During the first half of the eighteenth century New Orleans was, by all odds, the most musical city in America. From street cries to opera, from dance music to symphonic concerts, the city teemed with music. In this carefully researched and delightfully written book, a musician-historian recaptures the era when New Orleans was the opera center of the hemisphere, when the various elements that were to fuse mysteriously into jazz were in early stages of development. To a great extent, the history of opera in New Orleans in these years is the history of American opera. At a time when its population was under 40,000, New Orleans had three opera companies. The French Opera Company went on tour to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other Eastern cities before they had resident companies of their own. New Orleans opera has been touched on in many books, dealt with at some length in a few. But this is far and away the most thorough, the most fully documented work ever attempted on the subject. In many important areas it corrects errors, and misconceptions that have been carried over from book to book for many years. The author also treats at some length concerts, brass bands, dancing almost an obsession with New Orleanians of all social classes and Negro music. Jazz enthusiasts will be particularly interested in the material on early cutting contests, in the discussion of antebellum funeral parades (then as now the musicians played a mournful dirge on the way to the cemetery and gay and lightsome airs on the way home), and in the section on street singers. Here is social history at its bets, a book that will inform the historian and fascinate the layman.