Description"Black" is a word that carries strong cultural currency in the United States today. By casting jazz as “black music,” early jazz critics and scholars created suspect bases for many key facets of the music and its historical development. Due largely to racial politics, these have gone virtually unquestioned. Through this process of creating a history of jazz, African-American racial classification was conflated with Black ethnic identity. This thesis represents a preliminary approach to a deeper examination of the array of ethnic groups, and the cultures they represent, present in fin de siècle New Orleans. Particular attention is paid to Creole culture, a complex, regional construction scarcely recognized by the jazz community. By examining the development of jazz through a cultural lens, that music’s place in the broader evolution of American vernacular musics may become more evident.