New Orleans has long been one of the most important centers of artistic activity in the South. The earliest theaters were French, and the first of these was started by refugees from Hispaniola, who put on the city's first professional theatrical performance in 1791. The American Theater, which opened in 1824, attracted many of the finest actors in America, as did the nationally famous St. Charles. Showboats traveled the Mississippi and other waterways, bringing dramas, musicals, and minstrel shows to river towns and plantations as early as the 1840s, with their heyday being the 1870s and 1880s.
Principal theaters included the New Orleans Theater of the Performing Arts, the Saenger Theater in New Orleans (one of the "grand old theaters"), Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, and the Tulane Theater. Junebug Productions is a black touring company based in New Orleans. Louisiana State University (LSU) at Baton Rouge has theaters for both opera and drama. Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Monroe, Lake Charles, and Hammond are among the cities with little theaters, and Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Lake Charles have ballet companies. There are symphony orchestras in most of the larger cities, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra being the best known.
It is probably in music that Louisiana has made its most distinctive contributions to culture. Jazz was born in New Orleans around 1900; among its sources was the music played by brass bands at carnivals and at Negro funerals, and its immediate precursor was the highly syncopated music known as ragtime. Early jazz in the New Orleans style is called Dixieland; Louis Armstrong pioneered the transformation of jazz from the Dixieland ensemble style to a medium for solo improvisation. Traditional Dixieland may still be heard in New Orleans at Preservation Hall, Dixieland Hall, and the New Orleans Jazz Club. Equally distinctive is Cajun music, dominated by the sound of the fiddle and accordion. The French Acadian Music Festival, held in Abbeville, takes place in April.
Visual arts in the state continue to flourish, especially in New Orleans, where the New Orleans Museum of Southern Art opened in 1998.
The Louisiana Division of the Arts (LDOA; est. 1977), the largest arts grantmaker in the state, is an agency of the state Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. Arts projects are funded in every parish (county) in the state through the LDOA Decentralized Arts Funding Program. In 2003, Louisiana arts organizations received grants totaling $1,073,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities was established in 1971. Ongoing programs include Relic: Readings in Literature and Culture and Prime Time Family Reading Time, an annual program presented through local libraries. In 2000, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded 13 grants totaling $927,518 to state organizations.