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the Mardi Gras issue

MUSIC OF THE MARDI GRAS

INDIANS by Alison Fensterstock + photo by Golden G. Richard III

I t was in the late ’60s that Quint Davis first heard Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis singing. Both men were in their early 20s; Davis, the future New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival producer, was a Tulane undergraduate with a voracious interest in New Orleans music and street culture; while Dollis, just a couple of years older, was already Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians. According to Jason Berry’s New Orleans music history, Up from the Cradle of Jazz , it was the photographer Jules Cahn, who had been shooting second-line parades and jazz funerals since the ’50s, that invited young Davis to a White Eagles Indian practice at a small Central City lounge. Davis brought

a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and as he later listened to the chants and clattering percussion he’d captured, he found himself drawn in again and again by one element in particular: Dollis’ raspy, powerful, soulful voice. He sought the young chief out again with a request: Dollis should write a new Indian song, something original, and they’d make a record. Davis was also a fan of keyboardist Willie Tee, who’d had several R&B hits — notably “Teasin’ You” — in the mid-’60s. Davis booked Tee, who would soon form the seminal New Orleans funk band the Gaturs, to play a show alongside Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias on Tulane’s

campus. Onstage, the traditional sound of Indian chants, drums and tambourines met electric soul music likely for the first time. “It was probably the first time that Mardi Gras Indian music had been done outside the culture,” Davis told OffBeat magazine’s David Kunian in a 2011 interview. “And Willie created the whole thing right there. He got up on piano and started playing with them and he went in and out and way in and way out, and it just happened.” Dollis went and wrote that new Indian song, and Davis put together a band led by Willie Tee, which included Snooks Eaglin on guitar, Alfred “Uganda” Roberts on congas, Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2018