Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 16) R&B vocalist Irma Thomas, 1985 shooting up in an aurora over each head and fanning out in wings to the side, and they had long black braids hanging down on either side of their head. Under their names were designations like Flag Boy, Spy Boy, Big Chief They were called the "Wild Tchoupitoulas." Over a powerful rhythm-and-blues background — played by the great funk band the Meters — the Indians chanted their songs, led most of the time by a grainy-voiced singer named Big Chief Jolly. Indians, he sang, in what sounded like good-natured, cocky challenge, as much for his gang as for the listeners, here dey come. Meet de boys on de battlefront — the songs were all about boasts of prowess, how good his gang was, and what they would do to other gangs when they ran into them, the mayhem they would inflict, but the rhythm, the buoyancy of the music that carried these elegant rhymed boasts, was about dancing, not fighting. It was amazing. It turned out that this group of men was only one of at least a dozen such groups in New Orleans, and that most of them don’t make records, but make similar outfits every year in which they parade on Mardi Gras singing songs like those on the record. They have names like the Wild Magnolias (they had made a record, too, it turned out), and the Yellow Pocahontas and the Creole Osceolas and the White Eagles and the Ninth Ward Hunters and the Creole Wild West. The members of the gangs are mainly working-class African American men who spend months before Mardi Gras every year putting together their costumes, which 16 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006 above: Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacey performs at Jackson Square in 1994. right: Blues guitarist they call “suits.” Nobody really knows the genesis Snooks Eaglin, 1989. of the Indians, although the oldest gang, the Creole Wild West, dates its founding to back in the late 1800s. Some say interest was stirred up by Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West Show; others claim that a bond was forged between escaped slaves and local Indians who sheltered them and gave them sanctuary. Nobody knows for sure, just as guesses as to the etymology of the Mardi Gras Indians’ characteristic patois are notoriously unreliable.
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