Forty Sundays a Year

New Orleans Second Line Parades

Free-for-All, Sudan Kids, 2017.

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Forty Sundays a Year

New Orleans Second Line Parades

by Pableaux Johnson
Southern Cultures, Vol. 26, No. 1: Documentary Moment

“Sunday Second Lines nod to the past but embrace the present, dancing along that thin line where tradition thrives, four hours of unbridled jubilation at a time.”

On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs take turns celebrating the everyday joy and pains of the community in a flashy display of footwork and high fashion, hip-hop bass and thundering brass. Dedicated high-energy revelers suit up for a four-hour funk-fueled strut through the streets (and stairways, stoops, porches, and even roofs) we call home, turning their neighborhoods into temporary dance clubs in a wildly kinetic weekly tradition that showcases New Orleans’s musical, dance, and neighborhood traditions.

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