Louis Nelson was born on September 17, 1902 at 1419-21 Touro Street.  During the 1920s, he played with Buddy Petit, Kid Rena, Kid Punch Miller, Sam Morgan, Chris Kelly, Papa Celestin, Willie Pajeaud, Kid Howard, Sidney Cates and Kid Harris' Dixieland Band.  During the late 1920s he joined the Sidney Desvigne Orchestra. which played for white audiences at the New Orleans Country Club and the Southern Yacht Club. Monday and Tuesday nights were reserved for black audiences at such venues as the Pythian Temple and the Bulls Aids and Pleasure Club. During his 15 years with Desvigne's 10 piece Orchestra, Nelson played for summer Mississippi River cruises on the steamer S.S. Capitol. During the Depression, he became first chair in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) band. Between engagements, he and fellow musicians dug stumps for the City Park WPA expansion project.  He enlisted in the U. S. Navy and became Musician 1st Class at the U.S. Navy base in Memphis, Tennessee. After the war he returned to New Orleans and resumed playing with Sidney Desvigne's Orchestra. In 1945 he joined Kid Thomas Valentine's band, playing at the Tip Top club, Fireman's Hall in Westwego, and Speck's Moulin Rouge in Marrero.  He also worked for the Herbert Leary Orchestra at this time and kept day jobs as a driver for the post office, working as a fish merchant, chauffeuring, and working as a janitor. In 1949, he recorded with clarinetist Big Eye Louis Nelson Delisle, as well as Charlie Love, Johnny St. Cyr, Ernest Rogers, and Austin Young at his father's Touro Street house and recorded by jazz historian Bill Russell of AM Records. He played at the Paddock Lounge and Dixieland Hall, both on Bourbon Street.  He was a regular player with the Preservation Hall band and travelled abroad as both a soloist and band member of the Billie and De De Piece and Kid Thomas Valentine's bands.  His travels, begining in 1963, included perfomances with the George Lewis band in Japan, Eastern, Western Europe, South America, Australia, Canada and Mexico, as well as the United States. His music can be heard on the soundtrack of the movie Pretty Baby (1978) starring Brooke Shields.  He can be seen in many New Orleans jazz documentaries, including Art Ford's House Party, Live the Jazz, Three Men of Jazz and Till the Butcher Cut Him Down.  In later years, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts he developed a program in which he played for New Orleans public school students and discussed New Orleans jazz history.  Lous Nelson appeared at every New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival until his death on April 5, 1990 as result of a hit-and-run collision.