The Many Faces of Mardi Gras Music

by Ira Brooker
February 24, 2009 - 6:47am

As far as most of the country is concerned, Mardi Gras music begins and ends with the type of watered-down brass band beats heard in the background of Popeye’s Chicken commercials. While that particular style does hold an important place in the Mardi Gras pantheon, it’s far from the only tune in town. Here’s a brief overview of the myriad musical ways Louisiana celebrates Fat Tuesday.

Second Line Mardi Gras

This is the music most commonly associated with Mardi Gras, and the advertising tone-setter for Louisiana-based ventures like Zatarain’s rice dishes and the aforementioned Popeye’s. Second line tunes are heavy on the brass and meant for dancing. For such a buoyant style, it comes from some rather macabre roots. In a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, the second line is the group that strolls behind the deceased’s family and closest mourners, frequently while dancing to the marching brass band.

Over the years, the second line has expanded beyond its funereal beginnings and become a staple of all manner of parades and celebrations. The Crescent City is home to a wide range of brass bands specializing in this rarified style. As recordings go, New Birth Brass Band’s New Orleans Second Line is a good starting point, but second line music is really a genre that demands to be experienced live.

Rock and Roll Mardi Gras

When New Orleans first dipped its toe into the waters of rock & roll in the 1950s, the city put its own unique stamp on the burgeoning genre. Early New Orleans rock was laced with jazz, R&B and a host of traditional influences, and it didn’t take long for artists to apply rock’s laissez-faire attitude to the equally freewheeling Mardi Gras.

There have been hundreds of rock odes to Carnival Season over the years, but few have the durability of Professor Longhair’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” His bouncy, piano-driven ode to the pre-Lenten season has been covered by nearly every New Orleans notable of the past half-century, from Fats Domino to >strong>Dr. John to Harry Connick, Jr. Its simple yet emphatic call-to-action works both as an invitation to outsiders (“If you go to New Orleans / You oughta go see the Mardi Gras”) and a touch point for locals (“You will see the Zulu King / Down on St. Claude and Dumaine”). Who knows if it was his original intention, but Fess’s song has served as one of the city’s finest musical ambassadors for more than five decades.

Indian Mardis Gras

The Mardi Gras Indians are one of the strangest and most intriguing facets of the carnival season. Every year, multiple “tribes” of mostly African-American men roam the side streets of New Orleans in flamboyant, hand-sewn costumes styled after traditional Native American clothing. It’s a curious tradition dating back more than a century, allegedly begun as a tribute to local tribes who’d assisted runaway slaves in south Louisiana.

The music of the Mardi Gras Indians is generally based around repetitive chants, steady drum beats and a blending of English and Creole lyrics. Indian chants are pervasive enough in New Orleans culture that they’re frequently incorporated into more mainstream recordings, the most famous of which is The Dixie Cups’ 1965 single “Iko Iko,” a re-working of James Crawford’s “Jockamo.” The song became an international hit even though its heavy use of Creole and Indian lingo likely went over the heads of most listeners. The seemingly innocuous tune actually tells the story of a clash between two rival tribes, a contentious encounter that frequently led to bloodshed in the early 20th century.

Cajun Mardis Gras

After second line-style jazz, zydeco is the form of music outsiders most frequently associate with New Orleans. That connection isn’t entirely accurate. Sure, there’s plenty of Cajun influence in the Crescent City, but you have to head west to get the bona fide experience. Mardi Gras is a different animal out in bayou country: smaller in scale and not nearly as formal, but no less festive.

In small towns like Eunice and Mamou, zydeco and Cajun music reign supreme. The emphasis of these Carnival celebrations is less on extravagance and more on tradition. The unofficial theme of the season in these parts is “La Chanson de Mardi Gras,” an old-time song about gathering gumbo ingredients that’s frequently sung in both French and English. Acadian singer-songwriter Zachary Richard’s rendition is fairly definitive, a tuneful take grounded in the French-Cajun influences that flavor Southwest Louisiana’s fascinating landscape.

Hip-Hop Mardi Gras

Most of New Orleans’ most successful musical exports of recent vintage fall into the hip-hop category, but the unfettered joy of Mardi Gras doesn’t quite mesh with the nihilistic ghettoscapes chronicled by the Cash Money crew, or even with the socially conscious sounds of The Knux. That doesn’t mean that there’s no common ground between phat beats and Fat Tuesday.

On 2003’s lamentably hard-to-find The New Sounds of Mardi Gras, jazzman-of-all-trades Donald Harrison, Jr. created a fascinating and surprisingly coherent vision of carnival season in the hip-hop era. Longtime Mardi Gras Indian Chief Harrison melded traditional Crescent City sounds with sophisticated flows and down-and-dirty beats, producing a one-of-a-kind amalgam that captures the zeitgeist of two very different eras. Harrison’s goal of establishing a new subgenre of Mardi Gras music hasn’t quite materialized, but more and more brass bands have begun incorporating hip-hop elements in their performances. How long can it be before Master P jumps on this opportunity to cash in?

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