As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, MSN Music has memorialized in photo album format a litany of Brittany and other innovators of the past ten years who will forever hold the sort of secure place in artistic history currently occupied by Patti Page and Rudy Vallee.
Rudy Vallee
What’s that? Who’s Rudy Vallee? Surely you jest! He was the most popular singer of his day, a ground-breaking crooner who dominated popular music in the 30′s, hosting The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour–sort of an MTV for radio. He had a nasal voice and boyish good looks–just like Eminem!
Vallee, in a thoughtful mood.
Near the end of his life in the 80′s, a half century after the pinnacle of his popularity, Vallee was looking for a dignified repository for his papers and personal effects. He approached his alma mater, Yale, but his star had fallen so low in the firmament that they turned him down, and he had to settle for Boston University. The indignity!
Louis Armstrong
This brief excursion into the history of popular music is offered as corrective to snap judgments made in haste upon momentous occasions such as, say, the end of a decade. Colored by public relations specialists, the fashions of the moment, and the transient beauty of the young, they inevitably turn out to be wrong. As we look back on the late 20′s and 30′s now, it is Louis Armstrong, the vacation stand-in on Vallee’s radio show, who is recognized as the genius, and Vallee the mere footnote to musical history.
Bo Dollis: Note lack of boyish good looks.
So here’s a prediction; long after Marshall Mathers, Justin Timberlake and other current white imitators of black musical styles have been forgotten, people will still be listening to Bo Dollis.
Who, you may ask, is Bo Dollis, and why haven’t you heard of him? Simple; Dollis is a black performer in a regional musical style–that of New Orleans–and he’s sixty-five years old. In other words, he’s not going to knock the Jonas Brothers off the cover of Tiger Beat.
Dollis’s voice has been described by John Swenson in OffBeat as “full of passion and intensity with a rasp that gave him a wild edge.” I can’t say it any better; he is the Platonic ideal of which the Rod Stewarts and Mick Jaggers of the world are only pale imitations.
Dollis’s power flows within traditional banks, like the Mississippi River that runs through his home town. He grew up in the company of Mardi Gras Indians, men who sew elaborate costumes that mimic Native American dress and wear them as they march through the streets during Mardi Gras festivities.
Dollis in his Big Chief outfit
The Mardi Gras Indians are a unique American manifestation of mummers, that is, disguised performers who go merrymaking during public festivals. Like other examples of mummery around the world, the performance of Mardi Gras Indians is at the same time ridiculous and pretentious. Indians divide themselves into heiratical ranks by function; there are lowly Spy Boys, who scout for rival gangs, Flag Boys who relay the information thus secured, a Wild Man whose role is to scare people away and clear a path for the procession, Red Indians–the ordinary working men of a tribe–and a Big Chief.
Dollis had stood out as a Red Indian of the White Eagles, but in that role he could only answer the calls of his Big Chief. He moved on to the Wild Magnolias and was swiftly promoted to Big Chief from Flag Boy. He says he wanted to be Spy Boy–”I was young and could move around” he told Swenson in an interview–but his voice was too exceptional to be ignored.
Mardi Gras Indians
Dollis grew up singing gospel, and when he became a Big Chief he was able to impart a new sense of religious ecstasy to the traditional repertoire of the Mardi Gras Indians. Both genres of music include a call-and-response feature–a sort of R&B Greek chorus–and Dollis often plays the role of a gospel preacher in the hybrid music that he’s created.
Wild Magnolias album
Dollis has opened up the music of the Mardi Gras Indians to a new audience, recording formerly secret liturgical song such as “Handa Wanda”–an eerie, ritualistic rumination–for public consumption, and developing a non-peripatetic sub-genre of their parade music. The Crescent City version of funky R&B is polyrhythmic, with a three-beat second line often serving as the underpinning and embroidery on the standard four-beat measure. You can walk and rock at the same time.
A half-century from now Bo Dollis will be dead, but so will the music of Brittany Spears, Justin Timberlake and other former Mousketeers. They’ll still be marching in Indian costumes on Mardi Gras, however, and you’ll hear Bo’s music as they pass by.
