Queer Places:
449 Park Ave, New York, NY 10022, USA
Hook and Ladder Cemetery, 1000 Lafayette St, Gretna, LA 70053, United States

Robert Emmet Kennedy (January 10, 1877 - November 21, 1941) was born on January 10, 1877, in Gretna, Louisiana, a community situated just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. He was the youngest surviving child born to Dennis Kennedy and Elinor Dixon Kennedy, both Irish immigrants who established a home steeped in music and storytelling. His father played Irish jigs on the fiddle, often joined by local friends, while his mother sang and acted out traditional Irish folk songs with the children. Creative talent ran deep in the family, extending to his nephew, Emmett Hardy, who grew up to become a celebrated New Orleans jazz cornet player.

Growing up in the East Green neighborhood of Gretna, Kennedy’s artistic trajectory was fundamentally altered at age seven when he first heard African American spirituals performed at the neighboring New Hope Baptist Church. Listening from his kitchen window and forming close friendships with local Black youth, he developed a lifelong passion for preserving the musical and oral traditions of the community. Before the turn of the century, Kennedy became one of the first figures to transfigure these oral spirituals into written musical notation for piano and voice, preserving famous religious arrangements such as "Free at Last"—a song that would later gain global historic resonance through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

As an adult, Kennedy established himself as a versatile polymath. He worked across numerous creative and commercial disciplines, performing as a concert pianist, singer, actor, painter, and accountant, while also contributing book reviews to The New York Times. Seeking wider professional reach, he relocated to New York City in 1923, where he operated an antique shop at 449 Park Avenue and worked as a book clerk at Scribner's. During his years in New York, he published a series of notable books focused on African American folklore, dialect, and music, including Black Cameos (1924), Mellows: A Chronicle of Unknown Singers (1925), Gritney People (1927), Red Bean Row (1929), and More Mellows (1931). His literary footprint extended into Irish mythology and verse as well, with volumes such as Runes and Cadences (1925) and Songs of An Alien Spirit (1940).

Throughout his career in both New Orleans and New York, Kennedy operated as part of early twentieth-century Bohemian art circles that provided community for gay, queer, and non-conforming artists. His artistic immersion in folk cultures, lifelong unmarried status, and integration into urban creative networks reflect broader patterns of queer subculture in the arts during the Harlem Renaissance and early-to-mid 20th century, where folklorists, performers, and writers often found spaces of creative and personal liberation outside mainstream social constraints.

In mid-1941, following a period of declining health, Kennedy returned to the New Orleans area to stay with family. On November 21, 1941, at the age of 64, he suffered a fatal heart attack inside Max Samson's Drug Store on Camp Street in New Orleans. Following a funeral service at Leitz-Eagan Funeral Home, he was laid to rest at the Hook and Ladder Cemetery in his hometown of Gretna, leaving behind a rich legacy as a preservationist of Southern folk music and regional American literature.

In 1926 Pelican Bookshop Press, New Orleans, published "William Spratling and William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans", issued in 250 copies. The “Famous Creoles” (with ages in 1926) were

References:


Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) Paperback – September 8, 2014
by John Shelton Reed

Other references:

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