Entry · catalog no. 0027
spy boy
/ ˈspaɪ ˌbɔɪ /SPY BOY
n. · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
In the Black Masking Indian tradition of New Orleans, the member who moves well out in front of his tribe on Mardi Gras morning, St. Joseph's Night and Super Sunday, watching the cross streets for another tribe and signaling back down the line — to the flag boy, who relays it to the Big Chief. The spy boy is the lightest-suited and the fastest; the position is a rank, held and earned, not a costume choice.
“Spy boy came running back down Washington hollering, and everybody knew who was up ahead.”
Origin & Attribution
Black New Orleans, in the Mardi Gras Indian or Black Masking Indian tradition traced to the 1880s and the founding of the Creole Wild West, the oldest documented tribe. The hierarchy of Big Chief, spy boy, flag boy and wild man was in place well before it was written down; newspaper accounts describe masking Indians by 1899, and the roles entered the record commercially when the tribes began making records in 1970.
1880s
Creole Wild West forms; the masking tradition takes its documented shape in New Orleans
1970
Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias cut "Handa Wanda," the first commercially released Mardi Gras Indian record
1973
David Elliott Draper's Tulane dissertation gives the tradition its first sustained academic treatment
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1880s
Spoken by
Black New Orleans — Black Masking Indian tribes and the neighborhoods that follow them
$SPYBOYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady56 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1970
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
"Handa Wanda" — Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indian Band, Crescent City Records, 1970
audio · single
■
The Wild Tchoupitoulas — The Wild Tchoupitoulas with the Meters, Island Records, 1976
audio · album
■
+ Cite a source"The Mardi Gras Indians: The Ethnomusicology of Black Associations in New Orleans" — David Elliott Draper, Tulane University, 1973
text · dissertation
See also