New Orleans vocal trio · Red Bird Records · March 1965
Barbara Ann Hawkins, her sister Rosa Lee and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson were already stars from “Chapel of Love” when an unplanned jam in a New York studio — voices and improvised percussion rather than a band arrangement — was captured and released in March 1965 as “Iko Iko”. It reached No. 20 on the Hot 100, and on its own terms it is a wonderful record: sparse, hypnotic and nothing like a conventional 1965 pop single. The only error in the popular account is chronological.