...and the band had a name before the song did — Sugar Boy and His Cane Cutters. That's who's in the room in 1954, a young piano player who'd just about turned twenty, working a Mardi Gras Indian chant he'd heard around New Orleans into something with a backbeat under it. They called it "Jock-A-Mo." Checker put it out. It did all right, locally, the way a lot of great sides did all right.
Then about eleven years on the Dixie Cups cut it as "Iko Iko," and the story I've always heard is they were just messing around in the studio, tapping on whatever was within reach, and somebody had the sense to leave the tape rolling. First takes. Nothing you can plan. After that the thing just walks off and gets adopted — Dr. John, the Belle Stars, the Grateful Dead stretching it out, Cyndi Lauper. A song born in a small room in New Orleans and now half the world can hum it without knowing whose it was.
His name was James Crawford. Born in '34, raised on piano, and in the later years he mostly sang in church. He was still here until 2012. Listen for the hands on that first record — he's not showing you anything, he's just keeping the room moving.
People have been arguing about where those syllables come from for decades — Mobilian trade jargon, West African, Louisiana Creole, take your pick (there's a paper for each). Crawford's own line was simpler: he sang what he heard at the parades.
Otis, Mardi Gras Indian mornings in New Orleans start in the dark, and the whole street smells of something frying before anyone's out in feathers — coffee, hot grease, somebody's pot already going. That chant carries blocks. Lovely to think of a twenty-year-old hearing it through a kitchen window.