The commodification of popular music is not a new phenomenon. Uneasy questions accompany respect for early blues recordings: how far were these selected by record companies with profit in mind; do they form a representative selection of songs circulating in the black community? Probably not. Nevertheless blues singers have proved capable of transcending the limits of capitalist obsession with the most acceptable, profitable product. For decades blues men and women have sung with disturbing honesty about gender and class, sex and money, resentment and hope. The subversion of the lyrics has sometimes been masked; at others it has been stunningly explicit. The bland may have been ultimately been more persistently successful, but the disruptive have still sold and been heard.
One of the most disturbing and talented of young blues based, jazz orientated voices belongs to Charmaine Neville, whose socio-political commitment to opposing oppression and poverty is transmitted through the impassioned way she delivers significant songs. Charmaine Neville makes it clear during interviews that she is aware of the difficulty of being accessible while retaining independence and autonomy. She has developed a fundamental, yet flexible, set of values that cut through theoretical constraints and is aware enough of the obvious limitations of being a socially conscious singer in the "popular" arena to explore multidimensional approaches. She in particular, draws on one remarkably non commodified form of music. Growing up in New Orleans surrounded by the chanting of the Mardi Gras Indians, she determined to use that as a tool against oppression.
Charmaine comes from an influential African American New Orleans musical family whose traditions encompass not only jazz but opera, blues, rhythm and blues and the Mardi Gras Indian bands. She is the daughter of Charles Neville, who has achieved international fame as one of the Neville Brothers. She has sung with the Neville Brothers and Charles accompanies Charmaine sporadically with his saxophone and speaks highly of her technique as a singer. He has argued that her complex fusion of sounds and words could only emanate from the crescent city with its cultural memory of an African and American Indian heritage of resistance through encoded messages.
The music of New Orleans draws on richer and more diverse origins than that of any other American city. The swampland settlement that was established as an outpost of French influence, became fertile ground for the mingling of African cultures as slaves passed through the port or worked for local masters. Free black people came in waves from Caribbean islands and helped create a unique class of Creoles of color who had ancestry that was frequently French or Spanish as well as African and American Indian. Some of the Indian Tribes who had originally lived in the area that was to become New Orleans were absorbed by slavery or wiped out by disease and warfare. Amongst those who survived were groups of Natchez, Cherokee, Choctaw Seminole and Chickasaw who aided and harbored slaves who rebelled or escaped.
The consequent maroon offspring were ultimately reabsorbed into the African American community in New Orleans but Indian musical retentions were incorporated into the cultural continuum that developed into the Mardi Gras Indian ritual of drum based dancing and chanting in elaborately decorated and feathered costumes. The "practices" on Sunday evenings, the secret meanings of the lyrics, and the tribal hierarchical organizations were all part of a developing Afro-American tradition.2
Indian lineage is claimed by most of those masking and parading as Mardi Gras Indians since Becate and Eugene Batiste led the Creole Wild West Tribe out of the Seventh Ward into the mainstream of Mardi Gras in the 1 880s. Both the Batistes were of Indian descent and established the roles such as Big Chief, Spy Boy, Trail Chief, Flag Boy, that are still characteristic of every tribe masking in the 1990s Carnival and St. Joseph Day parades.3
These days most tribes have women prominently featured, not only as queens, but in several newly invented roles. In the Creole Osceolas, a tribe that was formed in 1974 in the Seventh Ward, women play dramatic and frequently changing parts and improvise trenchant lyrics while they dance in stunning costumes. Their songs are a call and response dialogue that comments on the politics and events of the moment. They are filled with wit and disquiet as well as a consciousness of their Indian ancestry. According to Lolet Boutte', their very name is a tribute "to Osceola, the Seminole chief who fought against the United States army to protect the freedom of African American slaves who had escaped and found refuge with the Seminoles." He is especially esteemed among the Creole Osceolas "as the only Indian chief never signed the treaty with the United States." Several of the Osceolas
have Seminole ancestors while others have Cherokee parents or
grandparents. Members of the tribe are convinced that "The Africans and the Indians really had a strong connection." Led by Big Chief Clarence Dalcour, they generate a keen historical awareness and a sharp
appreciation of the organic relationship between music, masking and
making sociopolitical comments.
To Big Chief Larry Bannock of the Golden Star Hunters, the Mardi
Gras Indians exist as "a way of paying homage to Indians in the past who
aided black people. Masking is a mark of respect." He wants others to
realize that "Indians were the only ones to harbor slaves and see the whole slavery thing from a black perspective. The Seminoles, Creeks and
occasionally the Choctaw and the Cherokee were natural allies and
defenders but they were not normally fighting Indians. We chose the
image of the Sioux as our model for masking because they symbolize the
greatest fighting spirit manifested by Indians who, like black people, were
attacked by whites." Like Charmaine Neville, Larry Bannock himself is
as proud of his own Indian ancestry as he is of his black parentage, and
feels these two traditions meet in a uniquely powerful and artistically
effective way in the masking and music of the Mardi Gras Indians.5
This heritage has become all the more important to Charmaine Neville because it was not an integral, automatically accepted part of her childhood. Her parents separated when she was only a couple of years
old. Years of abusive foster homes left her self-reliant but more than
anxious to find out about her father and his family once she became a
teenager. This conscious voyage of discovery into her own past left her
valuing, exploring and respecting the independent fighting spirit of the
Mardi Gras Indians. She had seen the "Indians" parade as a child and
had realized that they incorporated music of survival. Only as she
attained maturity did she realize how strongly this tradition could
contribute to her own survival and that of those around her.6

