Joseph Stillwell Cain, Jr.
(Joe Cain) (October 10, 1832 – April 17, 1904) is largely credited with the birth or rebirth of Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama.
In 1867, following the Civil War and while Mobile was still under Union occupation, Joe Cain paraded through the streets of Mobile, dressed in improvised costume depicting a fictional Chickasaw chief named Slacabamorinico.
Joe was joined by six other Confederate veterans, parading in a decorated coal wagon, playing drums and horns, and the group became the "L. C. Minstrel Band", now commonly referred to as the "Lost Cause Minstrels" of Mobile.
Life and work
Joseph Stillwell Cain, Jr. was born on October 10, 1832, along Dauphin Street in Mobile, Alabama.
He was a son of Joseph Cain, Sr. (1799–1856)
Gravestone for Joseph Stillwell Cain
Joe Cain's gravestone in the Church Street Cemetery, Mobile, AL
Joe Cain is buried in the Church Street Graveyard in downtown Mobile, Alabama.
His gravestone carries the inscription:
Here lies old Joe Cain
The heart and soul of Mardi Gras in Mobile
Joseph Stillwell Cain
Slacabamorinico - Old Slac
1832 - 1904
In 1866, Joe Cain dressed as a mythical Chickasaw Chief, and might have seemed comic - but certain perceptive ones realized he represented the epitome of victory - for the Chickasaws were never defeated in all their history. So Joe Cain, with his masquerade, lifted this region from despair and revived the ancient French observance of Boeuf Gras - now known in Mobile as Mardi Gras - thus inaugurating the dispute as to who had Mardi Gras first - Mobile or New Orleans?
The answer is Mobile.
The Boeuf Gras society was already 150 years old in 1861, when it disbanded because of the war...
According to tradition - Joe Cain was the first folly to chase the devil round a stump...
Joe Cain founded the Tea Drinkers in 1846...
Joe Cain Day
The Sunday before Fat Tuesday, Joe Cain Day is celebrated as part of the scheduled Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, with its center being the Joe Cain Procession (never called a parade). This has been called “The People’s Parade” because it is performed by citizens without being run by a specific Mardi Gras krewe. Originally, anybody who showed up at the parade start on Sunday morning could join in with whatever makeshift float they could cobble together. Eventually, the sheer size and the city's desire to have all the Carnival parades conform to the same set of rules forced the organizers to limit the participants to a preset limit. The parade is preceded with the visit of the “Cain's Merry Widows” to the gravesite of their “departed husband” (described below). And then, following their traditional toast the "Here's to Joe" the red-clad Mistresses of Joe Cain follow close behind his coal wagon moaning, "He loved us best!"
Julian Lee “Judy” Rayford established Joe Cain Day in 1967 by walking at the head of a jazz funeral, along with his beloved dog Rosie (the only dog to ever lead a Mardi Gras parade in Mobile) down Government Street to the Church Street Graveyard, where he had arranged to have Joe Cain and his wife reburied in 1966. When Joe Cain was disinterred from Bayou La Batre, Julian brought Joe Cain's skull back to Mobile in the pocket of his coat, and that is considered to be the first “passing of the feathers” to the next person to wear the headdress in Mardi Gras, as Slacabamorinico, chief of the Chickasaw.
The feathers were passed in 1970 to Fireman J.B. "Red" Foster who, attired in Plains Indian fashion, led the procession for 16 years. He then passed the feathers, tomahawk and peace pipe to author, historian, public relations, marketing professional and pastor, Bennett Wayne Dean Sr. in 1985. Old Slac IV "hisself" marked his 25th anniversary under the feathers during Joe Cain Day in 2010.
The impression that the celebration had on a couple of visitors from California resulted in Joe Cain Days being officially recognized, in 1993, as a sister celebration by the Joe Cain Society of California in Nevada City, California each Mardi Gras.
The Mardi Gras mystic society of “Cain’s Merry Widows” (a women’s mystic society) was founded in 1974 in Mobile, Alabama.
