Joseph Falcon was a Cajun accordion player in southwest Louisiana, best known for the first recording of a Cajun song; "Allons à Lafayette" in 1928. He and his wife Cléoma Breaux left for New Orleans to record the first Cajun record and went on to perform across southern Louisiana and Texas.
Early life
Joe was the fifth child of Pierre Illaire Falcon and Marie Arvilia Boudreaux. Pierre, spoke Canarian Spanish and French. Settlers in Louisiana from the Canaries are known as Isleños. Marie was of Acadian descent. He was born near a small German community north of Rayne, Louisiana known as Roberts Cove, located by Bayou Plaquemine Brule. He began playing accordion at the age of seven.
Music career
His career as a professional musician began some years later at a fais-do-do hall called the "Blue Goose" in Rayne, Louisiana when the regular band didn't show up and the dance hall owner insisted that Joe take their place. As a young man, Joe was friends with accordionist Amédée Breaux of the legendary Breaux family and sometimes accompanied him on triangle. Amédée's sister, Cléoma, a gifted guitarist and singer, became Joe's frequent accompanist and they married not long after the onset of their recording career. In April 1928, a jeweler from Rayne, Louisiana and native New Orleanian, George Burrow, persuaded Columbia records to record Joe and his wife Cléoma and their friend, Leon Meche, by agreeing to purchase 500 records. However, in the hotel recording studio, Meche backed down; scared he would mess up the recording. Joe stepped up and sang instead. In a 1962 interview with Mike Seeger, Columbia executive, Frank Buckley Walker, recalls recording the duo:
So I went up to Lafayette for a weekend. I happened to know something of the story of the Cajuns and was astounded at the interest that there was in their little Saturday night dances. A single singer would have a little concertina-type instrument and a one-string fiddle and a triangle, those were the instruments, but they would always have a singer and of course they sang in Cajun. And to me it had a funny sound. So I brought down a little group. I think his name was Joe Falcon. I brought him down to New Orleans, and we recorded just to have something different. We put it on the market, and it had tremendous sales.
Recorded on April 27, 1928 in New Orleans, "Lafayette" caused a sensation when it was released by Columbia Recordsin the summer of 1928. Thousands of copies were sold and Falcon became the first Cajun-recording star, playing to packed dance halls in Louisiana and neighboring Texas. Joe and Cleoma recorded more material at sessions in New York City in August 1928 and Atlanta in April 1929. After a hiatus caused by the onset of the Great Depression, the couple resumed their recording career in 1934, recording again in New York, then at New Orleans in 1936 and San Antonio in 1937. Cléoma died suddenly on April 9, 1941, but Joe continued to perform as leader of Joe Falcon and His Silver Bell String Band, which included his second wife, Theresa Meaux, on drums. Despite this success, Joe's career flagged in the late 1930s with the increasing popularity of fiddle-based country-and-western influenced bands. His music came to be considered old-fashioned and he stopped recording after his last session in 1937. Though Joe continued to play local dances into the 1960s, he declined to make further recordings, maintaining he had been cheated by record companies.