As a teenager Charmaine Neville performed and masked as an Indian and her father helped provide the music for one of the few "Indian" albums recorded and distributed by a major company. Performing on The Wild Tchoupitoulas was a family affair. As Charles Neville has pointed out, he and his brothers "grew up with Mardi Gras. Our uncle, George Landry, was Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas and he made us aware of the importance of the Indians in a traditional and a spiritual Sense." The young Nevilles were influentially surrounded by Catholicism, voodoo and a respect for the existence of an Indian Spirit world. These diverse religious forces mingled and blended with music they heard played by their own father, who was a musician, as well as by Caribbean bands, New Orleans jazz stalwart5, blues, and rhythm and blues Singers. Like almost every other pianist in New Orleans, the oldest brother, Art Neville, was transfixed by the mesmerically complex and rhythmically multi layered piano playing of Professor Longhair (Henry Byrd) and he built a Succession of bands around his "Fess" affected keyboards. The most influential was The Meters and ironically it was disbanding at the time of The Wild Tchoupitoulas recording in 1976, and Art was joined by Charles, Aaron and Cyril in the studio.
The album brought together traditional songs and arrangements with numbers such as Cyril Neville's "Brother John" and "Hey Hey" as well as the already popular "Hey Pocky A-Way," written by the Meters. It was produced by the already legendary master of New Orleans piano and production, Allen Toussaint, and arranged and co-produced by Charles and Art Neville.7 To Charles, the album tried to capture the sense of pride generated by the collective experience of black and ['Indian people that had its roots in Slavery times and was expressed in the memories and mood of the songs and chants," and the "Spiritual unity" vas as important as the practical solidarity that many of the lyrics referred to. it was this hidden communality that "the music Set out to capture."8
The record has been evaluated as something of a landmark because the "African percussive tradition, Submerged since the denouement of Congo Square and voodoo, surfaced eloquently in Charles Neville's hand percussion and Cyril Neville's conga drumming on The Wild Tchoupitoulas."' This is not to Suggest that African percussion had ever ceased to be a force in New Orleans music, but that this strong Surfacing
made it obvious that Mardi Gras Indian music was a major and original example of that branch of African derived urban dance music that expressed its ethos in spiritually and politically significant lyrics. The Neville Brothers 1989 album Yellow Moon involved international touring and success.'0 On "Wild Injuns" the Mardi Gras Indians are saluted in appropriate style, welding Indian chief delivery and Caribbean rhythms with a backing redolent of New Orleans brass bands. The lyrics have been called "investigative poetry of the highest order."" The 1990 album, Brothers Keeper, referred to the constraints of the medium as a force for change on the track "Sons and Daughters": "you have your speech as long as you don't say too much . . . " while celebrating the "drums of the street, drums of the Indian Chief."
Charles Neville has described their music as "New Orleans rhythm and blues with a mixture of other elements including funk, reggae, African, and Indian voodoo." Blues, he saw as fundamental, and voodoo as an especially New Orleans African survival. He believes that "it is specific use of voodoo and Indian rhythms associated with dancing and laughter that give the Neville brothers their infectious quality and get even the most staid audiences on their feet." He went further and said that "the rhythms we play express our love of life, our love of people and our love of music. What we play is not contrived. We play it from our hearts."12
Despite a certain worldwide fascination with Mardi Gras Indians serious attention has tended to be local or scholarly. Musicians who regularly mask as Indians have tended to make their recording impact in other arenas. The Neville Brothers sold far more copies of Yellow Moon than the Wild Tchoupitoulas and, as a more recent example, Donald Harrison has acquired more critical accolades and higher sale figures for his work as a jazz saxophonist than as a leading voice and instrumentalist on Indian Blues with The Guardians of the Flame (da Music 69514, 1992). This has not been accidental. The music of the Indians, like that of Charmaine Neville, has seemed so particular to the city that it has been minimally marketed outside New Orleans.
This has been far less true of the brass band parade and funeral music which was also an intrinsic element of the Neville's musical environment. Indeed Charles Neville is acutely conscious that the brass band helped create the most individual characteristic of New Orleans music. The second line rhythm is unique to the crescent city and springs
directly from the practice of mourners and street dancers following a brass band to a burial in solemn homage and returning from the cemetery joyfully singing, dancing, clapping hands, twirling umbrellas and giving the departed spirit a positive send-off into the next world. The mood is set with ebullient jazz trumpets, trombones, tubas, sousaphones and drums, with saxophones in greater or lesser evidence depending on the size of the band. The followers that form the second line establish a backbeat that is just behind or ahead of the main beat or can set up a complementary counter rhythm. This second line rhythm began almost a century ago to filter into the jazz and blues, and later into the rhythm and blues, that poured out of New Orleans in fertile proliferation. Add to this the raunchy, throaty suggestive sound of the tuba translated into horns of lesser size, but undiminished impact, and the persistently complex percussion of the piano, and some of the basic elements of New Orleans musical style fall into place. This second line, double percussive feel is a constant factor in the music of the Neville Brothers and Charmaine and her band. They are part of a well-established city movement. One of the most prominent and musically adventurous of the younger brass bands is the Dirty Dozen.13 Its members are deliberately promoting the cross-fertilization that was always endemic in New Orleans music: "we play every style we got in New Orleans. We all used to party with other New Orleans bands-brass bands, jazz bands, Indian bands." Many of the band, such as trombonist Charles Joseph and sousaphone player Kirk Joseph, come from musical families. Lionel Batiste, one of the band's two drummers comes from a line of jazz and brass band greats and says that "most of us come from musical New Orleans' families and grew up in the Seventh Ward. Many of us have French backgrounds and are conscious of our Creole heritage. New Orleans is a natural melting pot."14
The leader of another eclectic band, Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen, was trained as a classical and jazz musician and when he formed the Chosen Few in 1979 he wanted "to stretch my own musical limits and create a sound that drew on jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and Mardi Gras Indians as well as the traditional brass band repertoire."15 Tuba Fats has masked as an Indian as well as playing jazz with local small and large groups.
It was, of course, through jazz that New Orleans has achieved its greatest fame. The Senegambian cultural links established with the city through the slave trade ensured the survival of African rhythmic and
Charmaine Neville, the Mardi Gras Indians... 25

