Perseverance Hall is just gone. It has been a year since I read about the “jazz incubator’s” fall. I was editing a separate yet related post, when I realized that this one has been sitting in my drafts folder for a full year. (Both the date on the nola.com article and my initial draft of this post were August 24, 2022. Whoops!) But as it’s been exactly a year, it seemed fitting to post this one, today.
It was not the first culturally, musically and historically significant location to be “just gone,” but one of the most recent. As Paul Murphy mentions in that article, several jazz pioneers including Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet and King Oliver played there.
I was reminded of something that Davis said in an episode of the series Treme. I went in search of that remark online, but found a different scene, first. While not the “It’s a laundromat. Clearly,” line I was looking for, it is a scene featuring Perseverance Hall! I’m more familiar with King Oliver than Buddy Bolden but he is the one Davis was excited about, here!
I took a jazz history course as an undergrad at Loyola but Buddy Bolden does not stand out in my memory. I will have to find out more about him and I’ll come back here to let you know what I learn!
The line I was looked for comes during another stop in Davis’s music tour, in that same episode: As they view a laundromat that was once a recording studio, he explains that New Orleans does not preserve their history. There is much truth to this. There are obviously a plethora of plaques throughout the city detailing an event or someone who lived or died in a particular mansion. In a city that is over 300 years old however, there are many significant spots that have not been preserved.
Lorayne Cupero 