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the Mardi Gras issue

CARNIVAL MUSIC by Jason Berry

Avenue in time for the Zulu parade. “The combo’s there with a mambo beat” adds intrigue. The song was actually recorded a year earlier by country artist Jodie Levens on the Sapphire label. Lou Welsh, the label owner, and Ken Elliot, a radio DJ who steered him to Chess Records for the Hawketts’ reissue, share credits with Frankie Adams of the original band. Rhythm and blues historian Jeff Hannusch opines that Adams probably wrote the song, and who are we to doubt? The lyrics underwent a major change when Neville and the Hawketts got to work, providing rocket fuel. Mambo was a Cuban music form, African drumming married to big band arrangements with hot horns that made even people in tuxedos and gowns shake it up. The Caribbean influence on New Orleans rhythm and blues had its greatest expression in Professor Longhair, who kicked the base of the piano like a drummer riding his pedal, his attack on the keys a meld of barrelhouse boogie with a sizzling “mixture of mambo, rhumba and calypso” as Fess himself (Henry R. Byrd) once said. Longhair’s classic, “Go to the Mardi Gras,” was released in 1959 with a weave of horns and rocking drums as a cushion to those magic undulations of his fingers on the ivories. The wonderful whistling he does before singing gives an ethereal quality to a tune that captures a locomotive movement in the rhythm, like a train rushing down the tracks. It’s the song of a guy heading in for Carnival. Fess originally recorded a version of it called “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” in 1949 with first-person lyrics:

A bove all, Carnival is a time of movement — the flow of feet walking past and people toting ladders, fold-out chairs and ice chests to favored sidewalk spots for the parades; marching bands high-stepping behind the floats with maskers tossing beads to the crowds; second liners engulfing brass bands, gyrating to the thrum of hand percussions from Mardi Gras Indians — a tidal pulse through the days and nights of celebration. The music that pours out of clubs, parties and bandstands during Carnival season revolves around a constellation of classic, well-worn hits that get people out of the chairs, onto their feet, shaking it up. The popularity of these core songs touches the heart of people across the Gulf South who put a premium on a life lived to the fullest. “Mardi Gras Mambo,” “Go to the Mardi Gras,” “Carnival Time,” “Big Chief,” “Do Whatcha Wanna” and “Hey Pocky A-Way” — the latter from The Wild Tchoupitoulas — blast out of radio stations

and truck parade boomboxes. The songs were recorded decades ago — old songs that don’t seem old, they ripple out with a renewable energy across generations, summoning memories — or spawning new ones — for a season that thrives on dancing. First on the turntable, the granddaddy of them all: “Mardi Gras Mambo,” recorded by the Hawketts back in 1954, 63 years ago. The loping horns lay out a melodic line, followed by a loud Uhhhh! Then comes the honeyed baritone of 16-year-old Art Neville, who wasn’t old enough then to legally buy booze. It takes a cool cat to blow a horn On LaSalle and Rampart Street The combo’s there with a mambo beat The Mardi Gras mambo, mambo, mambo ... Down in New Orleans. The corner of LaSalle and Rampart, in Central City, was long a hub of Black Carnival that drew Indians and brass bands as people meandered down to St. Charles Down in New Orleans Where the blues was born

“ The music that pours out of clubs, parties and bandstands during Carnival season revolves around a constellation of classic, well-worn hits that get people out of the chairs, onto their feet, shaking it up.”

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2018