melodic patterns. This improvisational, syncopated fusion of African and European musical elements condensed into a new genre that had a rock solid blues base and highly individual instrumentation.16 Early New Orleans jazz giants like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong were as remarkable for their versatility as for their fluidity of tone and agility of pitch. Purity and precision were contrasted with dragged and blued notes, and with a get down growl: that excitement was as essential an aspect of early jazz as the ensemble harmony that could still allow for individual dissonance. Jazz musicians in New Orleans not only established new musical conventions but simultaneously challenged social and economic discrimination. At a time when segregation was tightening its grip in Louisiana, integrated bands ignored the law and created precedents for legal and social defiance. This is all well known and thoroughly documented. What is less frequently acknowledged is the roll of the call and response polyrhythmic songs of the Mardi Gras Indians. Jelly Roll Morton recorded the traditional "Tu Wa Bac Away" because "I happened to be a spy boy myself." Families like the Barbarins, and the Nevilles, who have produced four generations of jazz musicians and Indian maskers of major dimensions, are typical of New Orleans.'7 Danny Barker came from a branch of the Barbarins and saw the 'Indian' contributions were vital. He recorded several Indian chants including "My Indian Red." In a similar way the music of the Neville family interlocks jazz with the secrecy of the Indian chants to create deeply subversive dance sounds.
Threading though all the intertwined musical genres and families was the steel cord of blues. Blues had emerged as a medium of resistance from the work songs, spirituals and hollers of the slaves, the river songs of the Mississippi. Blues arguably emerged in the city during Reconstruction when people "were trying to find out in this music what they were supposed to do with this freedom: playing this music and listening to it-waiting for it to express what they needed to learn." Evidence does suggest that the "dichotomy between their hopes and desires and their actual experiences was enough to give birth to the blues."'8 Early bluesmen and women from Mamie Desdunes, Ophelia Simpson and Lizzie Miles to "Papa" Charlie Jackson, Robert Williams, Champion Jack Dupree and Lonnie Johnson blended wit with anger and became community articulators of common fears and aspirations.'9 Their thoughtful, funny encoded lyrics and blued multi-layered rhythmic style
26 Popular Music and Society

