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This Week's Edition
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French Quarter Festival takes over New Orleans this weekend with four days of music across 20 stages, blues returns to Baton Rouge, and we look back at the cornetist who invented jazz 130 years ago in a New Orleans honky-tonk. Here's your guide to Louisiana's biggest music weekend of the spring.
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April 14-20, 2026
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Louisiana's Biggest Music Weekend Arrives
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French Quarter Festival fills New Orleans with music, crowds, and spring energy
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| This is the weekend Louisiana celebrates what it does best. | | French Quarter Festival takes over New Orleans Thursday through Sunday with 302 performances, 20 stages, and Grammy-winning PJ Morton headlining. It's the largest free music festival in the world, and it happens right in the French Quarter. | | Baton Rouge fires up its Blues Festival with Grammy winners Kenny Neal and Chris Thomas King. New Iberia celebrates its Spanish roots. Lake Charles throws its annual This Is Home Fest. Slidell hosts a crawfish cook-off. And Bastrop brings crawfish season to North Louisiana. | | It's one of those weekends where Louisiana music fills every corner of the state. From jazz in the French Quarter to blues in Baton Rouge, from zydeco in Lake Charles to brass bands on Frenchmen Street, Louisiana is playing its soundtrack all weekend long. | | Perfect spring weather. Music everywhere. And from New Orleans to Bastrop, there's a reason to celebrate Louisiana. Here's what's happening across the state—April 14 through 20. |
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What's Happening in Your Area Code
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🎺 New Orleans / Kenner / Metairie - 504
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Music takes over the French Quarter during Louisiana’s biggest spring festival weekend
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| French Quarter Festival |
| French Quarter, New Orleans · April 16-19, 2026 |
| French Quarter Festival 2026 delivers four days of world-class local music across 20 stages with 302 performances, Grammy-winning PJ Morton headlining, and more than 70 local culinary vendors serving over 275 dishes. The largest free music festival on the planet, right in the heart of the French Quarter. |
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| A Taste of New Orleans |
| New Orleans · April 17-19, 2026 |
| One of the city's great spring food events bringing together the best New Orleans restaurants and flavors under one roof. If French Quarter Fest has you out in the streets, this one keeps the food focus going all weekend long. |
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Blues returns to Baton Rouge with live music in the heart of downtown
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| Baton Rouge Blues Festival |
| Baton Rouge · Repentance Park, Downtown Baton Rouge |
| Originating in 1981, the Baton Rouge Blues Festival is one of the oldest free blues festivals in the United States, celebrating Baton Rouge as the home of swamp blues. This year's headliners include Grammy-nominated Kenny Neal and Grammy-winning Chris Thomas King, free to the public all weekend. |
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🎶 Lafayette / Acadiana Area - 337
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| El Festival Español de Nueva Iberia |
| Bouligny Plaza, New Iberia · April 17-19, 2026 |
| Celebrating New Iberia's deep Spanish roots with the "Dave Robicheaux Running of the Bulls" 5K race and a full festival weekend of food, music, and cultural heritage. A reminder that Louisiana's culture runs through France, Africa, AND Spain. |
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| This Is Home Fest |
| Lake Charles · Saturday, April 18, 2026 |
| The 6th annual This Is Home Fest is an unforgettable celebration of music, art, food, and culture in the heart of Southwest Louisiana, with zydeco, live bands, and a full kids zone. Pure Lake Charles pride on display. |
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🚤 Houma / Thibodaux / Bayou Country - 985
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| Slidell's Crawfish Cook-Off |
| Slidell · Saturday, April 18, 2026 |
| The Northshore crawfish season hits full stride with Slidell's annual cook-off. Local teams competing for the best boil, live music, and the kind of backyard Louisiana energy that never gets old. |
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🌲 Shreveport / North Louisiana - 318
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| Morehouse Parish Crawfish Festival & Fair |
| Bastrop · April 16-18, 2026 |
| North Louisiana's biggest crawfish celebration brings the mudbugs to Bastrop for a three-day parish fair with games, live music, fair food, and crawfish every way you can think of. Northeast Louisiana doing it right. |
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| The Man Who Invented Jazz |
| The Cornetist Who Invented Jazz in a New Orleans Honky-Tonk |
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The sound of early New Orleans gave birth to jazz
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| Around 1895, in the honky-tonks and dance halls of New Orleans, a cornetist named Buddy Bolden started playing music nobody had ever heard before. |
| He took ragtime, the popular music of the day, and played it rough. He added blues. He improvised passages instead of playing songs the way they were written. He played loud—so loud that people said you could hear his cornet for miles when he "called his children home." |
What Buddy Bolden invented in those New Orleans dance halls became jazz.
