moevillini said:
maybe not exactly blues, but whatever - - I could see an entire page of Iko Iko...(but I'll stop at these two, for now at least...)
Actually it is blues, Mo. Ya got some nerve postin sumthin callin Cyndi Lauper's "the original version," eh? Any deadhead would know the Grateful Dead have been doin the tune for 30-40 years, but even that was long after such greats as Larry Williams ("Dizzy Miss Lizzy," "Slow Down," etc.) from Nawlinz also covered it. Least ya put up the Dixe Cups, who falsely claimed they wrote it, after they recorded it in 1965. In the early 90's they actually sued a guy (and won) for claiming he wrote it. It is in fact an old Nawlinz standard originally written and recorded with Chess Records in 1953 by Sugar Boy Crawford. Dr. John tells the tale in the liner notes of his gumbo album, as follows:
Dr. John said:
The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters. It was recorded in the 1960s by the Dixie Cups for Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller's
Red Bird Records, but the format we're following here is Sugar Boy's original. Also in the group were
Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene 'Bones' Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called 'Jockamo,' and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jockamo means 'jester' in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and 'second line' in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That's dead and gone because there's a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps.
You can detect the caribbean calypso syncopated kinda beat (just like Bo Diddley) in it, and anyone could guess it was probably of creole origin, not, god forbid, that punk-*** Cyndi Lauper. Here's Dr. John showin (kinda) how it relates to Bo Diddley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JESFMO1Hl4M
The dialect has been traced to Haiti, and West Africa, before that. Sugar Boy didn't know what it meant. He was just repeatin some thangs he heard rival tribes yellin at each other at Mardi Gras in Nawlinz.
More about Sugar Boy
HERE.
Thangs, they didn't end up so well for Sugar Boy, ya know? An excerpt:
"Sugar Boy and his band were on their way to a job in North Louisiana in 1963, when state troopers pulled him over for the then-crime of being a black man in a flashy brand-new automobile. One of Louisiana’s “finest” took exception to Sugar Boy’s attitude and proceeded to pistol-whip him on the side of the road. Sugar Boy spent three weeks in the hospital and was incapacitated for two years. He attempted a comeback, but after 1969, he confined his singing to church."
That enough Iko, for ya, eh?
Addendum: No doubt Sugar Boy deserved that beat-down he got. He probably said sumthin totally incomprehensible to the pig, like "Chockamo fe na nay," ya know? Who wouldn't pisto-whup his sorry *** for that, I ax ya?
