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We Want To Welcome You To The Storyville Blog where you will find ton's of great free adult stories and below you can see all kinds of great information and photos about Storyville the infamous section of New Orleans we named the Blog after and you will find photos of New Orleans and all the great and unusual things there. Plus some great Jazz Music Videos. Because what would a Storyville Blog be with out Jazzz.

Storyville was the legalized prostitution district of New Orleans, Louisiana from 1897 through 1917.

Locals usually simply referred to the area as The District. The nickname Storyville was in reference to city alderman Sidney Story, who wrote the legislation setting up the district. Most of this former district is now occupied by the Iberville Housing Projects, two blocks inland from the French Quarter.

One of the few surviving buildings from Storyville, 2005 photograph. 100 years earlier, the "New Image Supermarket" building housed Frank Early's saloon, where Tony Jackson regularly played. The Photo of the building is below.

One of the few surviving buildings from Storyville, 2005 photograph. 100 years earlier, the "New Image Supermarket" building housed Frank Early's saloon, where Tony Jackson regularly played. The photo of the buiding is above.

The District was set up to limit prostitution to one area of town where it could be monitored and regulated by authorities. In the late 1890s, the New Orleans city government studied the legalized red light districts of northern German and Dutch ports and set up Storyville based on such models. Between 1895 and 1915, "blue books" were published in Storyville. These books were guides to prostitution for visitors to the district's services including house descriptions, prices, particular services, and the "stock" each house had to offer. The Storyville blue-books were inscribed with the motto: "Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Evil to Him Who Evil Thinks.)"

Establishments in Storyville ranged from cheap "cribs" to more expensive houses up to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street for well-heeled customers. (The term "crib" origionated in San Francisco's red-light district.) New Orleans' cribs were fifty-cent establishments whereas the more expensive establishments could cost up to ten-dollars. Black and white brothels coexisted in Storyville, however, black men were barred from legally purchasing services rendered in either black or white brothels. None the less, brothels with black prostitutes serving black johns openly flourished with the full knowledge of the police and other local authorities a short distance uptown from Storyville proper. [citation needed]

The District was adjacent to one of the main train stations where travelers arrived in the city and became a noted attraction for many visitors.

Jazz did not originate in Storyville (it started off as a New Orleans style of music played all over town), but it flourished there as in the rest of the city; many out-of-town visitors first heard this style of music there before the music spread up north. Some early jazz writers suggested that Storyville was key in the development of jazz and that its closing was responsible for New Orleans musicians leaving for Chicago, Illinois, but this is now regarded as inaccurate. Some people from elsewhere continue to associate Storyville with the origins of jazz. It was tradition in the better Storyville establishments to hire a piano player, and sometimes small bands.

The District was closed down by the federal government (over the strong objections of the New Orleans City Government) during World War I in 1917. In regard to prostitution, New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman procounced that, "you can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular." After 1917, when Storyville was shut-down, separate black and white underground dens of prostitution emerged around the city.

The District continued in a more subdued state as an entertainment center through the 1920s, with various dance halls, cabarets, and restaurants. Speakeasies, gambling joints, and prostitution were also regularly found in the district despite repeated police raids.

Almost all the buildings in the former District were demolished in the 1930s to clear the land for the building of the Iberville Projects. While much of the area contained old and decayed buildings, the old mansions along Basin Street, some of the finest structures in the city, were leveled too. The city government wished to do all it could to blot the notorious district from memory. Basin Street was even renamed "North Saratoga" (although the historic name was returned some 20 years later).

Some Great New Orleans Jazz Music Videos

A Bit About Voodoo

The versions of Voodoo which survived in the Southeastern USA, were connected with Christian mysticism in the minds of rural African Americans. Segregation minimized the number of bi-lingual African Americans (those who spoke basilect and fluent acrolect), and at the same time minimized the number of whites who could translate basilect well enough to discover Voodoo in the spoken, sung, or written words of middle class, working class or working-poor African Americans. In isolated African American communities, such as the Georgia Sea Islands or in the Mississippi Delta, Voodoo lore could be freely referenced and practices, at least the more subtle ones, were more public.