Each Mardi Gras, on Joe Cain Day (the Sunday before Fat Tuesday), members of this society dress in funereal black with veils, lay a wreath at Cain’s burial site in Church Street Graveyard to wail over their “departed husband’s” grave, then travel to Joe Cain’s house on Augusta Street to offer a toast and eulogy to their “beloved Joe,“ continuously arguing over which widow was his favorite.
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Another view on Joe Cain from Mobile writer and chef, Drick Perry
Drick Perry's Rambling Cafe blog site
Link to original article
The civil war had halted all revelry. Joseph Stillwell Cain was a store clerk in Mobile, Alabama in 1865, who had noticed how much the war had mentally worn down the populace. He, like most of his fellow Mobilians, were still under Union occupation, but the mental war between the ex-confederate soldiers and union authorities still raged and was taking a toll. During the occupation several edicts had come down from Union leaders in an effort to totally break the the will of the the Mobilians. To make matters worse, finding themselves "men without a country" following the end of the Civil War, members of any branch of the Confederate forces were forced to sign "Amnesty oaths", to restore their citizenship rights.
After all, these were the people and soldiers that kept Union forces at bay, even after the battle and fall of Mobile Bay to the Union Navy in 1864. During the "bread riot of 1863, and the Union blockade which substantially reduced the trade in Mobile for the duration of the war, its people endured. Disruption of foreign trade persisted after the war, as Union occupying forces, which took the city of Mobile in April 1865, closed the port to foreign trade until late in August 1865.
Joe Cain knew however, that to openly voice any opposition to the occupation of Mobile by the Union troops would be viewed technically, as treason. The mental drain, however, had to be stopped, and the spirit and pride of the Mobilians has to be restored.
It was against this back drop that Cain, in 1866, decided the best way to accomplish this renaissance of the spirit, was to revitalize the Kraft parade, the celebration of Mardi Gras in Mobile, which had been halted during the conflict. One night, he led a group of revelers in a parade through the city, using a "borrowed" coal wagon and dressed in improvised costumes depicting a Chickasaw Indian chief from the local Wragg Swamp, he called himself Chief Slacabamorinico. The significance of choosing this character was a backhanded insult to the Union forces as the Chickasaw, had never surrendered during the civil war. He mocked the union military that controlled Mobile at the time.
This celebration gave the Mobilians a much needed boost, when the Union leadership learning of the, "one horse stunt" were furious at the man, but couldn't touch him because he had voiced no opposition.
In 1867, Cain reappeared, this time with a group of confederate soldiers, who were also musicians, calling themselves the Lost Cause Minstrels (and they paraded until 1879).
The parade continued to give Mobile back it's spirit and pride and allowed the city to hold its collective head up, and continue to progress and to some degree, move on.
Joe Cain is currently buried at Church Street Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama.
The Joe Cain Procession was started in 1967 by a local folk singer, historian, writer named Julian Rayford. He wanted to bring recognition to the man who revived Mardi Gras activities in Mobile. Julian Rayford dressed as Chief Slacabamorinico in his coal wagon. Cain's Merry Widows follow, a mysterious group of women in black, throwing black roses and Mardi Gras beads. The number of participating groups has grown over the years, now at 32 (a limit set by the Mobile Police Dept.). Julian Rayford also petitioned for Joe Caine and his wife's body to be moved from Bayou La Batre to the Church Street Graveyard in downtown Mobile, which has been closed to new burials since 1898. Julian Rayford died in 1980, and his body was buried right next to Joe Cain's. After the Joe Cain Procession, Cain's Merry Widows partake in a Mardi Gras funeral at the grave site of Joe Cain. Weeping, dancing and tossing beads in memory of Joe Cain.
