_No singer in the Big Easy had a more easygoing manner than Lee Dorsey. The rhythms behind him could be wickedly syncopated (they usually were), and Dorsey would still sound unruffled, unhurried, as if it were a sunny afternoon and he had nothing better to do than sit on his front-porch swing and watch a boisterous, second-line parade go by.

Just listen to the way he sings his first big hit, 1961's “Ya Ya.” He drawls out the words, “Oh, well, I m sitting here la la, waiting for my ya ya,” filling up every vowel with a happy-go-lucky hum. His buttery, slightly nasal, baritone croon is immediately relaxing. The singer is sitting around, waiting for his girlfriend to show up, but it hardly matters whether she does, because he’s already feeling fine. He's got the bouncy exuberance of the catchy little piano figure; he’s got the laid-back serenity of his own vocals—who could ask for anything more? Certainly not his listeners, who can’t help but envy a man so content that the arrival of his lover would be mere icing on the cake.

“Lee had what I like to call a smiling voice, says Allen Toussaint,” Dorseys most frequent songwriter and producer. “When you hear his voice in just about any song, it sounds like a smile. He had a free-hearted spirit for life, and one could hear that in his voice—his voice had a lift to it.”

The same sunny singing, the same effortless funkiness can be heard in Dorseys other hit singles: “Working in the Coal Mine” (later re-fashioned by both Devo and the Judds), Get Out of My Life Woman” (re-recorded by Paul Butterfield, Joe Tex, and, as an instrumental, by Toussaint), “Holy Cow” (remade by the Band), and “Do-Re-Mi” (redone by Dusty Springfield). Dorseys original recordings of these songs can now be found on Arista’s twenty-song, single-CD anthology Wheelin’ and Dealin: The Definitive Collection.

Twenty different Dorsey songs are on another crucial set, Yes We Can and Then Some (Polydor Chronicles), including such key cuts as “Yes We Can” (later a hit for the Pointer Sisters) and “Sneakin’ Sally Thru the Alley” (remade by Robert Palmer). Taken all together, these forty songs (plus the nine on his marvelous 1978 valedictory album, Night People) represent a body of work so rich and influential that it prompts the question, “Why isn’t this man in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?”

The answer is lost in the Vatican-like secrecy of Hall-of-Fame voting. But other questions arise as well. For instance, how could a voice sound so sanguine amid the rugged push-and-pull of New Orleans syncopation?

In most cities, total relaxation means an absence of movement, but in New Orleans, it means an absence of inhibition. Remove all tension, and the body will not hibernate but undulate—not sink like a stone through the rhythms of the streets, but float upon them like a cork.

That’s what we hear in Dorsey’s singing—a buoyant voice that rides the waves beneath him. Just listen to “Working in the Coal Mine,” where a high-squeaking guitar and a low-throated baritone saxophone tug the beat back and forth. The song takes on one of those memorable New Orleans grooves that we hear with the hips as much as the ears. And yet there’s no danger of Dorsey’s airy vocal losing its place in the staggered rhythm. And that’s the joke of the song—even a job as dreary as coal mining can’t make the singer worry or lose his way.

How could a man who was so mellow and carefree be patient and stubborn enough to achieve the intricate craftsmanship of these songs? The trick lay in a brilliant division of labor between Dorsey and Toussaint. Each supplied what the other lacked. When Dorsey stepped up to the microphone, he filled the moment. He had that creamy voice, that irrepressible optimism, and a knack for bringing them to the fore the moment the song started. What he didn’t have was the dogged patience to peck out a melody on the piano, instead he fingered it slightly differently each time until it sounded surprising and familiar all at once. He also didn’t have the determination to link words to music, drums to bass, guitar to piano, or lead to harmony, building a song gear-by-gear until it ran like clockwork. That was Toussaint’s job, and he was brilliant at it. What Toussaint didn’t have was the sensual voice, the stage-front charisma to bring his clock-like creations to life. They needed each other—the short, wiry singer who always seemed to be photographed with all his teeth shining in a big grin, and the tall, stately, mustached producer in the dapper suits.

“When a certain kind of song came knocking,” Toussaint remembers, “I knew right away if it were a Lee Dorsey song, because there was subject matter Lee could sing that wouldn’t work with someone who had a more serious or debonair attitude. For Lee, I could write about working in a coal mine, about taking a trip to Mexico, about riding a pony, songs where you don’t take things so seriously that you can’t enjoy the flowers. Who else could sing ‘Holy Cow’? Anyone else would be too hip for it. But Lee was as relaxed in life as he was in the studio. He was definitely a live-and-let-live person, a very free spirit.”

_Irving Lee Dorsey was born in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward on December 24, 1924. He and some other kids used to tease an overweight neighborhood friend who always had to stay inside and practice the piano. They called him “Fats” and the nickname stuck—Antoine “Fats” Domino. When Dorsey was ten years old, his parents moved to Portland, Oregon, and it was there that the youngster became a fan of the Grand Ole Opry and learned to yodel like Jimmie Rodgers.

