Julian “Judy” Rayford knew exactly what he had started.

Yet, in the years after he created Mobile’s Joe Cain Day, Rayford would sit quietly on a bench along Royal Street. He was just another face in the crowd and played the part of an unsuspecting bystander.

“What’s going on here today?” he’d ask a passersby with a twinkle of mischief in his eye.

“He knew full well what was going on,” said historian Wayne Dean, who first met Rayford during the inaugural Joe Cain Day procession in 1967.

Of course, he did. He created the day.

Yet, nearly 45 years after Rayford’s death, his contributions to Mobile’s Mardi Gras and his unique talents are fading into obscurity, just like the man himself once did during those long-ago processions.

In the folklore of Mobile’s Mardi Gras, Rayford was to Joe Cain what Victor Frankenstein was to his creation. But as with Cain, it’s the spectacle that people remember. Just as Boris Karloff’s iconic portrayal of the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein overshadowed the actor who played its creator, Colin Clive, Joe Cain’s legend has long outshined the man who revived it.

That doesn’t mean Rayford’s influence isn’t forgotten by Dean and other longtime Carnival historians and students. They would like to see the creator enshrined into Mobile, somehow and someday.

“We’ve attempted to have a person portray Judy and say, ‘I’m back and here is what I did,’” said Dean, about how to incorporate Rayford as a character into the annual Joe Cain Day Procession. Dean has, for 40 years, portrayed Chief Slacabamarinico – the Mardi Gras character first created by Joe Cain in 1868 but revitalized and embellished in the 1960s by Rayford, during the inaugural Joe Cain Day celebrations.

“One of the things Julian was concerned about was Joe Cain was not getting his due,” Dean said. “With the Joe Cain Day Procession, we got to thinking (lately) that Julian wasn’t getting his due. He has faded into the background and that’s a shame.”

Renaissance man

Rayford, often called a ‘renaissance man,’ had influence that reached beyond Mardi Gras. His story is one of complexity and peculiarity.

Some notable examples:

• He was a respected artist who once hobnobbed with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain fame.
• His artwork can be found in Mobile. A sculpture of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville is at the entrance to the George Wallace Tunnel downtown, across from Fort Conde. He also created the Farragut-Buchanan sculpture, located in Mobile’s Bienville Square that commemorated the centennial of the Battle of Mobile Bay.
• He was the author of multiple books including “Cottonmouth,” a 1941 novel in which Rayford writes about his upbringing in Mobile.
• Rayford was considered the “greatest living authority” on Paul Bunyan. He was fascinated with folklore, and even wrote a book about Mike Fink, who was called the “Snapping Turtle.” Rayford would also argue with historians who disputed the realism of Prince Madoc’s story of sailing up the Mobile Bay hundreds of years before Christoper Columbus landed in America.
• Rayford was a poet, and a sought-after speaker in the 1970s. A Kansas City newspaper article from 1975, described him as a “short, rotund man who looks like Santa Claus” … and who was a “living, national monument to American folksong, legend and poetry.”

Despite the impressive resume, Rayford never had much money. He lived his final years at the Cathedral Place in downtown Mobile. But he remained a sought-after interview by the local media, and his street chants would draw crowds.

“There were people who thought he was just a guy who doesn’t have a real job who just goes around and spouts poetry,” said John Peebles, a longtime member of the board of governors with the Mobile Carnival Museum who can recall Rayford’s chants that “make the hair stand on the back of your neck.”

He added, “There are other people who thought, ‘this guy is an intellectual underpinning of the city,’ and he needs a certain degree of respect for that.”

Local historians say the sculptures Rayford did represented his artistic best.

Raising Cain

But it’s with Mardi Gras that Rayford is best remembered in Mobile, some 63 years after his book, ‘Chasin’ the Devil Around a Stump,’ was released. The 1962 novel sparked a popular refreshing of Mobile’s Mardi Gras story from Rayford’s viewpoint. In it, Rayford positioned Cain as the seminal figure who revitalized Mardi Gras amid Union occupation of Mobile following the Civil War.

“(Rayford) gave sole credit to the renaissance of Carnival to Joseph Stillwell Cain,” said Cart Blackwell, a Carnival historian and curator at the Mobile Carnival Museum.

