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) and Julia Ann Turner (1795–1877). Joe Cain (junior) married Elizabeth Alabama Rabby (1835–1907). He helped to organize the T.D.S. (Tea Drinker’s Society), one of Mobile's mystic societies, in 1846; however, their banquets were part of Mobile's New Year's Eve celebrations, rather than being held on Mardi Gras day. Other groups had developed Mardi Gras parades, but the Civil War had brought them to a halt.
Cain participated in Mardi Gras parades in Mobile in 1863 as a Confederate veteran, and he returned to New Orleans determined to revive the celebration. He conceived the fictional character of Chief Slacabamorinico this time in New Orleans as he had done in Mobile years before ("slaka-BAM orin-ah-CO") while he was working as a clerk at the city market: he planned to make him a mighty Chickasaw, a tribe never defeated by Federal forces.
The chief, as Cain in costume with a native skirt and feathered headdress, paraded through the city streets on Mardi Gras day in 1866, irreverently celebrating the day in front of the occupying Union Army troops.
The following year (1867), a band of fellow Confederate veterans (including Thomas Burke, Rutledge Parham, John Payne, John Bohanan, Barney O'Rourke, and John Maguire) accompanied Joe Cain as "Old Slac" riding through town on a decorated coal wagon, playing horns and drums, parading and celebrating. The group became known as the "Lost Cause Minstrels" in Mobile.
The parade was the origin of the Order of Myths (OOM) parade, the final parade each year, on Fat Tuesday in Mobile. Joe Cain founded many of the mystic societies, and he built a tradition of Mardi Gras parades.
Joe Cain, who had played Old Slac until 1879, died in 1904 and was buried in the fishing village of Bayou La Batre (Alabama). Julian Lee "Judy" Rayford arranged to have Joe Cain reburied in Mobile's Church Street Graveyard in 1966, and he established Joe Cain Day in 1967 by walking at the head of a jazz funeral down Government Street to the cemetery.
Joe Cain's wife, Elizabeth Alabama Rabby Cain, died 3 years later, in 1907 at Bayou La Batre, and she is also re-buried, beside him.
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