Born in 1877 in Central City, Bolden grew up surrounded by brass bands parading through the streets, spirituals sung in Baptist churches, and the music of the Red River docks. He learned cornet from a neighbor and started playing at picnics, parades, and union halls around the turn of the century.
By 1900, Bolden's band was the hottest group in New Orleans. He was called "King Bolden," and people packed into places like Funky Butt Hall and Lincoln Park to hear him play. His sound was different from the society bands of the day. It was rougher, bluesier, more alive. He improvised. He let the music breathe.
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| Bolden created songs that became jazz standards. "Funky Butt," later recorded by Jelly Roll Morton as "Buddy Bolden's Blues," was one of the first references to funk in American music. He invented the "Big Four," a rhythmic innovation that gave early jazz room for individual improvisation over the marching band beat. | | Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton all remembered Bolden as one of the most powerful musicians they'd ever heard. King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, and Bunk Johnson were directly inspired by his playing. But Bolden never recorded. Not a single note.
| | In 1906, Bolden's health began to crumble. He had severe headaches, drank heavily, and struggled with mental illness. In 1907, at age 29, he was committed to the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson, where he spent the rest of his life. He died in 1931, having not played a note in 24 years. | | No recordings exist. No interviews. Just one photograph of his band and the memories of the musicians who heard him play and carried his sound forward into the world. |
| Buddy Bolden invented jazz in a New Orleans honky-tonk around 1895. And this weekend, 130 years later, Louisiana celebrates what he started with the largest free music festival on the planet. |
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| This city was founded in 1836 by the Shreve Town Company, a corporation established to develop a town at the meeting point of the Red River and the Texas Trail. | | For centuries, a 180-mile natural log jam called the Great Raft had blocked the Red River and made navigation impossible. Captain Henry Miller Shreve, commanding the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, used a specially modified riverboat called the Heliopolis to clear the river and make it navigable for the first time. | | The company and the village were named in his honor. Shreve Town. | | In 1838, Caddo Parish was carved out of the massive Natchitoches Parish, and Shreve Town became the parish seat. On March 20, 1839, the village was incorporated as a town. The original settlement consisted of 64 city blocks—eight streets running west from the Red River, and eight streets running south from Cross Bayou. | | The city became a center of steamboat commerce, carrying cotton and agricultural crops downriver. During the Civil War, it served as the capital of Louisiana from 1863 to 1865 after Baton Rouge and Opelousas fell to Union forces. | | In the early 1900s, oil was discovered in the region, and the city exploded. It became a national center for the oil industry and grew into Louisiana's third-largest city. | | Today, it's home to Barksdale Air Force Base, the Louisiana Hayride (where Elvis Presley got his start), and a downtown listed on the National Register of Historic Places. |
| The answer: Shreveport |
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Shreveport rose where the Red River opened Louisiana to trade and growth
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| Creole Institution |
| Why This 108-Year-Old Restaurant Is Still a French Quarter Institution |
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| Arnaud's Restaurant — 108 Years of French Quarter Tradition
813 Bienville Street, New Orleans | | In 1918, a French wine salesman named Arnaud Cazenave opened a grand restaurant in the French Quarter with one simple belief: the pursuit of the pleasures of the table is as worthy as anything else one chooses to pursue in life.
