The much quoted 1886 article[2] by George Washington Cable offers this description: The booming of African drums and blast of huge wooden horns called to the gathering ...

The drums were very long, hollowed, often from a single piece of wood, open at one end and having a sheep or goat skin stretched across the other ...

Although the inspiration for Gottschalk's compositions, such as "Bamboula" and "The Banjo", has often been attributed to childhood visits to Congo Square, no documentation exists for any such visits, and it is more likely that he learned the Creole melodies and rhythms that inform these pieces from Sally, his family's enslaved nurse from Saint-Domingue, who Gottschalk referred to as "La Négresse Congo".

Gottschalk was closely associated with the Cuban pianist and composer, Manuel Saumell Robredo, a master of the contradanza, widely popular dance compositions based on the African-derived habanera rhythm.

It is likely that contradanzas composed by both Gottschalk and Saumell were an antecedent to the ragtime compositions of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton.

When the Coonjai is danced, the music is furnished by an orchestra of singers, the leader of whom—a man selected both for the quality of his voice and for his skill in improvising—sustains the solo part, while the others afford him an opportunity, as they shout in chorus, for inventing some neat verse to compliment some lovely danseuse, or celebrate the deeds of some plantation hero.

The dancers themselves never sing ... and the usual musical accompaniment, besides that of the singers, is that furnished by a skilful performer on the barrel-head-drum, the jaw-bone and key, or some other rude instrument.

This family included United States chargé d'affaires to Texas and a Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, Alcée Louis la Branche.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Camille Nickerson performed art songs adapted from Creole folk music professionally as "The Louisiana Lady."

A brief summary of published compilations (with citations in References) follows: The most definite recollections of my childhood on the Labranche Plantation in St. Charles Parish where we lived, are of the singing and dancing of the negroes.

Many of the negroes who had wandered away (in fact, nearly all of them) had by then returned to their birthplace to find themselves practically under the same masters ...Vernacular music among Louisiana Creole people combined African, French, Spanish, and Anglo-American influences.