Many popular songs of the Delta Blues tradition (circa 1900 to 1941) referenced voodoo or its derivitive Hoodoo explicitly. Robert Johnson sang of "hot foot powder sprinkled all round my door" and Muddy Water(s) referenced "the gypsy woman", "seventh son", and the "mojo hand".

Scholars debate the variations of Voodoo, how they have survived, how much they have changed, and to what extent Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular were used as covers to enable the survival of Voodoo. A common saying is that Haiti is 80% Roman Catholic, 20% Protestant, and 100% Vodou. Thus the Catholic contribution to Haitian Vodou is quite noticeable.

However, in the United States the story may be a little different, depending upon which scholarship you read. Some scholars believe confusion about Voodoo in the USA arises because there is a widespread system of African American folk belief and practice known as Hudu or more popularly as hoodoo. The similarity of the words hoodoo and Voodoo notwithstanding, hoodoo may have tenuous connections to organized religion like Vodou, but hoodoo may be an integral part of the Vodoun religion in West Africa and arguably throughout all of Africa. Some aspects of hoodoo may be derived primarily from Congo and Angolan practices of Central Africa, and may retain elements of the traditions and practices that arose among Bantu language speakers.

Today, possibly due to the suppression of the Voodoo and Hoodoo traditions and Vodoun religion in the United States, most hoodoo 'rootworkers' are members of African American Protestant churches, but when hoodoo is compared to some of the African religions in the diaspora, the closest parallel is Cuban Palo, a survival of Congo religious beliefs.

In summary, Haitian Vudou is derived from West African religious traditions and was retained in modified form by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean who were captive in a mostly Catholic population. However, in the USA the Vodoun religion is derived from largely the Ewe and other West and central African groups

Public relations-wise, Vodou has come to be associated in the popular mind with such phenomena as "zombies" and "voodoo dolls." While there is evidence of zombie creation, it is a minor phenomenon within rural Haitian culture and not a part of the Vodou religion as such. Such things fall under the auspices of the bokor or sorcerer rather than the priest of the Lwa.

The practice of sticking pins in dolls has history in European folk magic, but its exact origins are unclear. How it became known as a method of cursing an individual by some followers of what has come to be called New Orleans Voodoo, which is a local variant of hoodoo, is a mystery. Some speculate that it was used as a means of self defense to intimidate superstitious slave owners. This practice is not unique to New Orleans voodoo, however, and has as much basis in European-based magical devices such as the poppet and the nkisi or bocio of West and Central Africa. These are in fact power objects, what in Haiti would be referred to as pwen, rather than magical surrogates for an intended target of sorcery whether for boon or for bane. Such voodoo dolls are not a feature of Haitian religion, although dolls intended for tourists may be found in the Iron Market in Port au Prince. The practice became closely associated with the Vodou religions in the public mind through the vehicle of horror movies and popular novels.

There is a practice in Haiti of nailing crude poppets with a discarded shoe on trees near the cemetery to act as messengers to the otherworld, which is very different in function from how poppets are portrayed as being used by voodoo worshippers in popular media and imagination, ie. for purposes of sympathetic magic towards another person. Another use of dolls in authentic Vodou practice is the incorporation of plastic doll babies in altars and objects used to represent or honor the spirits, or in pwen, which recalls the aforementioned use of bocio and nkisi figures in Africa.

Although Voodoo is often associated with Satanism, Satan is purely an Abrahamic belief and has not been incorporated in Voodoo tradition. When Mississippi Delta folksongs mix references to Voodoo and to Satan, what is being expressed is social pain such as from racism, which is couched in Christian terms and blamed on the devil. Those who practice voodoo do not worship or invoke the blessings of a devil.