was to be woven with Indians' songs not only into jazz but also into the rhythm and blues of musicians such as Roy Brown, Smiley Lewis, James Booker, Huey Piano Smith, Sugar Boy Crawford, Fats Domino, Paul King, Allen Toussaint, Walter "Wolfman" Washington, Professor Longhair as well as Irma Thomas, Betty Harris, the Dixie Cups, Wanda Rouzan and Lillian Boutte. Many of these masked as Indians at some time or another, and almost all used Indian songs such as "iko Iko" as a way of vocalizing critical comments, muted despair and guarded optimism.20
Moving easily from "Indian" songs to jazz and rhythm and blues, Charmaine Neville attempts to resist the conformist pressures of market forces that she understands have contributed to "the shape and impact" of at least some of the music she uses as a conduit for her political commentary.2~
Listening to Charmaine Neville it becomes relatively easy to appreciate that "the resistances of popular culture are not just evasive or semiotic: they do have a social dimension at the micro level. And at this micro level they may well act as a constant erosive force upon the macro, weakening the system from within so that it is more amenable to change at the structural level.22 She is singularly capable of articulating the insubordination of a heterogenous group of exploited people in the face of the unified, stable alliance of homogenous capitalist interest. It becomes inappropriate to join with Theodor Adorno, or, to a lesser extent, Michel Foucault, in dismissing most aspects of popular culture as either a safety valve or an opiate in the face of such socially pertinent opposition. It might possibly be illuminating to see such radicalized art as part of "a socialist theme of pleasure that locates within the structures of domination, but on the side of the subordinated.23 Her use of Indian style body movements on stage is an expression of joy with an underpinning of "sass" and subversion. This was particularly masked in her dangerously oppositional dancing and writing at Angola prison in the spring of 1988.
Charmaine Neville feels that in the United States in the late twentieth century there is a clear relationship between the cultural and the economic aspects of the military-industrial complex. For decades, finance capital has been supported by an imperialist foreign policy and the crucial relationship between arms spending and economic vigor has resulted in the commodification of culture. She sees both U.S. imperialism and exploitation of artists by record companies as being based on a similar acquisition of "economic power." Yet even if desire and pleasure have been manipulated by industry, and cultural forms such as popular music have become integral aspects of consumer society, these feelings and forms can be part of an ongoing search for ideas and responses that can sustain confrontation and rebellion. At its best, popular music can be productivity dialectical. It can stir up the fighting, challenging spirit of the disaffected, the poor and the oppressed. Frequently, the songs that have the most defiantly oppositional lyrics and music come out of the poor black communities, very much like that which spawned Charmaine Neville and the Mardi Gras Indian bands.
When she sings traditional Mardi Gras Indian songs and masks as an Indian in New Orleans annual carnivals, she is conscious that she still lives in the one United States city where music is almost as constant a soundtrack for life as it is in Africa. She is now very aware that because her family were all musical and took part in the unique ceremonial celebrations of the marching bands and the Wild Tchoupitoulas, they are part of a tradition that draws together the cultural oppositional strength of Africans and American Indians that began in New Orleans.24 She recognizes that traditional New Orleans Indian songs are intrinsically songs of rebellion and that the black Indian tribes all pay homage to those Indians who harbored escaped slaves for decades before emancipation. She too wears the spectacular beaded and feathered costumes as a tribute to the warlike resistance of the plains Indians and feels that the aggressive masking and marching on Mardi Gras and St. Joseph's Day is symptomatic of the constancy of the marginalized form of resistance. When Charmaine sings Indian anthems like "Hey Pocky Way," she adds her own dimension of spiritual subversion. She turns traditional Indian songs into music of a doubly oppositional nature.
Charmaine is also following in the footsteps of performers who used minstrelsy and burlesque to transcend and subvert gender and race. She can assume the social identity of male singers and dissects aural and emotional expectations with practiced ease. She uses her live performances on stage as a forum "where race and gender can be stereotyped and transgressed.25 She deconstructs and the restructures in a fresh way her own relationship to the people around her and the institutional discrimination that damages the poor and oppressed.
Charmaine Neville has a musical talent that has so far been resistant to commodification. She has consistently rejected offers that would put her in the hands of a record company and turn her into a consumer product. What Charmaine has, as part of the African-American tradition largely ignored by theoreticians, is a rich vein of humor. Wit is used by her in an illuminating and educative way. She channels the healing potential of comedy in a similar way to Spy Boy in an Indian parade. She acknowledges that feeling uncomfortable is an intrinsic aspect of the process of growth and that "having a good time and being in tune with people's basic needs are not mutually contradictory." She is even able to respond sardonically when asked constantly, "Who is the leader of the band?" It is very much Charmaine's band but she threads her responses with wry amusement as more likely to help break through prejudiced attitudes. Yet there is no doubt that she is fully engaged in a battle against discrimination.

