Second lines, explained: the parade that invites you in

What you need to know, in short: a second line is a street parade built in two parts. The first line is the brass band and the club that hired it, dressed for the day. The second line is everyone who falls in behind them and dances the route: neighbours, friends, strangers, you. There is no ticket and no barrier. The parades are run by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, neighbourhood organisations with roots in the nineteenth century, and they roll mostly on Sunday afternoons through the season, roughly September to June. Dates and routes are published in advance, and WWOZ, the city's jazz and heritage station, lists them in its Takin' It to the Streets listings.

The two lines

The name is a description. Up front goes the main line, as the clubs also call it: a grand marshal, the club members in the suits they have made for the day, feathered and finished down to the shoes, carrying decorated umbrellas and fans, and the brass band they have hired, trumpets, trombones, tuba and drums. Behind the band comes the second line, and it is not an audience in any ordinary sense. It moves, it dances (the dancing itself is called second lining), it waves handkerchiefs and twirls umbrellas of its own, and it can stretch for blocks. A Mardi Gras parade you watch. A second line you are in, or you are not there at all.

Where it comes from

The clubs descend from the benevolent and mutual aid societies that Black New Orleanians built from the nineteenth century onward, pooling money for the things they were shut out of: medical care, insurance, and a proper burial. Those societies buried their members with music. In the jazz funeral, the band walks the coffin to the cemetery playing slow dirges, and after the burial the music turns: upbeat, joyful, a celebration of a life on the walk back, and the crowd that falls in behind is the second line. By the late 1800s the societies were parading with brass bands on their anniversaries as well as their funerals, and the modern club parade grew from that: each Social Aid and Pleasure Club still buries its dead, still looks after its own, and once a year puts on its suits and parades its own neighbourhood, in a tradition its members regard as a duty as much as a party.

How a club parade runs

Each club parades once a year, on its own route, through the streets it comes from, and the route is the meaning: it passes the club's haunts, its members' homes, the corners that matter to it, with stops along the way. The parade lasts an afternoon and covers miles. The suits are new each year, a serious expense carried by the members, and the band is hired for the day. Nothing about it is staged for visitors, which is exactly why visitors who find one remember it longer than anything they bought a ticket for. The season runs through the cooler months, when a Sunday afternoon in a suit and a dancing crowd is a pleasure rather than a test.

Joining one, properly

The etiquette is short. The second line is an invitation, so accept it: fall in behind the band, keep moving, dance as much as the music asks of you. Practical notes: wear shoes you can walk miles in, carry water, and use WWOZ's listings to find the Sunday's route rather than hoping to hear a band by chance. And read the occasion. If the procession in front of you is a funeral, sombre on the way out and joyful only after the burial, give it the respect of the thing it is; the tradition holds grief and celebration in the same parade, and knowing which half you are standing in is most of what there is to know.

Second lines on this calendar

The club parades themselves are neighbourhood events rather than listings, but the tradition surfaces on this calendar where it meets the city's stages. The Satchmo SummerFest, free at the New Orleans Jazz Museum on 31 July and 1 August 2027, includes the Satchmo Salute second line parade. The Jazz Museum's Improvisations Gala, on 5 December 2026, fills the museum with music and second line parades for the night. And the brass band tradition runs through the music calendar all year, from the New Breed Brass Band's club nights on Frenchmen Street to the Hot 8 and the Dirty Dozen: hear the bands indoors first, and the Sunday parade will make a different kind of sense.

Walk the ground with a guide

The Quarter's streets are where these traditions are most visible to a new arrival. A guided walk is the gentlest introduction to the ground they move through. Sold by Klook at the same price you would pay there direct.

Sources: the second line tradition as documented in the Historic New Orleans Collection's Dancing in the Streets research on Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and American RadioWorks' Routes of Recovery; WWOZ's Takin' It to the Streets listings for how routes and dates are published; this site's records for Satchmo SummerFest (French Quarter Festivals, Inc.) and the Improvisations Gala (New Orleans Jazz Museum). Checked 1 November 2026.

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