Cain's Merry Widows
The widows will mourn in 2010 for the 36th year. These ladies toss moon pies, beads, and black roses to the procession revelers. The Merry Widows now ride in the procession in a mock trolley car. Thousands of spectators gather in the old graveyard, listen to Mobile's Excelsior Band, and marvel as Cain is memorialized by Mobilians dancing atop his grave. When the ceremony begins in the graveyard, several veiled women dressed in mourning robes, know as Cain's Merry Widows, cry aloud and lament his loss to the world. Joe Cain Day remains one of the most popular events of Mobile's Mardi Gras celebration, and its public parade is seen by many Mobilians as a response to the stiffness of the traditional mystic societies.
Another great article about Joe
from Mobile Alabama's Lagniappe Magazine:
online at: www.lagniappemobile.com
Something had to be done. The city's psyche was dismal after four years of death and destruction, of seeing her young men marched off to their deaths in faraway battlefields, after invaders churned up the waters of the bay and set about occupying her streets and homes.
One man knew just the remedy, if he could only get away with it. Joseph Stillwell Cain, a 33-year-old native Mobilian, was certainly endangering his job as a clerk were he to be caught by the patrolling soldiers. The Alabama port town was militarily occupied in the last years of the Civil War and the attendant malaise of war-wrought depression kept the citizenry in doldrums. Cain recalled the public frivolity of his youth, the parades that lightened the hearts of Mobilians every winter.
It was two years before Cain's birth when Mobile businessman Michael Krafft and some friends launched the Cowbellion de Rakin Society with an impromptu procession through the nighttime streets. The celebration originally centered New Years and Twelfth Night observances and before long the Cowbellions gave birth to a brood of like organizations. So impressive were the string of balls and events, New Orleanians sought tutelage on the application of the festivities to their own Carnival activities. But Mobiles frivolities had fallen by the wayside since the United States troops arrived in 1864. Cain meant to change all of that. Following an evening dinner in downtown, Cain recruited a few friends to join his rebellion of mirth. The clerk fashioned a makeshift Chickasaw Indian costume together and dubbed himself Chief Slacabarominico, the leader of a fictional band of natives from the depths of Wragg Swamp. On Mardi Gras, the rebels donned their disguises and rolled a coal wagon through the streets to the astonished smiles of locals and the perplexed gaze of the soldiers. While there were orders in place to quell any direct opposition to the occupation by locals, the troops knew not what to make of this latest spectacle.
The Union militia didn't realize the backhanded insult in the presence of the Chickasaw costume as the tribe reputedly had never been defeated or surrendered in war. The natives, though, caught the inference. The next year Cain once again paraded as Chief Slac and his ex-Confederate accomplices dubbed themselves the Lost Cause Minstrels, ghosts of the past blaring horns and drums to those who watched the preocession. Other homages to the Antebellum South remain littered across Mardi Gras through contemporary times, symbols like the broken column that appears in various societies; seals and floats. Cains revival of Carnival mirth grabbed hold of the public imagination and blossomed. Joe and his first band of paraders, eventually called The Tea Drinkers, remained in place until 1883. Joe went on to become the legendary father of a number of Mardi Gras Orders, including the Order of Myths, one of Mardi Gras most prominent groups and Mobiles modern Father of Frivolity paraded every year until his death.
Joe married Elizabeth Rabby and moved onto land in Bayou La Batre owned by her family. There they built a Victorian home beneath the oaks and raised six children on the estate. Mardi Gras, too, grew from his efforts, surpassing the spectacles staged in the decades before the war.
When Cain passed away in 1904, he was buried in a humble grave in Bayou La Batres Odd Fellows Cemetery. Elizabeth joined him three years later. In the mid-1960s, Mobile writer Julian Lee Rayford decided Cain deserved more acclaim and credit for the festivities that had grown to become the center of Mobile life since the clerks Reconstruction-era coal wagon ride. Rayford began to haunt the Bayou, talking with Cain descendants and other locals. In 1967, Rayford stated his case from the pages of The Courier, Bayou La Batres newspaper. Julian pegged Cain as probably the most prominent social figure on the entire sweep of the Gulf Coast, and felt the grand pater of Mobile mysticism to be plunged into oblivion and deliberately forgotten.