Anything you do in your life, if you're a women you're pushed and shoved around. Just even being the girl-the woman in a band-you be discriminated against. I've had people tell me "Gee, that band sure is goof. Which one of the guys runs it." I say "you come and see the show and you'll see which one of the guys runs it." I hate that! We are not "I'm the singer and that's the band"-we are a group and we all contribute, each and every one of us contributes to the music, to the planning of the songs, what we're going to play, to everything. We are a family. But people have this thing about a woman leading a band-"You can t lead this band, you're a woman." Why? Why can't I lead the band? Who's to say that I'm not as good as you are? You sure can't stand in my face and tell me that. I really hate that. We are discriminated against at the movies-especially black women, because the only time you see a black woman in a movie, she's getting paid by a man. She's always got to be a hooker or she's got to be a voodoo woman. . . . If you see a black woman in a love scene with a white man he's paying her or he's treating her like dirt. Any scenes that you see woman in are always misused in movies or TV. They put on shows on TV. about women being raped and then the next morning some weirdo goes out and tries all of these new ways to rape and kill women and they go "Oh my God. How did something like that happen?" Well they put the shit on TV? I feel bad for the women that have to take these parts because they feel like they're not going to be given any work anyway else so they're going to starve. But if we don't start standing up now and saying, "Hey we're not going to play this shit" if we don't do that then they're going to go on giving us these kinds of parts. And I won't play them, I'm sorry. If they ask me "Will you play this part, but you ve got to be the hooker," I'm sorry, I will not. "Oh but its good money-you won't play it?" "No, I sure won't, get somebody else to play it.". . . Black women singers have been really discriminated against and misused for a million years. Billie Holiday-and not just her, everybody, Aretha Franklin and all of them have been treated like trash. People think that their lives have been glamorous and have been marvelous and they made all this money and most of them have hardly made anything and the little bit that they got has been taken from them. So it keeps going around, it never changes, it's a never ending cycle, it keeps going on and on, and we as women have to try and do something. And in the music business women are becoming more outspoken in what they feel about the production of music and the writings of songs and just everything. Again we are making steps forward in that but for every two steps that we get to take forward they push us back five.

Charmaine attempts to deal honestly with the cultural contradictions presenting an attractive and sensuous image while avoiding the commodification of the erotic in popular culture:

All of it is about power and money. I think that's one way in which I'm different from everybody else. I'm not looking to be rich and famous and all of this bullshit. What I'm looking for is for more people to come out and enjoy what I enjoy because I love what I do.... I say don't put me in any category.'-'

To her the body, the image is just part of what she is, not a separate entity just as her music is a composite whole with its elements integrally intertwined.
She resists record companies who just "want me to sing all the Neville brothers stuff" but "I didn't want to do any one kind of music. I like rock and roll, I think its great but that wasn't what I wanted to do all the time. I like jazz, jazz is my number one first love. I love classical music, so I do that, I do blues, I do country and western, I do rap. I felt like the more versatile I was the better it would be for me. Because I felt that if you can only do one thing people stereotype you.... I want to do everything in one gig.27
She grew up wanting to make her voice sound like a horn and scatting is used to express emotions that are beyond words. Her opera
singing mother reinforced the Creole habit of moving easily from classical to street music. Charmaine's eclectism is living testimony to the widespread New Orleanian belief that a good musician is versatile:
African, classical and modern traditions are all there to be explored and ventured into. Anger and outrage are encoded into her growls and vocal inflections. Whether chanting "Indian" lyrics, singing or rapping, her tone is as relevant as the actual~words but it is often the words that give specificity to what is a generally oppositional cultural form. People dance, listen, and may almost unconsciously rethink attitudes to the acceptable polarization of wealth within capitalist society when confronted by her rendition of the sardonic "Rich Girl" (written by her son).
Mamie Desdunes, singing in the 1890s in New Orleans, was one of the earliest of blues singers and she made acerbic references to financial and sexual relationships as well as gender expectations. Charmaine Neville continues this tradition when she belts out "Greet me with your black drawers on" and breaks through gender roles. Her performance is filled with transforming wit and such irreverent understanding that gender is suddenly exposed as a societally fabricated chimera that divides people who have the capacity to relate at every level, including the sexual.28 She is insistent on her right to choose, to control how her sexual appeal is presented. She confronts the difficulty of not overtly becoming a marketable commodity in an industry dependent on consumer taste. She is sarcastic about record companies who want her to wear no blouses.... if you think it is my clothes that are going to make me sing better you've got a problem." She refuses to be judged for a cleavage-even though she does dress and move on stage in a manner which heightens her sexual appeal. As she puts it "I will not be dictated to. I don't like dictatorships. I refuse to be told what I can sing and what I can't sing29
She also wants to be free to express on stage and record her concern with poverty and deprivation that she elaborated on in some depth when interviewed.

