Bo Dollis

Theodore Emile "Bo" Dollis was born in New Orleans in 1944 and grew up in Central City, where he entered the participatory world of Black Masking as a teenager. He first masked in 1957 with the Golden Arrows after learning repertoire around the White Eagles, discovering a cultural form in which singing, percussion, movement, neighborhood identity and the making of a new beaded suit were inseparable. In 1964 Dollis became Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias, named for Magnolia Street. The title joined artistic leadership to community responsibility: a Big Chief led chants and encounters, organized the group and embodied its visual identity through a hand-sewn suit. Dollis became known for the force of his singing and for increasingly elaborate bead-and-feather work worn on Mardi Gras and St. Joseph's Day.

The Wild Magnolias' 1970 recording of "Handa Wanda," made with Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and musicians around keyboardist Willie Tee, helped carry an actual masking group's repertoire into commercial circulation. That same year Dollis and Boudreaux appeared at the inaugural New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The collaboration joined street-rooted call-and-response and percussion to amplified New Orleans funk and rhythm-and-blues, expanding the audience without replacing the underlying community practice.

Albums including *The Wild Magnolias* (1974) and *They Call Us Wild* (1975) followed, with collaborators including Willie Tee, Snooks Eaglin and other New Orleans musicians. The group performed nationally and internationally, reaching Carnegie Hall, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and stages in Europe. Dollis's rasping lead voice and the ensemble's layered percussion gave the recorded work a sonic force suited to dancing, while the live presentation retained the spatial authority of a chief and a responsive gang.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the neighborhood, Dollis opened Handa Wanda's as a place for tribal members to gather, sew, chant and practice. In 2011 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow, the federal government's highest honor in folk and traditional arts. Declining health limited Dollis's later performance, and his son Gerard "Bo" Dollis Jr. increasingly carried the Wild Magnolias' leadership and music forward. Dollis died in New Orleans on January 20, 2015, six days after his seventy-first birthday.