Tearing up the accordion, really

South Louisiana music is commonly called “Cajun” and “Creole” music today, but almost all of it shares common roots in a Louisiana French musical tradition that found its fullest expression on the prairies of south Louisiana.
Most of the “name” musicians — black and white — who made the early records and kept the music alive came from the prairies and shared the same repertoire, if not always the same interpretation of a song.
One of those legendary musicians was accordionist, vocalist, and composer Joe Falcon, who was born on Sept. 28, 1900, in Roberts Cove, Acadia Parish.
When Joe was seven years old, his father, a sharecropper, agreed to buy him an accordion, but only on the condition that he played it outside the house.
“We couldn’t play it in the house, so we went to the barn,” Falcon told writer Lauren Post many years later. “We had the biggest trouble over there with the cattle. They wanted to come in with us. I kept banging on the accordion until I struck a tune. It was so many years ago I forgot what tune it was, but I stayed with it and before I turned it loose I kinda started something.”
Indeed he did “kinda start something.” Lots of folks credit he and his wife, Cléoma Breaux, with the spread of Cajun music into the popular culture. In 1928, they issued the first recording of a Cajun French song, Allons à Lafayette, which appeared under the Columbia label.
Cléoma came from a musical family. Her brothers, Amédé on accordion, Ophé on guitar, and Cléopha on the fiddle, played together as the Breaux Frères. She played guitar with them on one of the earliest recorded versions of Jolie Blonde, which they recorded under the title of Ma Blonde Est Partie.
The brothers were apparently almost as famous for their fights as for their music. Jay Miller of Crowley, who played his first dance with the Breaux Brothers at ’Nest Lemaire’s Dance Hall at Cow Island, said in an interview some time later, that his strongest memory of that night was of the Breaux Brothers arguing among themselves throughout the dance and “fighting like dogs at the end.”
Music historian John Broven wrote, that [Amédé] Breaux was considered “one of the great Cajun musicians, although [he] did have a tendency, when drunk, to pull accordions apart in exuberant acts of showmanship.” Broven was charitable enough to omit the fact that Amédé also had a tendency to be drunk pretty regularly.
The Cow Island dance hall where they and Miller played was owned by Ernest Lemaire, whose daughter-in-law Thelma Lemaire told me several years ago that the band rode the train to Kaplan, where the Lemaires picked them up. They’d play that night, stay over in Cow Island, and be driven back to the train the next day.
She said the club sold 25‑cent bowls of gumbo and nickel cones of homemade ice cream in addition to the usual libations, and that reports that things could get a little rough were apparently true.
Ernest was a big man, she said, about 6½ feet tall, and “he tried to talk to people when they got out of hand, but if they didn’t listen, he’d use a stick.”
She said she’d kept the bouncer’s stick he used and that it looked like it would have done the job quite well.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.