Like Cain, Rayford had plans to bring new festivities to the Azalea City. He wanted to dig up Joe and Elizabeth, transfer them to Church Street Graveyard in Mobile and make Cain the center of an annual celebration. The Cain descendants weren't initially enthusiastic, but Rayford was relentless. After much prodding, the family agreed. On Sunday, Feb. 6, 1967, the remains were disinterred and made the trek north. The Excelsior Band dutifully accompanied the procession along with a revivalist;s interpretation of Chief Slac. Fittingly, Rayford was laid to rest beside Cain in 1980. The other activities for the day pledged to Cain's memory included what was dubbed a peoples procession, a parade dedicated to the common citizenry of the Port City. Anyone who desired was welcome the join the parade since it was designed as the antithesis of the exclusive and secretive societies who had become the norm in Mardi Gras. Anyone was welcome to decorate any manner of transportation and roll along the route.
The celebration quickly gained popularity, but grew unmanageably large after a few years. City leaders felt it wise to limit the number of entrants to 36 and there the number remains today despite the original intentions of the organizers. Unavoidably, societies have formed among the parading attendants but they still strive to keep a looser, less stiff atmosphere to matters. However, the procession is still lead by Chief Slac and a bevy of black-bedecked women known as Joe Cains Merry Widows. The grieving widows, whose identities are one of the more closely guarded secrets of the Mobile Carnival phenomenon, follow the days opening procession to Church Street Graveyard to pay their respects. An amount of sniping is often overheard between the widows as they playfully argue over whom Cain loved best. Following the short graveside ritual, the widows retire to Cains legendary home at 906 Augusta St., to revel before the early afternoon parade.
The jubilation is apparently infectious. In the early 1990s, a pair of visitors were so impressed by the proceedings they began their own version back home in Nevada City, Cal.. The picturesque gold rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills boasts Victorian architecture that melds well with the pre-Lenten traditions and the Golden State folks have added their own twist to the proceedings. Cains Merry Widows are present, but their form is a bit different. Rather than the traditionally Southern names their Mobile counterparts select-Sue Ellen, Georgia and the like-the California women are found of whimsical monikers like Lyda and Nova.
In another variation, the West Coast widows channel much of their energies into philanthropy with proceeds from the events heading to charities. The good that falls from those efforts is a noble and far-reaching effect for a meager city clerk who simply wanted lighten a few hearts.
One man knew just the remedy, if he could only get away with it. Joseph Stillwell Cain, a 33-year-old native Mobilian, was certainly endangering his job as a clerk were he to be caught by the patrolling soldiers. The Alabama port town was militarily occupied in the last years of the Civil War and the attendant malaise of war-wrought depression kept the citizenry in doldrums. Cain recalled the public frivolity of his youth, the parades that lightened the hearts of Mobilians every winter.
It was two years before Cain's birth when Mobile businessman Michael Krafft and some friends launched the Cowbellion de Rakin Society with an impromptu procession through the nighttime streets. The celebration originally centered New Years and Twelfth Night observances and before long the Cowbellions gave birth to a brood of like organizations. So impressive were the string of balls and events, New Orleanians sought tutelage on the application of the festivities to their own Carnival activities. But Mobiles frivolities had fallen by the wayside since the United States troops arrived in 1864. Cain meant to change all of that. Following an evening dinner in downtown, Cain recruited a few friends to join his rebellion of mirth. The clerk fashioned a makeshift Chickasaw Indian costume together and dubbed himself Chief Slacabarominico, the leader of a fictional band of natives from the depths of Wragg Swamp. On Mardi Gras, the rebels donned their disguises and rolled a coal wagon through the streets to the astonished smiles of locals and the perplexed gaze of the soldiers. While there were orders in place to quell any direct opposition to the occupation by locals, the troops knew not what to make of this latest spectacle.
