I wanna know
So in 2004 during Mardi Gras, I was walking around the streets singing Who Shot The LaLa over and over and a little boy kept telling me to quit singing that song. But obviously the song stuck in his head so in 2005 when I bought the house on Moss Street his dad drove him by to look at it and he pronounced it first Rachel’s Writing House and then later changed it to Rachel’s LaLa house. So when I completed the house in February 2007 after braving the impossible I installed in the front walkway the words LALA to mark the occasion. And so it stuck. I also had the doorbell chime changed to Who Shot The LaLa.
This is the LaLa.
In July of that same year, Oliver “Who Shot The LaLa” Morgan died, still exiled from New Orleans since the Federal Flood and I built a memorial on the front stairs complete with candle, obit and black roses.
But something has nagged me for years and it goes all the way back to when I was about 28 and in the Milan Lounge uptown in an epic fight with a friend over the lyrics to Who Shot The LaLa. The way the song goes, who shot the lala, I just don’t know, I know it was a .44. My friend insisted the song said “I know it was a phony pho,” which I said was RIDICULOUS.
The other day sitting on the front porch, Marcela said she had just found out Who Shot The LaLa is about a hot shot, which she said is tainted heroin. The Urban Dictionary says a hot shot is a poison that is injected and then you die. Since Oliver Morgan released the song in 1964 about Lawrence “Prince LaLa” Nelson who was killed in 1963 maybe he was messing around in a typical New Orleans fashion with words and calling a hot shot a phony pho.
But if you search for the lyrics to Who Shot The LaLa they all say it was a .44 but if you listen to the song and think about a hot shot and not a gun shot, you might hear a different song than the one you thought it was – so I’m not saying I concede on this argument 24 years later, but I am saying this new information gives me pause (and I wanna know).