Baton Rouge Traditions

[Editor's note: The Baton Rouge Traditions exhibit is now traveling! Visit louisianafolklife.org/batonrouge for details on how to book the exhibit.]

Two times of the year, you ought to be in Baton Rouge and nowhere else: autumn, when the city gathers in purple-and-gold finery to cheer on the home team, cooking, drinking, and clamoring hours before the LSU Tigers kick off; and late winter, as a hot-pink neighborhood parade vamps out of the shadow of the State Capitol.

This is what Maida Owens, director of the Louisiana Folklife Program, gathered from locals when, six years ago, she began to ask, “What are Baton Rouge traditions? What are we known for?” Undoubtedly, the leading answers to Owens’ query—“tailgating” and “Spanish Town Mardi Gras”—are prominent, colorful elements of the city’s culture. But when she probed for more, her respondents shrugged: “Baton Rouge doesn’t really have any traditions. There’s nothing going on here.”

Observations both personal and professional told Owens, a lifelong Baton Rougean, otherwise. She just needed to prove the city wrong about itself.

Fieldwork

In 1999, Owens remembers, the young-professional organization Forum 35 adopted a succinct new slogan: “We Are BR.” “It was catchy,” said Owens. “Some people still remember it. But what I wanted to know was, Who are the ‘we’? Who are we?”

Owens has been a state folklorist for over thirty years, “but I had just not focused on Baton Rouge.” The city was included, though not extensively, in the Florida Parishes Folklife Survey published in 1984. In this recently completed project, called the Baton Rouge Folklife Survey and conducted from 2013 until 2017, Owens had at her disposal funding from the Library of Congress and the National Endowment of the Arts as well as the dozen folklorists who had answered Owens’ nationwide call to come investigate Baton Rouge and its tradition bearers.

[Read about the early stages of the project in our February 2014 interview with Maida Owens.]

Over the course of five years, Owens’ fieldworkers combed the city for evidence of its various cultures. Come within two miles of campus on an October Saturday and barbecue smoke and up-tempo trumpets will give every confidence that a game is looming. Other traditions are quieter, and often practiced behind closed doors, but the folklorists homed in on plenty. “Quite honestly, once you start peeling back the layers, there’s just so much going on here that there’s no way we could have documented everything,” said Owens.

Limited funding, not findings or enthusiasm, capped the project this year; the result is Baton Rouge Traditions, a compilation of writings gleaned from the Baton Rouge Folklife Survey; the New Populations Project, which surveyed the state’s immigrant and refugee communities between 2005 and 2011; and other related folklife research. The thirty-eight essays in the collection—all published at LouisianaFolklife.org—range from Joyce Jackson’s “Black Preaching Styles: Teaching, Exhorting, and Whooping” and Dominic Bordelon’s “My Way to Show I’m Here: Latino Music and Dance in Baton Rouge” to Laura Marcus Green’s “Living in Style: The Language of Hats” and Douglas Manger’s “Creative Pragmatism at Work: Generational Small Businesses in Baton Rouge.”

Owens concludes that rather than lacking an identity, Baton Rouge is a “cultural microcosm” of Louisiana. “We’ve been a work hub—so many people from throughout the state and Lower Mississippi have come here, and they’ve brought their traditions here,” said Owens. Moreover, after Jefferson Parish, East Baton Rouge Parish has the second-largest concentration of immigrant groups in the state. These aren’t all recent transplants—76.9% of the parish’s residents are native-born. Traditions have had time to take root.

As to why this variety has escaped notice, while cities like New Orleans and Lafayette are more celebrated for their diversity, Owens points to the city’s settlement patterns. “We don’t have neighborhoods of one ethnic group, like some communities do. We’re dispersed. But they’re here. And they have networks, but they aren’t as visible to the public."

Though the entire book can be found online, and for free, Owens’ work isn’t done. Four panels were planned for September and October, in collaboration with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge and the Louisiana Book Festival, to showcase the survey results to its subject, Baton Rouge at large.

“We don’t have neighborhoods of one ethnic group, like some communities do. We’re dispersed. But they’re here. And they have networks, but they aren’t as visible to the public."

