Frenchmen Street is a small but vital music corridor just outside New Orleans’ French Quarter. With Frenchmen Notes, we’re bringing together interviews, anecdotes, numbers, figures, and other research relating to its rich, complex history and cultural importance.
This is only the tip of the iceberg—we have many more interviews to process and post, countless others still to be conducted, and all sorts of data to collect and synthesize. It’s a living project! Have a favorite Frenchmen memory of your own to add? Share it here.
Scroll down to read more on what Frenchmen is, why it matters, and how to use this site.
What is “Frenchmen”???
In the words of some of the people we’ve interviewed (speaking about various eras):
“An ‘arts incubator.’… A lot of creative music. It was ‘The Scene’. Locals patronized it. If you wanna hear some awesome original music, that’s where you went.”
“Frenchmen has always been known as “where the locals go”. [Tourists] would always ask, “Where should we go see music?” And cab drivers would either say, ‘Go to Bourbon’ or [whispers] ‘Go to Frenchmen!'”
“It used to have this clubhouse atmosphere. Even if you didn’t know everybody, you knew them by sight… so you felt a bit like it was a clubhouse, the whole street, or that it was an array of clubhouses and that you had a membership to every one of them.”
“It was really the best place to learn. Really, really experienced people would be up there, but you felt like everybody was kind of on an even playing field; it was comfortable.”
“You’re not gonna get rich on Frenchmen, but it’s the best place to play!”
“I’ve never been to Havana, but I always imagine that it would look the way [Frenchmen] looked in the ‘90s. It was just very romantic, decadent… You could go down to Frenchmen and run into people, you could dance, you could do a little coke, smoke a little weed, get drunk, meet somebody. …A beyond-beautiful haze.”
“…the fusion of funk and klezmer music, all different kinds of Latin music and contemporary jazz…”
“…A lot of just walking up and down the street, visiting with your friends, and hanging out.”
“…bohemian…”
“…piratic…”
“…inexpensive…”
“…local…”
“…international…”
“…they’re not tourists; they’re travellers!”
“…Wild West…”
“…incredibly supportive…”
“It was always known as a best-kept secret that just kept getting louder and louder.”
“What was such a beautiful thing about it was that it actually stayed local for a long period of time. It was an interesting—very interesting—situation, where you had a lot of different outlets, but they were actually making it, with 90% of the people coming to Frenchmen Street being locals. …I saw it transition from 2012 to 2015. From 90% locals to 90% tourists.”
“It was really a different world. People weren’t mobile, they weren’t always trying to go somewhere else, to the next place the internet told them to go. They were just there. Hanging around.
Why is Frenchmen important?
Despite being only two-and-a-half blocks long, the strip referred to as “Frenchmen” (technically only a fraction of that whole street) is its own tiny ecosystem, both culturally and economically.
The music scene on Frenchmen began developing in the late ’70s and continued to do so—slowly, organically, with just a handful of venues—throughout the ’80s and ’90s. From the start, its bohemian character encouraged artistic experimentation and innovation. (And it should be noted, as many interviewees have pointed out, that this bohemian atmosphere was able to exist because of the widespread access to affordable housing in the area.) Many strange and wonderful fusions were born, innumerable attempts were allowed to fail, and Frenchmen thus served as an “incubator” for countless musicians, bands, and local micro-genres. It was an outpouring of cultural vitality that was fairly unexpected for a strip with no great musical history, in a neighborhood struggling out of an economic depression and with very restrictive zoning laws. (Many early venues had to get… creative. Read more about this here.)
In the early 2000s, several new venues sprung up at once, creating a “snowball effect” for foot traffic and commerce and available gigs. Many musicians could now make their entire livings on Frenchmen…. and do so playing original music for predominantly local crowds. (Crowds peppered with highly music-literate travellers.) Each club had its own distinct vibe and specialized in different types of music; most for better or worse, didn’t have a cover charge; and this kind of variety and density—right before the pandemic there were sixteen-odd venues there, and remember, Frenchmen is only two-and-a-half blocks long—created a unique and pretty damn cool phenomenon where pedestrians could easily encounter several different types of highly skillful bands in one evening, musicians could meet new bandmates, and everyone could have a good, cheap time out with their friends and neighbors.
[Related to above paragraph: Frenchmen musicians are highly dependent on tips to make a living, which is a mixed bag to say the least. See Hannah’s article for some very valuable/sobering insight into tipping in New Orleans.]
Frenchmen is changing, and so many different people—locals and visitors, musicians and non-musicians alike—hold treasured memories of it from across the decades. It’s important to document these memories for their own sake, especially as many of the key figures on the early Frenchmen scene are now among our elders. That being said, we don’t want this to just be a nostalgic exercise, nor do we want it to just be an academic one. The world at large is changing, not just Frenchmen, and it’s becoming harder and harder for certain kinds of environments to find fertile ground in which to grow. We hope these stories and data have things to teach us about how we—as cities and as communities and as individuals—can nurture organically-forming cultural incubators like Frenchmen Street; piratic, bohemian, affordable corners of the world that value originality and mutual support.
SOME WAYS TO EXPLORE THIS SITE:
*Quick Reads, Anecdotes, Favorite Memories
*Timeline of Frenchmen history
*The Community Portal — share your own stories/memories with us!
*Numbers and Data: Cultural Economy, and other nerdy thoughts
*Resources and other reading, including pieces written by us and others
.