The city that gave music more than any other
A list of songs about New Orleans is really a tour through American music itself, because so much of it was born there. Jazz, blues, funk, and the wild sound of Mardi Gras all trace back to these streets, and this list carries them. When the Saints Go Marching In came out of the brass bands and became the city’s anthem. St. James Infirmary Blues is a funeral dirge that Louis Armstrong turned into jazz royalty. You cannot separate the songs from the place, because the place invented the sound the songs are made of.
The piano professors run through the whole list. Professor Longhair turns up again and again, because his rolling, whistling style basically defined the New Orleans groove. Big Chief, Tipitina, and Mardi Gras in New Orleans are all his, and all of them sound like the French Quarter on a good night. Dr. John carried the tradition forward into the gris-gris funk of Right Place, Wrong Time. This is a city with a house style, and these are the players who wrote it.
The carnival and the river
Mardi Gras has its own deep catalog here. Iko Iko is the Mardi Gras Indian chant that everyone can sing without knowing what half the words mean. Take Me to the Mardi Gras is Paul Simon’s breezy anticipation of the carnival. Do Whatcha Wanna is Rebirth Brass Band bringing the second-line parade into the modern era. These songs carry the actual sound of the street during carnival, the brass and the bounce and the crowd, and they work as an invitation whether or not you have ever been.
The heavier entries remember the city’s harder chapters. Louisiana 1927 is Randy Newman singing the great flood with quiet devastation, a song that found painful new relevance after Katrina. Walking to New Orleans is Fats Domino setting off on foot for home with nothing left. The Battle of New Orleans turns a piece of war history into a number one hit. The city’s music holds its joy and its grief in the same set of hands, which is exactly why it runs so deep.
Related lists
New Orleans keeps company with a few other places here. The city up the river fills songs about Chicago, and the one that never sleeps runs through songs about New York. The trip down to the Quarter lives in songs about travel, and the bars along Bourbon Street connect to songs about drinking.
If a fragment brought you here, some line of brass or a chant you cannot place, the search bar on our home page finds songs from remembered words.
The songs here run from the twenties to the nineties and beyond, and no American city has given music more. New Orleans is where the sound of a whole country got started, and this shelf holds the jazz, the funk, and the carnival that keep it going. Turn it up and the street comes with it.