CHAPTER 4 | REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN ANTEBELLUM BLACK MUSIC MAKING 99
in New Orleans. One Sunday afternoon in February 1819, he wrote, he heard
“a most extraordinary noise,” which sounded to him like “horses trampling on a
wooden fl oor.” When he investigated, it turned out to be an assembly of blacks,
fi ve or six hundred strong. They had formed themselves into rings, “the largest
not 10 feet in diameter.” In one ring, two women danced “a miserably dull & slow
fi gure, hardly moving their feet or bodies.” Two drums and a stringed instru-
ment provided the music, and there was also singing: “The women squalled out
a burthen [refrain] to the playing at intervals, consisting of two notes,” in a call-
and-response pattern resembling the way “the negroes, working in our cities,
respond to the song of their leader.”
Latrobe found nothing beautiful in the performance. “I have never seen
anything more brutally savage,” he wrote, nor “at the same time [more] dull &K Benjamin Latrobe included sketches of the African
instruments he saw played in New Orleans’s Congo
Square in his journal entry for February 21, 1819.172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 99 23/01/13 10:07 AM