I'm concerned with El Savador, I'm concerned with everything that's going on n the Middle East and, of course, with what's happening in South Africa. But also I'm concerned with what's going on here in the United States because there are so many horrible things that are going on here and we are more worried about whether or not we can get enough money to send guns to the guerrillas in El Savador or to somebody else rather than worry how we can feed the people here who are living on the streets and give medical aid to the people who are dying of disease. I have some really strong views on that because every day there are white children, black children, Hispanic children, Jewish children, German children-there are a lot of children that are being born with AIDS every single day. What are they going to do about it-what in the hell are they going to do about it....
The U.S. can't feed the people here but they can send $1.5 million a day to buy guns for El Salvador to kill women and children and old people and to disrupt a country's culture. They can do that and it's sickening, it really sickens me. It makes me feel, Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this? I get crazy when it comes to politics. I don't know how to shut up sometimes. But I think it's good though-if more people would learn to not shut up maybe things would change. And the only way they are going to change is not by our government, but by us. The government is going to do what it wants to do and we have to force the government to do what is right, what we feel is right-regardless of whether or not they think it is the right thing to do because a lot of times they don't know. Power makes them crazy and when they have power like that and can do whatever they want, then it's on you to try to make them see: Come back down, get your feet on the earth, this is what it's really about. It's not about you going over there and killing Russians or killing people in Iraq or Iran, it's about taking care of the children that are being born every day here and the people that are breaking their necks from all these war-torn countries and coming to the United States and believing that this is the land of the milk and honey and everything else and finding out that they're worse off here an they were in their own country.30

Charmaine herself has done something about the problem of children with AIDS. She has personally adopted an AIDS baby and is locally active in anti-drug campaigns.

I feel that if the government can keep someone from bringing a bag of marijuana into the country, they can certainly keep someone from bringing cocaine and heroin and ice and all of this other stuff into the country. The only reason why they are not doing this is because they want to have it. Because they are going to make big money out of it. A friend of mine who lives in New York tells me about across the street from me where she is she watches the police go into this crack house and run all the people out and take the drugs. When the people come and knock on the door the police are selling through the door-they don't know its the police-but everyone in that neighborhood knows it's the police selling the drugs.31

Charmaine has strong views on the danger presented by the racist Klu Klux Klan, neo-Nazi ex-representative, David Duke; who came close to being elected governor of Louisiana in 1991.

What people really don't realize, they think all he hates is black people, but he hates every damn body. He hates the Jews, he hates the Spanish, the Italians, he hates anybody who's not pure white. Now tell me where there's one person in this whole anywhere that is pure white. Show me that one person-I swear there ain't nobody.... I know he's a liar. "I love everybody. What I was saying then was then, but I see better now." He doesn't see shit! What he sees is that "If I lie maybe they'll believe this and maybe they'll really vote me in and once I get in there than I can do what I want to."

Unlike Duke she would like to give more help

to those people that I pass by every night and stop to give some food or to give some money to because I know where their spots are and they are close around my house and there are a lot of them. People think I'm crazy, but I'm not crazy. I really am not. I really want everybody to live and survive and for their children to grow up and be able to have the chance that your kids or my kids have to be whatever they want to be or whoever they want to be. ~

Abbreviated, encoded, versions of her wide-ranging views are frequently slid into songs, and introductions to the songs, during live performance-very much in the tradition of Mardi Gras Indian constantly evolving chants. Like the Indian maskers who alter topical songs to comment on changing situations, she layers meaning in a similar way. She wrote over 80 verses for a 1991 song that juxtaposed the Gulf War with poverty and homelessness in the US It raises vital issues and uses the recurring phrase "Tell me what you feel" to highlight media insensitivity about death and deprivation.33 When interviewed in March 1991, Charmaine expressed the hope "that music could change the world" and in 1990 had said that she wished
that music could be a healer of all the serious problems in the world, I really wish it could. I wish that just by singing a song-that song "We are the world"-that they really could have raised enough money to give to people in South Africa and everywhere else that they were trying to give money to. Unfortunately that song did a lot of good to make people feel good for a couple of weeks but none of that money ever reached any of those people. Who knows where that money is going? They tell you they have benefits for the hungry and the homeless and still every day you look on the street and there are more and more hungry and homeless people-where is all that money going? They tell you "Don't give them money" out of your pocket if you see someone say, "I'm hungry and homeless in the street"-well, if I don't give them money out of my pocket and you're not giving them money out of your pocket. . . Am I supposed to walk by and say "Starve, let your baby lay down in the street and be full of bugs"? No, I can't. I'm going to do as much as I Can.34

