About this project
This project began with the passing mention in 2021 of binders documenting locations mentioned in the numerous oral history interviews which Tulane University recorded beginning in the 1950s. The timing of these interviews allowed for first-hand accounts from musicians who were active from the inception of New Orleans' Storyville red light district through the post-Storyville migration to other cities, Prohibition and its eventual repeal, the Great Depression, the Dixieland revival of the 1940s, and onward.
The data for this project comes from scanning, transcribing, and researching the locations mentioned in the binders, using a variety of sources cited alongside individual items. Particularly useful tools included Sanborn fire insurance maps digitized by the Library of Congress, city directories digitized by Ancestry.com, digitized "Blue Book" guides to Storyville, and digitized historical newspapers.
While the majority of venues are in New Orleans and surrounding areas, this dataset also captures musical activity along the Gulf Coast, as well as in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and other locations. This set of venues also captures a much wider variety of performance venues than the small number of locales whose names survive in modern memory. The expanded set of venues -- not only saloons and "sporting houses," but also benevolent societies, resorts, campsites, and private homes -- provides a fuller picture of the musical life of the communities represented in the dataset.
Using this site
The interactive map below, hosted by Google's My Maps, plots locations with accompanying descriptive information. For densely marked areas, zoom in to street level. Each mention has its own entry so that it can be identified with an interview and location in the digest or transcript. The "location in document" field provides where in the transcript or digest and in the scanned binders the mention may be found. The "description" field transcribes information from the binder pages (many of them simply marked "Nola"), while the "notes" field contains comments or observations from the research process. Markers pinpoint the historical location as precisely as possible. Street numbers and names may have changed over time. Numbers may differ slightly where properties have been merged or split.
Click the upper right corner of the map for a larger presentation in a new tab.
About this site
This site is provided as a test platform for accessing the data and interactive map of locations of jazz venues mentioned in Tulane University's William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz Oral History, and was launched in conjunction with the Music Library Association's 2025 annual conference to accompany the presentation "Blue Harvest: Putting forgotten jazz venues back on the map with the Tulane jazz oral histories." The 2023 presentation "Do you know what it means to map New Orleans?" for the Texas chapter of the Music Library Association demonstrated a non-public alpha site.
Statistics and limitations
The current dataset captures 6576 mentions of locations, which include 1649 distinct place names and 988 individual locations. As of March 14, 2025, 5898 mentions, or about 89.6%, now have location information. One goal in making this project publicly accessible is to solicit more information on the remaining unknown locations. Still, some locations may defy identification due to conflicting information, the limitations on human memory in interviews conducted decades later, impermanent locations and those without street addresses, and changing terrain due to human intervention and natural disasters.
Using this data
This page and its data are available under a Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-SA license.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to the staff of Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, the Historic Collection of New Orleans' Williams Research Center, the libraries of Rapides Parish, LaFourche Parish, and Mandeville, Louisiana, Ricky Riccardi, the Iberville Parish Library, Burke Devillier, and Alexandria, Louisiana historian Michael Wynne.
Known issues
Links to Sanborn fire insurance maps are being replaced with stable links.
Contact
Questions? Corrections? Suggestions? Please email Maristella.Feustle[at]unt.edu with the subject line "Blue Harvest."
Site last updated September 4, 2026.