Part fact with plenty of embellishments and fiction, the inclusion of Cain as a Mardi Gras figurehead was Rayford’s idea.

“(Rayford) did not let facts slow him down,” Blackwell said. “He is the reason Joe Cain is known today. (Cain) would be a footnote in history if not for Mr. Rayford discovering him, having a reburial and writing about him and the creation of Joe Cain Day and the role of Joe Cain (with Mardi Gras).”

Rayford, ever the folklorist, was relentless in getting Cain transformed into the mythical savior of Mardi Gras. His quest was filled with persistence and patience, politicking and creativity that would be unheard of today.

“He couldn’t have done what he did with Joe Cain if he didn’t have a substantial footprint in the community,” Peebles said. “What he did, in creating a new public holiday in an almost 300-year-old city, and then getting this historic figure excavated from one graveyard and place in another and — more or less — canonizing him, he did all of that. It would have not happened without him.”

Rayford’s immortalizing of Cain is based on his antics after the Civil War. As the story goes, Cain dressed in a plaid skirt and a headdress and paraded through the streets of Mobile on Fat Tuesday in 1868. The celebration took place in front of the citizens and the remaining occupying Union Army troops and represented the revival of postbellum Mardi Gras.

Clain claimed to be a Chickasaw chief – named Slacabamarinico – as a backhanded insult to the Union forces because the Chickasaw tribe had never been defeated during the war.

But none of that history, nor its tale, was celebrated until Rayford came along. And so began Rayford’s long and persistent focus of getting Cain’s remains disinterred from a cemetery in Bayou La Batre and reburied at the Church Street Graveyard, occurring in 1966.

Dean said it took Rayford 11-1/2 years to complete his plan, marking the first “passing of the feathers” from one Slacabamarinico to the next. The reason for the decade-plus wait, Dean said, was because one of Cain’s descendants declined to sign off on the reburial, and that Rayford had to wait for that person to die before he could proceed with his elaborate plans.

“He was very persistent,” Dean said.

Democratic Carnival

Documentation suggests that Rayford had been looking for an active role in Mardi Gras decades before his fascination with Cain. In an Oct. 18, 1935, letter to then-Mayor Cecil Bates, Rayford writes about a new plan for Carnival that he wished to take a leading role in directing.

He pushed for a street fair, stage by a local fraternal organization. He also wanted to form a float makers guild, host agricultural exhibits, allow high schools to participate in parades, and encourage mystic societies to choose a branch of local legend.

Nowhere in the letter is Cain mentioned, though the foundation was laid for a common man’s version of the holiday that has become the hallmark of Joe Cain Day. Rayford wrote of a plan to “Americanize Mardi Gras” by making it more “democratic” through removing the kings and queens and replacing them – possibly – with a governor.

The letter also included a vision of incorporating Black Mobilians into the festivities during the Jim Crow South. According to Rayford, Black performers would carry out “jungle motifs” with warriors parading to “great humor” ahead of the Comic Cowboys parade.

Isabel Machado, author of the 2023 book, “Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile,” said Rayford’s early views toward Mardi Gras reflected the time period when the holiday and festivities was told through white elites, and Black people were considered forms of entertainment.

Years later, Joe Cain Day began with the first procession in 1967, with Rayford referring him to an “uncrowned emperor of Mardi Gras, who was at home” at the Church Street Graveyard, according to The Mobile Register article of the event.

The activity has long been referred to as “uniquely Mobile” addition to Carnival traditions and one aimed at bringing Mardi Gras celebrations to the common people. Joe Cain Day, the day-long community-wide festival on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, is considered the city’s antithesis to the mystic societies and private, invite-only Carnival balls often enjoyed by more affluent families and guests.

The 1960s

But is the timing of the reemergence of Joe Cain, with the help of Rayford, a coincidence in the midst of the 1960s Civil Rights era? -honoring a Confederate soldier in the direct aftermath of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Machado says the timing shouldn’t be dismissed, but most Mobile-based historians reject the link. They say there was no connection between the national policies of the time and the creation of a day memorializing and embellishing the story of a Confederate soldier.

“I’m not saying people were consciously saying we would do this, but it was happening at that moment,” Machado said.

Dean said that civil rights were “never a thought in anyone’s mind.” He said Rayford’s embrace of the Cain story was not considered a “push back” against the current events at the time.

