As a longtime student of African American music history, John Davis came to New Orleans in search of the sound that came before jazz.
He had virtually no knowledge of south Louisiana other than of composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
“I remember going to the Hogan Jazz Archive, and this guy Lynn Abbott — who’s a very well-known guy in the world of jazz scholarship and the early history of Black American music — comes out and he said, ‘So what do you want to see?’ And I said, ‘Well, how about box No. 1? Let’s start there.’”…