The Parade That Belongs to Everyone
In New Orleans, a second line is not a backup plan. It's the most democratic form of celebration in American culture — a moving street party led by a brass band and a Social Aid and Pleasure Club, followed by anyone who wants to join. The "first line" is the band and the club members in their matching suits. The "second line" is everyone else — neighbors, strangers, kids on bikes, old men with umbrellas, anyone who hears the music and falls in step.
Second lines happen nearly every Sunday from late August through the end of spring. They roll through neighborhoods across the city — Central City, the Tremé, the Seventh Ward, Uptown — following routes that haven't changed in decades. The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs that organize them are some of the oldest community organizations in Black New Orleans, dating back to the post-Civil War era when African Americans created mutual aid societies to provide insurance, burial funds, and social support that the broader society denied them.
The Clubs
The names of the clubs read like a roll call of neighborhood pride. The Prince of Wales. The Lady Jetsetters. The Original Big Seven. The Nine Times. The Money Wasters. Each club represents a neighborhood, and each club's annual second line is the biggest day on that neighborhood's social calendar. Members spend months preparing — ordering matching suits in bold colors, coordinating with the brass band, planning the route, decorating the banner.
On the day of the parade, the club members step out in their finery — men in three-piece suits with matching fedoras, women in coordinated dresses and decorated parasols — and the brass band strikes up. The route winds through the home neighborhood, stopping at significant spots — the corner bar, a member's house, the spot where a fallen member used to stand. The second line grows as it moves, picking up followers at every block until the street is full of dancing, waving, shouting people moving together to the beat.
The Jazz Funeral
The second line tradition is inseparable from the jazz funeral, the most famous New Orleans ritual. When a musician — or anyone in the community who is loved enough — dies, a brass band leads the procession from the church or funeral home to the cemetery. On the way there, the music is slow and mournful — hymns like "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" played at a dirge tempo. The grief is real and public and shared.
But after the body is "cut loose" — after the burial or the symbolic release — the band kicks into up-tempo music, and the second line erupts. Umbrellas go up. Dancing breaks out. The mourning transforms into celebration, not because the grief is gone but because New Orleans understands that death and joy are not opposites. They're neighbors. The jazz funeral says: we will grieve you properly, and then we will celebrate your life with everything we've got.
The Umbrella
The decorated umbrella is the essential accessory of the second line. It's not for rain — though it works for that too. It's a signal, a flag, a dance partner. Second line umbrellas are decorated with feathers, ribbons, sequins, and fabric in the colors of the club. Waving one overhead while dancing through the street is the quintessential New Orleans gesture — joyful, visible, unapologetically alive.
Every Sunday
The second line tradition has survived everything — slavery, Jim Crow, urban renewal, Hurricane Katrina, and the ongoing pressures of gentrification and noise complaints from newcomers who moved to New Orleans and then discovered that New Orleans is loud. The clubs keep forming. The brass bands keep playing. The neighborhoods keep turning out.
For visitors who happen to stumble onto a second line on a Sunday afternoon, it's a revelation — live brass band music, hundreds of people dancing in the street, an energy that no concert or festival can replicate because it's not a performance. It's life. It's the community taking its joy public. It's New Orleans doing what New Orleans does better than anywhere else on Earth: turning an ordinary day into something extraordinary.
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