From the late 1960s into the mid-1980s a New Orleans-based record label, the Smoky Mary Phonograph Company, released fourteen LPs by some of the city's most revered and respected elder jazz musicians. The labels's owner, trombonist Frank Demond, produced Smoky Mary's sessions and often played on them, including many of the songs anthologized here on Traditional Jazz From New Orleans. A native of Los Angeles, Demond fell love with the Crescent City trad sound after hearing the Preservation Hall Band perform in California. That transformative moment inspired Demond to move to New Orleans, sit in with the band, and eventually join it. Smoky Mary refers to a nineteenth-century train which many musicians rode between gigs in downtown New Orleans, bythe Mississippi River, and. Dome five niles away, in Milneburg on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Demond focused on recording such venerable veterans as singing pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, trumpeter Percy Humphrey and his clarinetist brother Willie Humphrey, trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine, trombonist Jim [Big Jim?] Robinson, and a host of their colleagues.

As described in our Privacy Policy, we collect personal information from your interactions with us and our website, including through cookies and similar technologies. We may also share this personal information with third parties, including advertising partners. We do this in order to show you ads on other websites that are more relevant to your interests and for other reasons outlined in our privacy policy.

Sharing of personal information for targeted advertising based on your interaction on different websites may be considered "sales", "sharing", or "targeted advertising" under certain U.S. state privacy laws. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to opt out of these activities. If you would like to exercise this opt-out right, please follow the instructions below.

If you visit our website with the Global Privacy Control opt-out preference signal enabled, depending on where you are, we will treat this as a request to opt-out of activity that may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information or other uses that may be considered targeted advertising for the device and browser you used to visit our website.