Panels take their names from the book’s six chapters (“Baton Rouge Gives,” “... Makes,” “... Plays,” “... Worships,” “... Works,” and “ … Diversifies”). On September 13, the first installment, “How We Worship and Diversify,” was held at Mid City Ballroom—appropriately, a former church converted into an arts venue on Acadian Thruway—with demonstrations from four faith traditions. “I’m going to make you sing,” challenged Rabbi Jordan Goldson, of Congregation B’nai Israel, who led the audience in a nigun, a song of nonsense syllables intended as a soulful expression. “You just have to listen first.”

A panel discussion followed, between Goldson; Pastor Robin McCullough-Bade of the Interfaith Federation; Dr. Dandina Rao, representing the Datta Temple and its Hindu traditions; and Clarence Jones, director of Heritage, a local choral ensemble founded in 1976 and specializing in the Negro Spiritual.

The evening closed with a six-song concert from Heritage. One member of the ensemble, Jacqueline L. Jones, spoke of “a tone and a presence” that stirred her throughout the program, “even if I didn’t understand the languages.”

“If only the whole world could be like that room was tonight,” added Mid City Ballroom co-owner James Fogle. “If people would just be cool …”

The second installment, “How We Make and Play,” coincides with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge's Perkins Rowe Arts Festival on September 16. Two panels remain for Baton Rouge Traditions in 2017: “How We Give and Work,” October 10 at Jolie Pearl Oyster Bar, ahead of the Capital Area United Way’s Jambalaya Jam; and “Who We Are,” October 28 at the Book Festival, itself one of the city’s dearly-held traditions. The Book Festival panel, led by Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, will act as a summation of the three previous events as well as a discussion of how the city moves forward from here.

Partners including the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, Visit Baton Rouge, and the Louisiana Book Festival will give the project legs, in Owens’ view, whether it’s Visit Baton Rouge attracting tourists and journalists to town with the research or the Arts Council building an exhibit.

Arts Council President Renee Chatelain is grateful for the resource. “Especially last year with the flooding and when we launched Creative Relief [providing response, relief, and recovery resources to regional artists after the flooding and, more recently, Hurricane Harvey], it was very important to us that artists were helped, that the cultural definition of who we are as a people was not diluted or depleted,” said Chatelain. “If an artist got flooded or moved to another state, we wanted to know. Having this research is like having an inventory of our cultural assets.”

The Folklorist’s Lens

“Part of my challenge in this project was not realizing what I was seeing,” said Owens. She recalled taking newcomers on an introductory tour of the city before they embarked on fieldwork. “One of the folklorists said, ‘You have an extraordinary number of beauty parlors and nail salons and churches.’ I just took that for granted growing up here. Doesn’t every community have that? Evidently no. At least not to the extent we do.”

“Louisiana is so rich culturally,” said Chatelain. “People don’t separate these traditions from their everyday lives. Your grandmother quilts, that’s what she does.”

Owens cites “the folklorist’s lens”—and credits former Country Roads editor Nalini Raghavan for coining the phrase—as a deliberate perspective needed for success in the field. “That’s why I wanted to bring people from out of state. Once you put on that hat and you’re not just going about your daily life, you start seeing a community in a different way.”

She was particularly struck by the city’s generosity. “There are so many people making things to give away,” said Owens, who spoke in particular of the quilting communities in Baton Rouge, like The Giving Quilt, a non-profit which provides hand-sewn quilts to neonatal units, wards of the state, wounded soldiers, and other groups in need. Members from the Giving Quilt and the Wasted Women’s Bee have been in attendance at each panel, guiding attendees in the design of individual panels to contribute to a community quilt, which were unveiled at the October 28 [2017] “Who We Are” event.

It’s natural to seek common ground, to gravitate toward those who share a sense of humor, a hobby, a  faith, even an alma mater. But a city holds more than one weekend pastime or one language. And Louisiana’s capital is all the richer for that which we do not immediately understand.

Owens took the stage at Mid City Ballroom last month to thank the crowd for attending. Moments like these, the folklorist added, were what she’d dreamed of when she launched the project years ago. “I did this out of love for Baton Rouge,” said Owens.

[The Baton Rouge Traditions exhibit is now traveling! Visit louisianafolklife.org/batonrouge  to explore the online essays and for details on how to book the exhibit.]