Inez Catalon ( September 23, 1913 – November 23, 1994) was an American Creole ballad singer, who was one of the most well-known performers of the genre known as Louisiana "home music". These are a cappella versions of ballads and love songs, drinking songs, game songs, lullabies and waltzes performed by women in the home, passed down from earlier generations to provide entertainment for the family before radio and television existed. Home music is not considered part of the public performance repertoire of Cajun and zydeco music because the songs were sung in the home by women, rather than in the dance halls of southwestern Louisiana which featured almost exclusively male performers.
Catalon was a recipient of a 1993 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
Early life
Inez Catalon was born in Maurice, Louisiana and grew up in nearby Kaplan, Louisiana, the youngest of ten children with German, Spanish, French and African ancestry. Her great-grandmother was an enslaved person.
The family lived in a house in Kaplan built by her father in the 1920s. Her father was a farmer who died when Catalon was a child. Both of Catalon's parents spoke Creole French rather than English. Both parents sang, but her mother was her greatest influence as a singer, with a "beautiful deep, rich" voice that young Inez tried to replicate. Her mother did not consider her to be a very good singer because her "tongue was too heavy". By the time Inez was a child, all but one of her older siblings had moved away from the home but none of Catalon's sisters were interested in learning the songs that were passed down from prior generations. Inez, however, enjoyed learning the cantiques (songs that originated in France) that her mother knew, spending most of her day singing songs on the steps of the family home. Inez Catalon never received formal schooling, due to the death of her father which required the Catalon children to go to work.
Career
Catalon worked as a domestic for much of her adult life. However, she enjoyed singing on a stage. Her performance style has been described as "saucy" and that some of her songs were considered "risqué". One music scholar described Catalon as "a vibrant tell-it-like-it-is character with a wealth of music, jokes, and stories within her". She was most well-known for her unaccompanied performances of songs that told their stories through a series of vignettes, passed down from her French-speaking ancestors. She also enjoyed singing other styles of traditional music as well as popular songs of the day, including blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley and Jimmie Rodgers tunes.
Catalon's first public singing performance was in 1974 at the inaugural "Tribute to Cajun Music" which later evolved into the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles. She was the first performer to take the stage at that 1974 event. Afterwards, she performed at many music festivals across the United States, including both the 1976 and 1983 Festivals of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. She also toured as part of the "A la mode de chez nous" concert series featuring French-American music and dance, sponsored by the National Council for the Traditional Arts.
In Louisiana, she performed several times during the mid-1980s at the Louisiana Folklife Festival in Baton Rouge as well as appearances at both the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles and Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette.
Catalon was also a frequent performer at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, usually accompanied by folk singer and folklorist Marce Lacouture. Lacouture is from Texas but has Cajun ancestry on her father's side, which she began to explore in the early 1980s by spending time doing research in Acadiana. By 1983, she had met ballad singers Catalon and Lula Landry from whom Lacouture was learning the old French a capella songs, as well as Cajun and Creole cultural history. In 1986, Lacouture was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to formally apprentice with Catalon and Landry, as an attempt to preserve the old, traditional songs associated with home music. This was followed by another apprenticeship grant in 1987–1988 from the Louisiana Folklife Program. The relationship was more than just professional, as Lacouture became a close friend to both women, learning from them in their homes and being treated as if she was a granddaughter.