthrates for as long as slavery lasted.