Iko Iko – The Dixie Cups

Music I happen to like
– Aria

 

I liked this song ever since I heard it in the early 1960s. The Dixie Cups made it a hit, then other groups picked it up. Its popularity kept getting bigger.

Until this week, I never knew the real story behind the song, or the brutality that took the songwriter out of circulation.

In the early 1950s James Crawford, with the stage name Sugar Boy, was already a local success in New Orleans. Native American rituals were the source of parts of city culture. He combined a couple of native chants he had heard and put the result to music. His group was invited to record the song. The record was a minor hit for a short time, then faded.

In 1963, his little group was headed for a gig in North New Orleans, when they were spotted by the Louisiana State Police. There was no infraction or reason for suspicion. The officers saw an expensive car driven by a young black man and knew that was just not right. During the stop, Crawford was insufficiently obsequious.

One state police officer didn’t like his attitude and beat him to a bloody pulp.

Crawford spent three weeks in the hospital and two years in recovery. He never regained his career as a singer and eventually dropped out of local scene. He went to school and studied to become a building engineer. He began working to set up a business as a locksmith.

About then a new and rapidly rising group, the Dixie Cups, heard the song on the streets of New Orleans. They revised the words and the music and, thinking they were the originators, recorded the song as their own. After a series of broken promises by record producers, followed by legal proceedings, James Crawford began getting royalties.

Other groups re-recorded the song, each new hit becoming bigger than the last.

Crawford never became the international celebrity he might have been. Like others before and since, he was the victim of the raw form of juris-perversion that prevailed in the rural south in those decades.

But he did find a new life as a business owner, with additional income from that one almost forgotten writing and recording effort left over from his shattered career in music.

Poetic justice is no justice at all. But life sometimes demands that we settle for what we can get.

Perhaps this could qualify as poetic success.

James Crawford died in 2012.


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