“New Orleans” is Neil Diamond in pure early-career motion—two and a half minutes of Southern postcard joy, where the cure for heartbreak is simply going somewhere loud, warm, and alive.
The most important facts first, because this track’s identity is tied to its roots and its era. “New Orleans” is a cover of the 1960 R&B hit popularized by Gary U.S. Bonds, written by Frank Guida and Joseph Royster. Neil Diamond recorded it in his Bang Records years and included it on his debut album The Feel of Neil Diamond (released August 12, 1966). On the album’s track list, “New Orleans” opens Side Two. Unlike the album cut, Diamond later issued “New Orleans” as a single in January 1968, and that single reached No. 51 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
Now, the heart of why it matters.
When people say “Neil Diamond,” they often mean the later monument: the big choruses, the arena warmth, the storyteller who could turn a crowd into one voice. “New Orleans” belongs to the earlier photograph—the Bang-era Diamond who still sounds like he’s running on streetlight electricity. The debut album The Feel of Neil Diamond is full of that mid-’60s immediacy: short tracks, punchy arrangements, and a singer finding out how to stand in front of a band with confidence.
And what a choice it is to open Side Two with a song like this. “New Orleans” doesn’t ask you to analyze it. It asks you to move. The lyric is an invitation—“come on everybody… make a trip with me”—and it paints the South in bright, sensory strokes: honeysuckle, magnolia blossoms, French moss hanging from big oaks, and that promise that “if you ain’t been to heaven, you ain’t been here.” It’s the language of travel-as-salvation, the old American fantasy that a change of scenery can change the soul—at least for one night.
Diamond’s performance is interesting because it isn’t “authentic New Orleans” the way a Crescent City band might play it. It’s New Orleans as myth and medicine—a place imagined from afar, soaked in rhythm and romance, where the air itself is supposed to fix what the heart can’t. That’s not a weakness; it’s the point. Early pop records often worked like postcards: not documentary realism, but emotional truth. And the emotional truth here is simple and timeless—when life feels heavy, we daydream about a city that feels light.
There’s also a quiet kind of craftsmanship in the song’s afterlife. A track that began as an album cut in 1966 later earned a second, public shot as a 1968 single, and—while it didn’t climb into the very top tier—it still charted solidly enough to place Diamond inside the broader pop conversation of the moment. That matters because it reminds you how Neil Diamond’s career wasn’t born fully formed as “legend.” It was built step by step: the club energy, the studio hustle, the willingness to try on R&B material and make it fit his voice.
So when you play “New Orleans” today, you’re not just hearing a jaunty cover. You’re hearing a young Neil Diamond chasing momentum—singing like a man who believes a song can be a train ticket. And maybe that’s why it still feels good: because underneath the vintage swing is a deeply human wish—that somewhere down the road, past the worry and the worn-out days, there’s still a place where the music is loud, the night is kind, and your heart remembers how to bounce.