Paul Barbarin: The Drummer Who Died Doing What He Loved

The Drummer Who Died Doing What He Loved

Paul Barbarin spent his entire life chasing the beat. Born in New Orleans in 1899 into one of the city's great musical families, he played drums with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and every major figure in early jazz. He founded the Onward Brass Band. He kept the traditional New Orleans sound alive when the rest of the world was moving on. And on February 17, 1969, while playing snare drum in a Mardi Gras parade, Paul Barbarin collapsed and died. If you have to go, that's the way to do it in New Orleans.

The Barbarins were musical royalty. Paul's father Isidore was a musician, and his brothers carried the tradition forward. Growing up in that household meant growing up in a world where music wasn't something you chose—it was the air you breathed. Paul gravitated to the drums, and the drums took him everywhere.

Like so many New Orleans musicians of his generation, Barbarin headed north when the action shifted to Chicago and New York. He left New Orleans in 1917 and fell in with the heaviest company in jazz: Freddie Keppard's band, Jimmie Noone's group, and then King Oliver's orchestra from 1925 to 1927. Playing with Oliver was the equivalent of getting a Ph.D. in New Orleans jazz—you were learning from the source.

From Oliver's band, Barbarin moved to Luis Russell's orchestra, one of the great big bands of the late 1920s, and eventually worked with Louis Armstrong himself. His drumming was rooted in the New Orleans tradition—press rolls, parade rhythms, a feel that swung without ever losing the connection to the streets where the music was born.

But Barbarin's heart was always in New Orleans, and in 1955 he came home for good. He founded the Onward Brass Band, reviving one of the city's historic musical organizations, and spent the last fourteen years of his life doing what New Orleans drummers were born to do: leading bands through the streets, playing for funerals and parades and second lines, keeping the tradition alive for a new generation.

And then came that Mardi Gras day in 1969. Barbarin was seventy years old, marching with his band through the streets he'd known his entire life, playing the rhythms he'd been playing for sixty years. His heart gave out mid-parade. He died on the street, in the middle of the music, surrounded by the sound of New Orleans.

There's something almost literary about Paul Barbarin's death—the old drummer who came home to play the music he loved and died doing exactly that, on the biggest day of the year, in the city that made him. It's the kind of ending that a novelist would be accused of making up. But this is New Orleans, where life has always been more dramatic than fiction, and the best musicians don't retire. They just keep playing until the music calls them home.