John Sledge, a longtime Mobile historian, said Joe Cain Day represented more of a celebration of the 1960s counterculture, but that civil rights was likely not the main issue.

“The idea of people taking ownership of (Joe Cain Day) and participating in it and not letting it be defined by the elites, I think, is part of it,” said Sledge.

The holiday is notably on a Sunday, a traditional day of church services in the Deep South.

“I don’t think you could have a Joe Cain Day in the 30s,” said Sledge. “In the 60s, it was in the culture.”

Mission accomplished

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Dean said that Rayford’s goals with the hoopla of Joe Cain Day was to give Cain the fame he deserved for reviving Mardi Gras. The other was to make sure a day was set aside during Carnival that was a democratic event – much like Rayford’s 1935 letter suggests – open for anyone who wanted to show up and participate.

Dean said he consider both goals accomplished, especially the part in getting Cain recognized.

In Mobile, the Joe Cain Day Procession – never called a “parade,” but a “procession” – has long been led by a man portraying Slacabamarinico, waving to onlookers while standing inside a horse-drawn coal wagon. Dean has been the longest “Chief Slac,” serving in the role Rayford revived since 1985.

Following Slacabamarinico are the foot marchers, or the people dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes who walk along the Mobile parade route. After them comes raucous floats on display by the parading society.

Cain’s image is everywhere throughout the day. It can be seen on T-shirts, cups, koozies and specialized Mardi Gras beads. During the procession, there’s Cain-inspired floats — Cain’s Misfits, Krewe of Cain’s, Isle of Cain, Friends of Joe Cain, the Many Masks of Joe Cain – and so forth. The Merry Widows are all about Cain, arguing over whom Joe loved the best. Not to be outdone are the Merry Mistresses of Joe Cain, adorned in all red.

Few, if any, U.S. city celebrates one individual like Mobile does with Joe Cain Day. Even other cities have borrowed on the fascination of the day, namely Nevada City, Calif. Initially, the city called their Mardi Gras celebration “Joe Cain Day.” But the Confederate roots of the holiday led to the city’s chamber of commerce to rebrand it as “Mardi Gras,” while scrapping Cain.

Machado explains that while Joe Cain Day has clear ties to the Lost Cause narrative, its history is more complex. If anything, the day has become the embodiment of an inclusive celebration.

Rayford envisioned the event as a democratic celebration open to all, and over time, the day has been embraced by historically marginalized groups. In the 1970s, the LGBTQ community found a safe space for self-expression within the procession. Today, Machado’s research shows that Joe Cain Day remains one of the most anticipated events of the Carnival season, especially in Mobile’s Black neighborhoods.

It’s also one of the most popular days of Mobile Mardi Gras, with more than 100,000 people likely to visit the city to line the barricades and watch the procession.

“Folks in the African American community are proud of Joe Cain Day,” she said. “Mardi Gras Day, people think of New Orleans. But Joe Cain Day is this thing that is uniquely Mobilian.”

Related content: Why Joe Cain Day, for 50 years, is uniquely Mobile

Proper remembrance

Rayford never married and had no children. After he died, he was buried next to Cain. Rayford never met Cain — he was born in 1908, four years after Cain died in 1904. The two both died at the same age of 72.

Unlike with Cain, the decision by Mobile city officials to have Rayford buried at the Church Street Graveyard was quick and obvious given Rayford’s obsession in getting Cain honored.

When the Widows visit the graveyard on Sunday, they will pay homage to Cain. They will also briefly reflect upon Rayford during what is the only moment of the Carnival season he’s given his due.

Peebles said he would like to see a statue of Rayford and Rosie, his beloved Fox Terrier that was “one of the best-known canines in the area,” during the 60s, erected that recognizes the folklorist and artist whose efforts redefined Mobile’s Mardi Gras. Dean said there has to be someway the city could do more to recognize his Mardi Gras mentor.

Perhaps the day should be called Joe Cain/Judy Rayford Day? That occurred only once, on March 1, 1981. That was the first Joe Cain Day after Rayford’s death.

Rayford, himself, sort of predicted the situation in 1967 during that first Joe Cain Day, when he called out Mobile for not embracing Cain appropriately.

“Mobile is a peculiar city,” Rayford said at that inaugural event. “Like real peculiar. Mobile does not honor its great men.”