So we’ve done favourite songs and favourite films, but the really pressing question is what is our collective favourite version of this much-recorded classic? The Dixie Cups? The Belle Stars, Natasha? Dr John? Joy Division? The Grateful Dead? Cyndi Lauper? Another one?
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SteveT says
Dr John for me. Although also quite like the Belle Stars version.
SixDog says
The Belle Stars
Loved them
duco01 says
I enjoyed Jenny Belle Star’s vocal contributions to the Jam’s “Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)” single.
Leicester Bangs says
Belle Stars version (complete with clips from Rain Man!) (Iko Iko also appears in another Cruiser movie, Mission Impossible 2)
Harry Tufnell says
The Belle Stars version takes me straight back to 1982 and Adam & Eve’s in Rotherham!
Markg says
Alias says
The Dixie Cups version must have sounded extraordinary when it was released. I wonder if it was the first chart hit consisting entirely of vocals and percussion. It is based on a 1950s son called Jockomo. The best versions are from New Orleans.
The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ LP is easily good enough to be mentioned on the funk albums thread. There are a few members of the Meters in the band. This is their take on it:
Dr John also covered it.
Mike_H says
If you listen to Dr. John’s “Big Bass Drum (On A Mardi Gras Day)”, frm his “Remedies” album, it’s the same song basically. Recycling.
Tiggerlion says
Spare a thought for the song’s writer, James ‘Sugar Boy’ Crawford. He created it as Jock-A-Mo in 1954. Ten years later, The Dixie Cups were messing about with cutlery, reminiscing about their mothers singing in the kitchen and came up with Iko Iko. Sugar Boy sued. The Dixie Cups defied the human ear and claimed it was a completely different song. Sugar Boy won only royalties for 25% of public performances, not record sales. He’d left the business the year before following a vicious beating by state troopers. He really needed the money. He eventually died the month before an episode of Treme was aired featuring him in a cameo.
My favourite version is the original, Sugar Boy And His Cane Cutters.
https://youtu.be/XxWM35qEGqI
Mike_H says
I suspect the song is even older than this version and that Sugarboy just created his own version of something he was familiar with too.
I have a liking for the Dixie Cups version. Short, sweet and to the point. Good though all the other versions are, that’s my favourite.
It’s highly unlikely, given how the biz was structured in those days, that The Dixie Cups profited to any extent from their recording of the song. Whoever the label and the producer (who probably was given the writing credit) were, I bet the money flowed in their direction.
Tiggerlion says
Crawford: It came from two Indian chants that I put music to. “Iko Iko” was like a victory chant that the Indians would shout. “Jock-A-Mo” was a chant that was called when the Indians went into battle. I just put them together and made a song out of them. Really it was just like “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”. That was a phrase everybody in New Orleans used. Lloyd Price just added music to it and it became a hit. I was just trying to write a catchy song….
The official writing credit on the Dixie Cups version is now James Crawford, Barbara Hawkins, Rosa Hawkins and Joan Johnson. Just the girls then.
Mike_H says
Good for them. So many artists in those days got totally screwed by record companies, producers. publishers etc.
salwarpe says
I don’t know, I always thought I liked the Belle Stars version. But listening to that clip above, it sounds terribly thumpy and muddy. The version I must be remembering is Cyndi’s, which is good, as I think she is one of the most underrated pop stars of the 80s, who made better songs than Madonna, but always seemed to be in her shadow, maybe because of la Ciccone’s blonde ambition.
This is lively, percussive and given the space to be sparse yet fun – this is the version I would jump around and sing along with
Tiggerlion says
Nice choice. I agree Cyndi had the better songs, but Madge had the better producers. Imagine what William Orbit would have done with Cyndi!
salwarpe says
Better songs and a better voice. But Madonna was good at exploiting her more limited talents, as you said, thorough getting the key producers and having an eye of the next big thing coming over the horizon. Remember when she said “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Alison Goldfrapp”?
I like to think of Deadly Cyn spinning off in her own orbit, habituating with Goonies and wrestlers because she wanted to, not because it would sell well. I have no idea what William Orbit would have made of her? Probably walked out in frustration as she refused to bow down to his classical-lite breaks and beats?
Tiggerlion says
Aye. There’s the rub. Untamed artist v commercial business woman.
duco01 says
Talking about New Orleans music, Light in the Attic Records have recently issued this vinyl LP, “Dirges”, by the Eureka Brass Band, and I bought it the other day.
It’s a field recording from 1951 of a proper New Orleans band playing dirges in the parade on the way to a funeral: trombone, trumpet, sousaphone, clarinet, sax and drumming. It’s the goods, 100% authentic, the real thing.
It’s hardly a mass-market release, but I reckon it would appeal to quite a few jazz-fancying Afterworders.
http://lightintheattic.net/releases/3107-dirges
Leicester Bangs says
This is a fun version. Sia (on legs and vocals) has a great bit right at the very end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMQRfliyznQ
Kaisfatdad says
A very international song!
You all want to hear what it sounds like in Turkish, don’t you? The Balkan brass is quite agreeable.
Here it is done as Swedish bluegrass (!) by Le Chat Mort.
Neither can ever hope to compete with the glory of the Dixie Cups.