| | Over 108 years later, Arnaud's is still serving that philosophy.
| | The restaurant was built across 11 buildings with a labyrinth of dining rooms. Cazenave, who called himself "Count Arnaud" (a purely local and honorary title), ran the restaurant for 30 years until his death in 1948. His daughter, Germaine Wells, took over and ran it for the next 30 years. | | By 1978, when the Casbarian family acquired Arnaud's, only one dining room and the bar were still operating. The Casbarians restored the entire restaurant, modernizing the kitchen while keeping the original appeal intact. They renovated 14 dining rooms, each one furnished with antiques, chandeliers, and drapes that still feel like 1920s New Orleans. | | Today, Arnaud's has 14 named dining rooms: Mezzanine, Creole Cottage, Bourbon Suites, Edison Park, 1920, Iberville, Bienville, Toulouse, Dauphine, Lafitte, Bacchus, Gold, Irma, and Count's. The restaurant serves classic Louisiana Creole cuisine—Shrimp Arnaud, Oysters Bienville, Trout Meunière—dishes that have been on the menu since the beginning. | | Upstairs is the Germaine Cazenave Wells Mardi Gras Museum, named for Count Arnaud's daughter. Wells reigned as queen of over 22 Mardi Gras balls from 1937 to 1968—more than any other woman in Carnival history. The museum displays more than two dozen lavish Mardi Gras costumes, including 13 of her queen gowns, vintage photographs, elaborate krewe invitations, and faux jewels. | | The museum opened in 1983 and has been free to the public ever since. It's one of the most unique Mardi Gras collections in Louisiana, tucked inside one of the oldest restaurants in America. | | Arnaud's survived Prohibition (the bar stayed open, surreptitiously), the Great Depression, Hurricane Katrina, and a pandemic. It reopened in November 2005, just months after Katrina devastated New Orleans, making it one of the first restaurants to come back. | | Today, the restaurant is run by the fourth generation of the Casbarian family: Katy and Archie Casbarian, along with their mother Jane. They still serve classic Creole cuisine in 14 dining rooms. The Jazz Bistro still has a strolling jazz trio. And upstairs, Germaine Wells' queen gowns still hang in the museum. |
| 108 years later, Arnaud's is still a French Quarter institution. |
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Arnaud’s has defined French Quarter dining for more than a century
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| A Note from Our Sponsor |
BayouRoots |
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Dear Louisiana Reader,
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| I want to tell you something about your last name. |
| Whether it's been in Louisiana for six generations, or your family arrived more recently — your surname touched this state at a specific moment in history. A parish. A year. A reason. And that story is sitting inside the historical record, waiting to be told. |
| That's what BayouRoots does. We research your family's first known connection to Louisiana and put it in your hands — not guesswork, not assumptions. Documented history. |
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"I had no idea my grandmother's family name showed up in Pointe Coupee Parish records from 1822. BayouRoots found it in an afternoon."
— A BayouRoots subscriber
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| This week, you can get your family's Louisiana surname report for $19.99 — that's $10 off the regular price — when you use the code LAUNCH at checkout. |
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With warm regards from the bayou country,
The BayouRoots Team
family.louisianathisweek.com
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| The Weekend Louisiana Music Takes Over |
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Louisiana music fills every corner of the state this weekend
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| This is the weekend Louisiana celebrates what it does best. | | French Quarter Festival brings 302 performances to New Orleans. Baton Rouge fires up its Blues Festival. New Iberia celebrates Spanish heritage. Lake Charles throws This Is Home Fest. Slidell hosts a crawfish cook-off. Bastrop brings crawfish to North Louisiana. | | It's one of those weekends where music fills every corner of the state. From jazz in the French Quarter to blues in Baton Rouge, from zydeco in Lake Charles to brass bands on Frenchmen Street, Louisiana is playing its soundtrack all weekend long. | | Spring is here. Festival season is in full swing. And from here until summer, there's music happening every single weekend. | | Until next time, |
| Michael |
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