If you ’ve only hear one Mardi Gras call , it ’s probably " Iko Iko , " the bang recorded by the Dixie Cups in 1965 . An earlier interlingual rendition ( title " Jock - a - mo " ) by James " Sugar Boy " Crawford came out in 1953 , and many artists , from Dr. John to the Grateful Dead to Cyndi Lauper , have extend it . It ’s a playful , taunting chant , that comes from the traditional call and response challenge of two battle tribes at a Mardi Gras parade . The chorus goes something like this :
Everyone has immortalize it a small differently , but no one who recorded it knew what it meant . Crawford had hear the phrasal idiom at parade battles , and the Dixie Cups say they had heard their nan sing it .
There are as many guesses about the significance of this song as there are versions of it : Jock - a - Missouri means " brother John , " or " joker , " or " Giacomo ; " Jock - a - mo flipper a Michel Ney mean " kiss my ass , " or " John is dead " ; Iko mean " I go , " or " pay care , " or " gold , " or " hiking around " ; the words issue forth from French , or Yoruba , or Italian …
newsman Drew Hinshaw decide to require some experts about the parentage of the birdcall after he noticed the law of similarity between the Iko chorus and a rousing call - and - reply chant he heard at a parade in Ghana : " Iko Iko ! Aayé ! " In this 2009 clause in the New Orleans euphony magazineOffbeat , he recounts how he showed the lyric poem to a local philology prof who thought they definitely came from a West African language . Back in the US , a prof of Creole Studies thought it come from a motley of Yoruba and French Creole , and proposed the following breakdown :
Meanwhile , Wikipediasays some mysterious , unnamed " creole lingua specialists " endorse the follow French - based Creole interpretation :
Another theory making the turn of various family medicine substance circuit card is that the " jock - a - mo " part comes from a aboriginal American language where " chokma finha " think " very near . " This at least matches up with what Crawford say about his original 1953 recording : he sang " chock - a - mo , " but it was misspelled on the record label as " suspensor - a - minute . "
We will probably never be able-bodied to pin down the origin of the words or what they once meant . But it may well be that even from the very first intonation of the phrases , the Africans , Native Americans , French , and English that made up the bully language / culture mélange of New Orleans all understand it in their own way . And still had a sound old clip anyway .
