Rosa Hawkins, one of the trio of singers who performed with the Dixie Cups, died on Tuesday in Tampa, Florida, following complications from a surgery last week. She was 76.
The Dixie Cups debuted in the early 1960s at a time when girl groups like The Supremes and The Chiffons were topping the charts, but the group’s rise to national fame was short-lived and fraught with exploitation and mismanagement. Two of the group’s best-known songs included “Chapel of Love,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts in June 1964, displacing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” and “Iko Iko.” an adaptation of a Mardi Gras Indian song. The group remained regionally known and the Dixie Cups appeared at festivals for more than five decades, including the French Quarter Festival and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The surviving members of the group plan to perform at both festivals later this year.
In 2013 The Dixie Cups were honored with a Best of the Beat Lifetime Achievement Award among other legends from the golden age of New Orleans rhythm and blues scene in the 1950s and ’60s. The following is an excerpt from a story by John Swenson in the January 2013 edition of OffBeat that recounts the group’s early days on stage and in the recording studio:
Rosa Hawkins, born September 24, 1944, grew up in New Orleans’ Calliope housing projects singing with her sister Barbara Ann and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson.
“Every day after you did your chores you went outside on your porch and everybody in the neighborhood got together and sang,” Barbara said. “I never dreamed anything would become of it.”
The girls were asked to sing at a citywide school talent show in 1963, where Joe Jones, who recorded “You Talk Too Much” in 1960, heard them sing.
“He called Sylvia [Robinson] of Mickey and Sylvia and told her, ‘I’ve got a gold mine in these girls,’” recalled Barbara. “He said he wanted to take us to New York, but he didn’t have the money so if Sylvia would give him the money he’d split half the royalties with her. But he took the money and never paid her back.”
Rosa details a history of treachery from Jones.
“We all drove up to New York in his car and he found an apartment for us,” she said. “He took us to every record company and they all loved us, but Jones wouldn’t sign because he wanted what he called ‘front money.’ We didn’t know what that was. We were young and just wanted to sing so we trusted him.”
The great songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were just starting their own label, Red Bird Records. “Leiber and Stoller really wanted us, so they agreed to pay Jones the front money,” said Rosa. “But he kept it all for his own family and never paid us any of it. He had a family in New Orleans and another family in New York.”
The Dixie Cups became a signature act for Red Bird right out of the box with a gold record, “Chapel of Love,” in 1964. “We had our own sound,” says Rosa. “All the other girl groups had a female lead and backup singers, but we sang three-part harmonies. When the writers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich played ‘Chapel of Love’ for us it was a dry, kind of country-and-western song. We asked if we could liven up the vocal arrangement and they went along with that.” The girls charted another top 40 hit the same year, “You Should Have Seen the Way He Looked At Me.” But after going out on a national tour they returned to New York to discover that they were broke.
“We got back and there was an eviction notice on the door,” Rosa says. “The electricity was shut off. The phone was dead. We had to call our mothers for money to pay the bills.”
Yet the Dixie Cups kept recording and kept having hits. Perhaps their most influential record was a 1965 hit with an impromptu interpretation of a Mardi Gras Indian-inspired verse, “Iko Iko,” a variation on the 1954 version called “Jock-a-Mo” by Sugar Boy Crawford.
“That was something that my grandmother sang and we heard it at home every day,” notes Barbara. “We were in the studio and all the musicians were on a break. We thought we were alone but Jerry and Mike were in the control room. We started singing and banging on ashtrays for percussion, just having fun, and when we finished the voice came over the speaker and said, ‘Can you do that again?’”
Meanwhile the girls still weren’t getting paid. Finally they went to Leiber and Stoller and asked for money.
“You mean Joe Jones hasn’t been paying you your royalties?” Rosa recalls being told. Each of them was given a receipt for payments and a check for $4,012 dollars. “That’s for a record that sold over a million copies in three months,” says Rosa. “Joe Jones took the rest.”
Eventually Johnson just quit the group and went home. The final straw came when Jones wanted to bring in another singer as the featured member of the group with Barbara and Rosa as the backup vocalists. After many years the group was able to disentangle itself from Jones and finally settle business matters. The Dixie Cups continue to perform, often appearing at Jazz Fest. The current lineup includes Athelgra Neville and the Hawkins sisters.
“I enjoy what I do,” says Barbara. “I never dreamed when we first recorded that almost 50 years later we would still be entertaining audiences. We are blessed. We feel wonderful when we walk out onstage and start singing our songs and they sing them with us.”
In 2021, the University Press of Mississippi published Rosa Hawkins’ memoir, “Chapel of Love: The Story of New Orleans Girl Group the Dixie Cups,” was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2021. Writer Steve Bergsman conducted an oral history of Hawkins and is credited as co-author. in the book, Hawkins reveals that in addition to financial deceit she was sexually abused by Jones.
Funeral arrangements for Hawkins are pending.