John Fornas points out that while "cultural forms like popular music always relate to money and power," it is always more than "exchange value or cultural capital." It can instead initiate a many stranded creative process that not only interrelates musical, verbal and visual symbols with language, style and aesthetic form but also makes appropriate statements about the world, sometimes to the point of encouraging "revolutionary changes."35
In a patriarchal society, Charmaine is a symbol of affectionate subversion. In real life she has the highest regard for her father, Charles Neville. She knows she can safely use such a man for generic mockery in "The Right Key But the Wrong Keyhole." This again is not just because the words are self-penned but because her interpretation of those words has a myriad layers of subtle interpretation and implied nuances. She manages to put men down in song in a way that enables them to feel responsive and open to change rather than simply attacked as reprehensive reprobates.36
As Charmaine makes clear, she is a non-devisive feminist who does not condemn men for their role in the disempowerment of women. She evidently adheres to anti-racist socialist feminism that constitutes "an ideological position to which women of whatever race, can subscribe."37 And, indeed, with which men who are in favor of human liberation feel comfortable. It is a kind of feminism that involves shared responsibility for the future of the human race, men as well as women, the deprived as
well as the powerful. She does feel, however, that she is part of a group that have been doubly marginalized for being black and Indian. As she is also a woman there is at least triple jeopardy.
In her life and in her music, Charmaine fulfills bell hooks's proffered preference for standing in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, towards that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible.38

Charmaine herself is convinced that music can affect everyone's life.

In some ways or another, music touches everyone's life and makes a big impact on it. I think that's one reason why music will never die. They'll never be able to stop music. They might be able to stop everything else but they can't stop that because that's something that's inside each and every one of us. Even people who can't sing and can't play instruments, it's still inside. . .. Music and politics definitely go together because I feel that the only way you can sometimes get your message across and try to help people is by saying what you mean in a song, you know, because that is a universal thing-everybody will listen to a record whereas everybody will not be in tune to listen to you make a speech. So you have to make that speech in what you do-and not only in your songs but in theater, in dance, in all of the arts-in your painting, in everything you know. So I try to do as much as I can in all of it. Sometimes, it's scary and you think, God, if I do this are people going to listen? What I'm trying to do is to do this so it's up to them to listen to it and it's up to me to put it out there for them.39

As a black woman and a foster child, Charmaine experienced the kind of marginalization that bell hooks is convinced engenders strength and "provided us with an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair.40 Charmaine refuses to be packaged or commodified, to be turned into a product. To bell hooks, analyzing the type of stubborn integrity in musicians, the "space of refusal, where one can say no to the colonizer, no to the downpressor, is located in the margins."41 Such margins are "both sites of repression and
sites of resistance. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of Opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. . . . We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms, and sustains our objectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world."42 There is no doubt that the cultural forms of music and language are elemental aspects of this struggle and that the radicalization of these forms has encouraged intensely oppositional ways of thinking.
Charmaine's singing is ultimately rooted in both the blues and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Indeed she is a creatively interpretative blues singer and is a living manifestation of true cultural pluralism. She also strengthens the idea that the "blues in the original, African-American tradition, becomes a political act which works to undermine chauvinism and the historically attendant politics of inequality."43 She opposes "the expropriation of the blues by the record industry" just as she resists the exploitation of her own talent.44She automatically feels that fear of reprisals must be ignored: "Speaking about what I might feel like inside is going to get me in trouble. People feel like that-you know it's happening every day so they're afraid to say 'I like that even though it's a political song and I believe in what the song is saying,' because that may cause harm to them in some way.' Defiantly, and with an optimism that may be misplaced, she argues that "the government can't stop me writing or talking about anything. . . . The more they try to oppress it, the more it's going to be heard."45 Charmaine Neville powerfully fulfills John Blacking's criteria for effective performance:
"The chief function of music is to involve people in shared experiences within the framework of their cultural experience.46 This is a singer who uses a shared cultural background as a safe base from which to introduce fresh musical ideas and challenging sociopolitical concepts to her audience. In the style and tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians, she has chosen to use music as a forum for asking disturbing questions outside of the restrictive framework of a lucrative record contract. This could mean that she is not "going to be heard," but packed shows twice nightly and twice weekly at venues like Snug Harbor in New Orleans, nationally programmed television and radio performances and good distribution for her small-company cassettes she has already found a wide and responsive audience, and remains 'Unbought and unbossed.'47