The Union militia didn't realize the backhanded insult in the presence of the Chickasaw costume as the tribe reputedly had never been defeated or surrendered in war. The natives, though, caught the inference. The next year Cain once again paraded as Chief Slac and his ex-Confederate accomplices dubbed themselves the Lost Cause Minstrels, ghosts of the past blaring horns and drums to those who watched the preocession. Other homages to the Antebellum South remain littered across Mardi Gras through contemporary times, symbols like the broken column that appears in various societies; seals and floats. Cains revival of Carnival mirth grabbed hold of the public imagination and blossomed. Joe and his first band of paraders, eventually called The Tea Drinkers, remained in place until 1883. Joe went on to become the legendary father of a number of Mardi Gras Orders, including the Order of Myths, one of Mardi Gras most prominent groups and Mobiles modern Father of Frivolity paraded every year until his death.
Joe married Elizabeth Rabby and moved onto land in Bayou La Batre owned by her family. There they built a Victorian home beneath the oaks and raised six children on the estate. Mardi Gras, too, grew from his efforts, surpassing the spectacles staged in the decades before the war.
When Cain passed away in 1904, he was buried in a humble grave in Bayou La Batres Odd Fellows Cemetery. Elizabeth joined him three years later. In the mid-1960s, Mobile writer Julian Lee Rayford decided Cain deserved more acclaim and credit for the festivities that had grown to become the center of Mobile life since the clerks Reconstruction-era coal wagon ride. Rayford began to haunt the Bayou, talking with Cain descendants and other locals. In 1967, Rayford stated his case from the pages of The Courier, Bayou La Batres newspaper. Julian pegged Cain as probably the most prominent social figure on the entire sweep of the Gulf Coast, and felt the grand pater of Mobile mysticism to be plunged into oblivion and deliberately forgotten.
Like Cain, Rayford had plans to bring new festivities to the Azalea City. He wanted to dig up Joe and Elizabeth, transfer them to Church Street Graveyard in Mobile and make Cain the center of an annual celebration. The Cain descendants weren't initially enthusiastic, but Rayford was relentless. After much prodding, the family agreed. On Sunday, Feb. 6, 1967, the remains were disinterred and made the trek north. The Excelsior Band dutifully accompanied the procession along with a revivalist;s interpretation of Chief Slac. Fittingly, Rayford was laid to rest beside Cain in 1980. The other activities for the day pledged to Cain's memory included what was dubbed a peoples procession, a parade dedicated to the common citizenry of the Port City. Anyone who desired was welcome the join the parade since it was designed as the antithesis of the exclusive and secretive societies who had become the norm in Mardi Gras. Anyone was welcome to decorate any manner of transportation and roll along the route.
The celebration quickly gained popularity, but grew unmanageably large after a few years. City leaders felt it wise to limit the number of entrants to 36 and there the number remains today despite the original intentions of the organizers. Unavoidably, societies have formed among the parading attendants but they still strive to keep a looser, less stiff atmosphere to matters. However, the procession is still lead by Chief Slac and a bevy of black-bedecked women known as Joe Cains Merry Widows. The grieving widows, whose identities are one of the more closely guarded secrets of the Mobile Carnival phenomenon, follow the days opening procession to Church Street Graveyard to pay their respects. An amount of sniping is often overheard between the widows as they playfully argue over whom Cain loved best. Following the short graveside ritual, the widows retire to Cains legendary home at 906 Augusta St., to revel before the early afternoon parade.
The jubilation is apparently infectious. In the early 1990s, a pair of visitors were so impressed by the proceedings they began their own version back home in Nevada City, Cal.. The picturesque gold rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills boasts Victorian architecture that melds well with the pre-Lenten traditions and the Golden State folks have added their own twist to the proceedings. Cains Merry Widows are present, but their form is a bit different. Rather than the traditionally Southern names their Mobile counterparts select-Sue Ellen, Georgia and the like-the California women are found of whimsical monikers like Lyda and Nova.
In another variation, the West Coast widows channel much of their energies into philanthropy with proceeds from the events heading to charities. The good that falls from those efforts is a noble and far-reaching effect for a meager city clerk who simply wanted lighten a few hearts.