Iko Iko (From "Rain Man")

Iko Iko: The Belle Stars Bring a New Orleans Classic to the Silver Screen

Few songs in popular music have traveled as far, across as many formats and generations, as "Iko Iko," the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian chant that began its recorded life in 1953 and arrived, via a British all-female pop group, in the top 20 of the American charts in 1989. The Belle Stars were a Birmingham, England, ska and pop group formed in 1980, best known in the UK for a string of early-1980s chart entries including their number 2 UK hit "Sign of the Times" in 1983. By 1989, the group had largely faded from their commercial peak, but a placement in one of the year's biggest films gave their recording of "Iko Iko" a second life that no one involved could have anticipated when the record was first made.

The song's origins trace back to 1953, when Sugar Boy Crawford (James Crawford) recorded a version under the title "Jock-A-Mo" for Checker Records in New Orleans, establishing the song's characteristic call-and-response structure and its roots in Mardi Gras Indian ritual. The Dixie Cups popularized a version in 1965, which reached number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the definitive mass-market recording until subsequent decades produced new interpretations. Dr. John, the Grateful Dead, and numerous other artists covered the song over the years, each adding layers of cultural context to a piece that was already deeply embedded in American roots music.

The Belle Stars' version, recorded and released in the UK in 1982, was a brisk, keyboard-driven pop arrangement that captured the song's joyful energy while translating it into the idiom of early-1980s British pop and ska revival. It had not been a major commercial success upon its initial UK release, reaching number 35 on the UK Singles Chart. The song's American commercial life came entirely from its inclusion in Rain Man, the 1988 Barry Levinson film starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. The film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, and its soundtrack received enormous exposure through the film's theatrical run and subsequent home video release.

The placement in Rain Man drove a reissue campaign that brought the Belle Stars' recording to American radio programmers for the first time with any significant promotional weight behind it. The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 4, 1989, entering at number 86, and it embarked on one of the more remarkable climbs of that year's chart. Ascending week by week through March and April, it reached its peak position of number 14 during the week of May 13, 1989, spending a total of 18 weeks on the chart. That 18-week run and top-15 peak made it the most commercially successful American moment in the Belle Stars' entire career, achieved seven years after the original recording was made.

The timing was fortuitous in every respect. Rain Man's awards success kept it in public consciousness through the early months of 1989, and the film's emotional power gave the song's joyful exuberance a poignant context: its placement in the film's road trip sequences made it the sound of unexpected connection and liberation, qualities that translated directly to radio. On the Adult Contemporary chart, the song also performed strongly, benefiting from the film's broad demographic appeal across age groups.

The Belle Stars, who had by 1989 largely dissolved as an active recording act, did not capitalize commercially on the song's unexpected American success, but "Iko Iko" secured their place in the history of the Hot 100 and introduced their recording to an entirely new audience. The song has since appeared in numerous additional film and television productions, each time carrying the momentum of its long and varied history. The original Mardi Gras Indian tradition from which the song derives has never stopped evolving, and every commercial recording of "Iko Iko" is in some sense a continuation of that living tradition into new contexts and new audiences that would otherwise never have encountered it.