Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 18) Indians pride themselves on making a new suit, from scratch, every year, in time for Mardi Gras. They decide on a main color, then order feathers and plumes, and canvas patches on which pictures and designs will be sketched out, then beads and thread and needles to sew the beads to the canvas patches, bringing the designs alive in phenomenal color and detail. Those patches are then sewed into the entire suit to make an integrated effect that is stunning and aweinspiring no matter how many times you have seen it. They parade, and have always paraded, through the streets not only on Mardi Gras but on St. Joseph’s Night, March 19, and, more recently, on what is called Super Sunday, the Sunday nearest St. Joseph’s Night, when all the Indians in the city assemble together — uptown gangs in Shakespeare Park, on Washington and LaSalle, and downtown gangs on Bayou St. John by the Orleans Avenue bridge. The uptown Indians concentrate on sewing repre- 18 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006 sentational scenes in their intricate beaded patches. Downtown Indians substitute elaborate 3-D geometrical constructions, encrusted with jewellike pieces of glass and pearls. The Wild Tchoupitoulas had a band behind them, but most of the time the gangs would rove the streets accompanied only by tambourines and drums and even beer bottles — anything that would rap out the characteristic rhythm as the Big Chief lined out a call and the rest of the gang would answer as follows: An ace, a trey, a deuce and a jack Shoo fly, don't bother me I been to Angola but I made it back Shoo fly, don't bother me I walk through fire and I swim through mud Shoo fly, don't bother me Snatch the feather from an eagle, drink panther blood Shoo fly, don't bother me That Wild Tchoupitoulas album grabbed hold of my heart and would not let go and it hasn’t let go to this Big Chief Tootie Allison Montana leads the Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indians, 1987. day. Down amid all those compelling funky-butt rhythms, and all those calls from the chief and responses from the gang, all that good-natured boasting, and the relentlessness of the groove that they set on each track, the mixture of good humor with something deadserious, I heard the essence of what I had loved for years in jazz music, blues, bluegrass, and in rock-and-roll, that mixture of opposite qualities — gravity and buoyancy, go-for-yourself spontaneity and absolute rhythmic precision, seriousness and irony — delivered over certain rhythmic patterns that lived at the center of everything important to me. I recognized that rhythmic stew, with its call and response patterns and its Latin-FrenchAfrican-Caribbean inflected rhythms, as the roots not just of jazz but of rhythm-and-blues as well as funk. It only surprised me a little bit when, much later, I heard Jelly Roll Morton reminisce, in the Library of Congress recordings, about hearing and seeing Mardi Gras Indians when he was a
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