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Early on a cloudless Sunday morning last February, the party at Le Bon Temps Roule in uptown New Orleans kicked into high gear as the Wild Magnolias launched into their first set of Mardi Gras classics. Revelers danced and knocked back Bloody Marys as they enjoyed the last few days of Carnival season with the legendary band that has fused two of the Crescent City’s cultural institutions—funk music and Mardi Gras Indian tradition—into a seamless whole.
Dressed in a black jacket with the words “Big Chief” embroidered on the lapel, bandleader and founder Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis smiled and made small talk with a growing group of neighbors and friends on the sidewalk. Since he was named Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias Indian tribe in 1964, the singer and percussionist has been one of the city’s leading voices of R&B-inflected funk and the century-old Afro-Caribbean call-andresponse style of Mardi Gras Indian music. While some band members over the years have also masked Indian (which means designing and creating a flamboyant new suit for Mardi Gras each year) with the Wild Magnolias, the band has had a rotating cast of musicians and Indians from other tribes, including Dollis’ childhood friend Monk Boudreaux (Big Chief of the Golden Eagles tribe), whose role in the Wild Mags has been almost as crucial. The spectacle of two of the city’s most popular Big Chiefs—often performing together in full costume with the likes of Snooks Eaglin, Wilson “Willie Tee” Turbinton or June Yamagishi—has influenced generations of players from the Meters to more contemporary bands like Papa Grows Funk.
“I love to mask Indian and that’s the bottom line,” the 63year-old Dollis told documentarian David Kunian last year in an interview. “Mardi Gras Indian is guys who have Indian blood. It’s something that the old people taught them and they do it today because they did it over a hundred years ago. It’s not just masking. It’s a feeling that runs deep inside.”
Dollis began masking Indian in 1957 when he was in high school, sneaking out to sew his costume and then pretending to go to a Mardi Gras parade the first group he joined in the street was the Golden Arrows. He soon moved on to the Wild Magnolias, who eventually offered him the highest position in the gang. Since the 19th century, neighborhood groups in New Orleans have spent long hours throughout the year hand-stitching intricately beaded and fantastically plumed costumes for themselvesand their hierarchy of Indians to wear on Mardi Gras. (The tradition goes back to when Native Americans befriended runaway slaves and freedmen.) On Fat Tuesday, certain streets and parks become gaming grounds where different Indian gangs meet, pitting costumes, music, moves and the ability of their “spy boys” against each other in a friendly but serious competition.
The Indians’ music—punctuated by the sounds of each enormous costume and its various clinking and swishing parts—is a heavily percussive derivation of Afro-Caribbean rhythms featuring intricate chants and prayers. Artists like Huey “Piano” Smith and “Sugarboy” Crawford occasionally incorporated pieces of chants into pop music in the ’50s. But in the ’60s, just before New Orleans funk had established a niche on the Top 40 charts, Dollis began blending that funk with the music he made as an Indian. The combination resulted in some of the most popular Mardi Gras songs ever committed to tape. And although bands like the Meters are responsible for putting such timeless songs as “Hey Pocky-A Way” on the airwaves, it was Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias whose first recordings captured the distinctive swamp-funk style of the Mardi Gras Indian tribes.
“What makes a good Mardi Gras song?” Dollis asked, repeating Kunian's question. “Funk. New Orleans funk. You get some good funky musicians behind you like Zig [drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste of the Meters]—that’s what makes a great Mardi Gras song. If you got any New Orleans funk in you and you get together with some great [and] talented musicians, you’re going to have a great song.”
The first time Dollis recorded one of his own great songs was in 1970, when a Tulane student named Quint Davis (now the director of the Jazz And Heritage Foundation in New Orleans) suggested Dollis make a 7-inch record. Joining his Indians with legendary producer and keyboardist Willie Tee’s backing band, Dollis and the Wild Mags tracked their seminal hit “Handa Wanda.” Shortly thereafter, they signed with the French label Barclay Records.
“When the Wild Magnolias recorded ‘Handa Wanda,’ it was the first time Indians had been recorded on a major label,” said Tipitina’s Foundation director Bill Taylor at Dollis’ 2006 induction into the Tipitina’s Walk Of Fame. “Never before had anyone mixed funk and Indian music. And with ‘New Suit,’ the Wild Mags became the soul of Carnival,” he said, referring to their subsequent hit about why Indians sew a different costume each carnival season. “Thirty years later, that’s still the case.”
Over the course of those decades, the band’s lineup changed, and the music has changed along with it. Their first two albums, The Wild Magnolias and They Call Us Wild, recently reissued on Sunnyside as a double CD, underscore the line between funky jazz and Indian music that the Wild Mags have often straddled. Willie Tee arranged most of They Call Us Wild, lending the album a jazzier, more familiar funk sound than The Wild Magnolias, which leans more towards of straight Indian street music.
“The true record that defines their sound is The Wild Magnolias,” says the band’s manager Glenn Gaines. “It was a big time jam session with Indians and Snooks [Eaglin]. They Call Us Wild is a brilliant recording, but it’s more Willie’s take on Indian music. Today, it’s a combination of June [Yamagishi] and Gitchie Johnson and June Victory [Johnson] doing the arrangements.”
While much of the band’s repertoire is straight funk, songs like “(My Big Chief Has A) Golden Crown” (reissued as a bonus track on the Sunnyside set) rely on tambourines, hand percussion, whistles and an Indian chant about heading downtown from 2nd Street and Dryades—site of the legendary H&R Bar where many an Indian practice session takes place. Dollis uses his flexible, soulful voice to belt out lines like “We wear our feathers and marabou / We jump up and down, better let us through,” as the band uses every available space in the rhythm. It’s a style that lights up the scorching funk-rock album Life Is A Carnival, which features Wardell Querzogue, members of the Nevilles and the Meters, Dr. John, Rockin’ Dopsie, and Marva Wright—the guest list of luminaries underlining the extent of the Wild Mags’ influence on the Big Easy’s entire music scene. Dollis also remains an important figure in the citywide Indian community. “Bo and Monk are both elders, so young people and neophytes look up to them for guidance and learning the protocols,” says Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Big Queen of the Guardians Of The Flame and curator of the Mardi Gras Indian Hall Of Fame, which awarded both chiefs with the prestigious Crystal Feather award. “It’s an indigenous tradition, so you don’t go to a textbook or a college campus to learn it.”
Recent health problems have made it harder for Dollis to perform and attend Sunday practices at Handa Wanda’s (his tribe’s headquarters) as often as he would like. But that hardly quells the energy with which he sings and sews. “Bo is everybody’s cheerleader,” says Gaines. “And
he must have fire in the band. If it’s not burning up, he’s not interested.”
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