Crawford started on trombone and led a New Orleans band that Leonard Chess signed to Checker, renaming them Sugar Boy and his Cane Cutters. In November 1953 they recorded “Jock-A-Mo”, which Crawford built by setting phrases chanted by the Mardi Gras Indians to music. The record sold locally and never charted nationally. A severe beating by state troopers in 1963 incapacitated him for two years and effectively ended his commercial career; by 1969 he was singing only in church, and he lived to see the song become a standard, appearing on HBO’s Treme in the year he died.