BACK WHEN THE GOOD TIMES ROLLED

Photographs by Charles Muir Lovell

Traveling Exhibition Proposal

PROPOSAL

The book Back When the Good Times Rolled: Charles Muir Lovell Photographs is a 100-page, large-format book of 85 color photographs of my New Orleans second line parades taken between 2009 and 2021. The book includes a foreword by Don Marshall, executive director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and essays by Jason Berry, reporter, author, and film director; John Lawrence, former director of museum programs at the Historic New Orleans Collection; and Gwen Thompkins, journalist, writer, and host of Music Inside Out on NPR. The photographs document a culturally and historically significant part of New Orleans’s Black culture while also having artistic and aesthetic value.

The exhibition of the same name will include the very best 30-40 photographs selected during the editing process, and printed in standard sizes of 16 by 20, 20 by 24, and 30 by 40 inches which are then matted and archivally framed. Estimated square footage required is from 2400 to 1800 square feet. I will work with your curatorial staff to select the works from my book of 85 New Orleans second line parade photographs, with the exhibition tailored to fit your gallery space.

My work focuses on the second line musicians and dancers that traditionally follow a Jazz Funeral in New Orleans and form supportive social aid and pleasure clubs that honor and uplift their communities. I have printed the essays and foreword from the book as exhibition educational text panels. This work presents an opportunity to engage the community and coordinate lively events. I have lectured on these works at Stonybrook African Studies Department and could discuss doing the same for an event at your venue. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

Soon after I moved to New Orleans, I discovered the unique New Orleans Black cultural tradition of second line parades. Following them with my camera became my passion, and my color photographs have documented over a decade’s worth of weekly parades. The parades evolved from the funeral processions sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs that arose in the 1880s to provide Black Americans burials at a time when insurance companies did not offer them coverage. Even further back, they evolved from West African dance circles and Congo Square dances held on Sundays, the enslaved workers’ afternoon off. For a time, the dances were banned, deemed threatening to the city’s White inhabitants. Rich in ceremony and ritual, the parades exuberantly express the right of Black Americans to publicly parade while preserving a vibrant cultural and artistic heritage.

“Second line” may refer to a group that follows the hearse or the band in a jazz funeral, a deep-rooted ritual tradition wherein a jazz procession begins outside the church after a funeral, accompanying the body to the cemetery. The casket is followed by a brass band playing somber songs for the departed. Mourners walk in slow dirge steps, often followed by a “second line” of marchers. Or, more often, the term refers to the weekly second line parades, still sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs, which follow brass bands as they move through the New Orleans neighborhoods of Tremé, Central City, Uptown, the Seventh and Ninth Wards, Marigny, Mid-City, and others, with paraders exhibiting Black American forms of dress and dance. The parades happen every weekend, except during holidays, Jazz Fest, and the hottest part of the summer. Recently the COVID-19 pandemic seriously affected this tradition, with New Orleans having some of the nation’s highest infection and death rates, preventing all second line parades for more than a year.

I have spent more than a decade following the weekly parades, resulting in over 90,000 photographs. Although my photographs are cultural documents, I approach them with an artist’s eye. Besides documenting and preserving a visual record of New Orleans second line parade culture as it exists in the early twenty-first century, I hope that my photographs will increase awareness and understanding outside of Louisiana of this unique cultural tradition, which has sometimes suffered from scholarly neglect along with serious cultural and economic challenges.