Notes

1. Charles Neville, interviewed by Mary Ellison, New Orleans, 7 August
1988.
2. David Draper, "The Mardi Gras Indians: The Ethno musicology of
Black Associations in New Orleaps," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Tulane, 1973; Michael P. Smith, "Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras
Indians and the New Orleans Second Line," Black Music Research Journal 14.1
(Spring 1994): 43-74; Violet Harrington Bryan, "Evocations of Place and
Culture in the Works of Four Contemporary Black Louisiana Writers: Brenda
Osbey, Sybil Kein, Elizabeth Brown~Guillory, and Pinkie Gordon Lane,"
Louisiana Literature 4.2 (Fall 1987): 51; Maurice M. Martinez, "Black Indians:
Their Heritage is Rooted in New Orleans," National Leader 24 March 1983:18-
20; Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones, Up From the Cradle of Jazz:
New Orleans Music Since World War II (U of Georgia P, Athens, 1986) 203-71;
Rosita M. Sands, "Carnival Celebrations in Africa and the New World:
Junkanoo and the Black Indians of Mardi Gras," Black Music Research Journal
11 (Spring 1991): 75-92.
3. Interview by Mary Ellison with Pete Hardy of the Golden Star Hunters,
29 July 1988; interview with Chief "Tuddy" Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas by Jason Berry, 13 March, 1982, New Orleans Ethnic Music Research Project, William Ransome, Hogan Jazz Archive, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.
4. Interview by Mary Ellison with Creole Osceolas, 24 April 1987.
5. Interview by Mary Ellison with Larry Bannock, Chief of the Golden Star Hunters, 29 July 1988.
6. Charmaine Neville by Mary Ellison, 20 September 1990; Kalamu Ya Salaam, "My Name is Charmaine Neville," Wavelength, January 1989: 8-14,
36.
7. Interview by Mary Ellison with Charles Neville, 7 August 1988. The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Antilles Thi/Island AN-7052, 1976).
8. Interview with Charles Neville.
9. Berry, Foose, and Jones, Up From the Cradle of Jazz.
10. The Neville Brothers, Yellow Moon (A & M 5P5240, 1989).
11. John Sinclair, "711e Nevilles Come Home," Wavelength, May 1989: 43.
12. Interview with Charles Neville.
13. Rhodes Spedale, Jazz in New Orleans (New Orleans: Hope Publications, 1984) 31.
Charmaine Neville, the Mardi Gras Indians... 37
14. Interview by this author with members of the Dirty Dozen Band,
4 July 1989; The Dirty Dozen, Voodoo (CBS CB291, 1989).
15. Interview by this author with Tuba Fats Lacen, 29 July 1988.
16. Michael T. Coolen, "Senegambian influences on Afro-American Musical Culture," Black Music Research Journal 11.1:1-18; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Aflicans in Colonial Louisiana (Baton Rouge: U of Louisiana P, 1992) 43, 118.
17. Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album,
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State LP, 1984) 9; Kalamu Ya Salaam, "Listen to the
Music: Some Musings on the State of Jazz in New Orleans, 1989," Wavelength,
October 1989: 22; Interviews by this author with Michael White, 13 April 1994,
7 August 1988; Rose and Souchon, op. cit., 189; Jelly Roll Morton, Library of
Congress Recordings 5 (1938), L.P. Classic Jazz Masters, CJM6; Alan Lomax,
Mr. Jelly Roll (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950); Louis Dumaine's
Jazzola Eight, "To-Wa-B ac-a-Wa," Vi 20723, BVE 37978, 1927; Danny Barker
and His Creole Cats, "Tootie Ma Is a Big Fine Thing," "Corrine Died on the
Battlefield," "My Indian Red," "Chocko Mo Freeno Hey," King Zula 0001 and
0002 (1955); Danny Barker interview with Mary Ellison, 7 April 1994.
18. Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (London: Cassell, 1960) 50; Edna Edet,
"One Hundred Years of Black Protest Music," Black Scholar July-August 1976:
39-42; Henry Kinen, Music in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,
1966) 226.
19. New Orleans bluesman Lonnie Johnson was idolised by B.B. King
and was at his most popular in the twenties. He cut almost a hundred singles and an effective album compilation of 22 of these, including "Working Man's Blues," can be found on Lonnie Johnson, Tomorrow Night, Gusto GD5039X(2), 1976.
20. Interviews by this author with Snooks Eaglin, and Earl; King, 23 June
1990; Interview by this author with Irma Thomas, 4 July 1989. See also John
Broven, Walking to New Orleans. The Story of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues,
Flyright, Bexhill on Sea, 1977, 145; Interview by this author with Wanda
Rouzan, 24 April 1987. See also Lyla Hay Owen/Owen Murphy, Creoles of
New Orleans (New Orleans: First Quarter, 1987) 93-98; Interview by this
author with Lillian Boutte', 1 August 1990.
21. Neville/Ellison interview 1990.
22. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin, Hyman 1989)11.
23. Ibid, 183.
24. Neville/Ellison interview, 1990; Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II,