New Orleans festival · New Orleans, since 2002
Founded 2002. Louisiana musicians playing the Fab Four, once a year in New Orleans.
The New Orleans Beatles Festival was founded in 2002 by Chuck Credo IV, and it started about as small as a festival can start: an unplugged tribute to the Beatles on the little stage at Rock ’n’ Bowl. What nobody had accounted for was how many Beatles fans this city had been quietly holding. They packed Mid-City Lanes to the walls, and after that the question was never whether there would be a second one.
It outgrew that room, and then it kept outgrowing rooms. Sold-out years at Rock ’n’ Bowl gave way to the House of Blues from 2007 through 2020, and the Festival now stages at the Jefferson Performing Arts Center. In 2027 it turns twenty-five — which makes it the second-oldest Beatles festival in America.
Every year the city comes to it. Louisiana artists gather to pay tribute to the Fab Four, a rotating cast taking a song apiece, which is why no two years sound the same and why the same people come back regardless. House band Newspaper Taxi anchors the night and is known for performing entire albums front to back, with an elaborate video and production show built around them — records the Beatles themselves never took to a stage, played in sequence to a room that knows every note.
The guest list over the years reads like a roll call of Louisiana music and Beatles history at the same time. Marc Broussard. Randy Jackson of Zebra. Irma Thomas. Deacon John. George Porter Jr. Bonerama. Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills. And, from Paul McCartney’s Wings, Laurence Juber and Thaddeus Richard — two men who played this music alongside the man who wrote it.
It began as a New Orleans tradition. It is not only that any more: Beatles fans travel in from around the world every year to spend the night with this band and this catalog, in a city that has always understood what to do with a room full of people and a song everybody knows.
If you want this catalog in your own theater, that is Newspaper Taxi — the Festival’s house band, and a touring production in its own right.
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We’ll come back with availability, what each show needs, and one price — usually the same day. If you have more than one night to fill, say so and we’ll program the whole arc rather than quoting you a band.