“Lee straddled the fence between blues and country,” Toussaint insists. “In his music, those two elements come into contact quite openly. On a song like ‘Lover of Love,’ you hear a country feel, but also a lot of blues. Those two musics have a lot more in common than most people think. If you hear a good, sincere country song, it can get as bluesy as blues can get.”

Dorsey was drafted into the Navy and saw action in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he was billed as “Kid Chocolate” and became one of the Northwest’s top featherweight and lightweight boxers. Then in 1955, he gave up the sport and moved back to New Orleans. He studied body and fender repair under the G.I. Bill and soon landed a job in a shop owned by local disc jockey Ernie the Whip.

“I used to sing to make my work go easier,” Dorsey told author Jeff Hannusch in his invaluable book I Hear You Knockin’. “I wasn’t thinking of making no records. But one day this guy came in to get his car fixed—Reynauld Richard. I was up under a car hammering and singing away, and he said, ‘Hey, you want to make a record?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t think he was serious. But he was.”

Richard was a local record promoter, and he helped Dorsey cut several singles in 1957. On one of them, “Lottie-Mo,” producer Harold Battiste brought in the young pianist Allen Toussaint to play one of his signature riffs. Thus began the long association between the two.

“Lottie-Mo” didn’t sell a lot of copies, but it did catch the ear of Marshall Sehorn, a promotion man for Fire/Fury Records, who alerted his New York boss, Bobby Robinson. Robinson came down to New Orleans and discovered that Dorsey had a wonderful voice but no original material. As the label owner and singer sat on Dorsey’s front porch, trying to think of songs to record, they heard some kids across the street clapping and chanting a nursery rhyme, “Sitting on the la la, yeah, yeah.” Robinson called the kids over and had them sing it again until Dorsey had learned it. Then the two adults repaired to a bar and wrote out new lyrics on a napkin. That was “Ya Ya,” and it was recorded with Toussaint on piano and Dominos Red Tyler on saxophone. It quickly became a national smash, topping the r&b charts and rising to number seven on the pop charts. Dorsey quickly followed it up with another nursery rhyme song, Earl King's “Do-Re-Mi,” which became a top thirty hit. The momentum stalled, however, when Fire/Fury went into receivership and Toussaint went into the military.

In 1965 Toussaint formed a partnership with Sehorn, and one of their first projects was recording Dorsey. Toussaint wrote and produced “Ride Your Pony,” a cowboy song brimming with sexual innuendo, and it featured Dorsey’s bubbly voice gliding above a funky groove, with a chink-a-chink rhythm guitar pushing against a percolating bass line and baritone sax-honks. It was a top ten r&b hit and a top thirty pop single, and it kicked off a string of Toussaint/Dorsey hits: “Get Out of My Life Woman” (#5 r&b, #44 pop), “Working in the Coal Mine” (#5 r&b, #8 pop), “Holy Cow” (#10 r&b, #23 pop), Go-Go Girl” (#31 r&b), and “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)” (#33 r&b).

“I had this way of writing for Lee where Willie Harper and I would start singing together and we’d put Lee’s voice in the middle,” reveals Toussaint. “For example, Lee never sang the whole line, ‘working in the coal mine’; he just sang ‘working,’ and Willie and I sang the rest. ‘Get Out of My Life Woman’ was another one of those songs that we had that fun formula where the backups would sing half the song. We’d sing every other line in a call-and-response pattern. There was no question where the lead was, because once you heard Lee Dorsey’s voice, you knew that was what it was all about.”

In 1970 Toussaint tried to transform Dorsey into a progressive-soul album artist similar to Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye. The producer wrote some brilliant songs about black pride and solidarity (“Yes We Can”—also called “Yes We Can Can”—and “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?”), about class issues (“When the Bill’s Paid” and “On Your Way Down”), and about Louisiana’s distinctive culture (“Riverboat” and “Gator Tail”), and Dorsey sang them with an ebullience that captured the optimism of the era. The 1970 album Yes We Can, and its 1978 follow-up, Night People, were artistic triumphs but commercial failures.

Dorsey didn’t care; he went back to working on cars. He appeared almost every year at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and he toured with the Clash in 1980. For the most part, though, he was content to work in his auto shop, singing to himself as he straightened out dents and bumps. He died of emphysema on December 1, 1986.

“If he had a record out that was doing fairly well,” Toussaint explains, “he’d go out and perform. But after a while, as the popularity of a recording diminished, he’d retire into the body-and-fender shop where he was very happy and was around a lot of his buddies and family having a great time bending fenders.

“He loved recording and the stage thing, but he knew he had another life that he could trust and was very good at it. It was not like a demotion to go back to that. His fender work was artistic as well, and he was proud of it. One time he wanted a Cadillac, so he just built himself one. After a few months of visits to the junkyard, he put together a beautiful—and I mean flawless—Cadillac. If things were slow in one area, he always had the other. Maybe that’s why he sounded so carefree when he sang.”