ROUSES_JanFeb2021_Magazine_Pages

phrases like those transcribed as “mighty cootie fiyo” and “two-way pocky way,” Berry writes, are a creole dialect with possible roots in some French, some Spanish and some Native American languages. The music, critic John Swenson wrote in OffBeat in 1988, is a “missing link” — a “new world fusion” of West African roots and early American jazz, blues, gospel and parade shuffles. The first tribe of Mardi Gras Indians who masked as we recognize the phenomenon today appears to be the Creole Wild West, which was active in the 6th Ward by the 1880s; in his book, Berry cites a memoir written by a New Orleanian named Elise Kirsch, who remembers “a band of men disguised as Indians … shouting and screaming war whoops” and running down St. Bernard Avenue on Mardi Gras Day 1883. Although the screaming, costumed men were an intimidating sight, Kirsch wrote, she always looked forward to seeing them. Jelly Roll Morton, in his extensive 1938 Library of Congress recording sessions with the famous folklorist Alan Lomax, recalled

watching the Indians take to the streets in his youth at the turn of the 20th century, claiming that, in fact, he had masked as a spy boy — the Indian who scouts ahead, looking for other tribes on the move — himself. In 1956, field recorder Samuel Charters caught the first live tape of Mardi Gras Indians out in the streets on Fat Tuesday morning, consisting of raw call-and-response chants over the syncopated rhythm of handheld drums and tambourines. By that time, musicians in New Orleans had already transposed Indian words and melodies onto popular music forms. In 1953, guitarist Danny Barker self- released four sides of Indian-inspired rhythm and blues material, including a song he titled “Chocko Mo Feendo Hey.” The same year, Sugar Boy Crawford recorded his own version of the song, “Jock-A-Mo,” for Chess Records. And close to a decade later, a trio of teenage girls called the Dixie Cups waxed a tune inspired by the same chant, using a name we’re more familiar with today — “Iko Iko.” The song “Iko Iko,” covered by Cyndi Lauper, the Grateful Dead and others,

brought the sound of the New Orleans streets at Carnival time all around the world, just as the Wild Magnolias and the Wild Tchoupitoulas did in the early ’70s. In post-millennial New Orleans, funk and rock bands — from Galactic to Cha Wa to the current version of the Wild Magnolias, which Bo Dollis’ son Bo Jr. inherited after his father’s death in early 2015 — continue to interpret and borrow from those unique Indian chants and polyrhythms. And over the years at Jazz Fest, founded the same year that Dollis and Quint Davis first released “Handa Wanda,” fans from all over the world can see those acts onstage — or just the tribes in all their glory, roaming the Fair Grounds on schedule. But there might be no better way to hear Indian songs than the way they’ve been delivered for at least a hundred years and change: out in the streets, on Mardi Gras Day.

13 WWW.ROUSES.COM