Bradshaw
Some old-timers remember when chicken wire was strung in front of bandstands in some of the Cajun dance halls. It wasn’t to keep the bands in. It was to keep the crowd out and to protect the band from beer bottles thrown when somebody’s request didn’t get played quickly enough, loudly enough, or often enough.
Those dance halls could sometimes turn into pretty rough places. In fact, there’s an old saying that not too long ago folks in the Marais Bouleur area near Cankton did three things before heading to the Saturday night dance: They put on their good shirt, combed their hair, and sharpened their knife.
Lawmen tried with varying degrees of effort and success to control the fights, but they usually winked at the Saturday night highjinks— unless they really got out of hand. That’s what happened in November 1928 when the promising young accordion player Mayeus LaFleur was killed in a brawl in Basile.
LaFleur was born in Mamou in 1906 and began playing and singing when he was just a kid growing up on his grandmother’s farm. She reared him from infancy after he had been abandoned by his mother. He hooked up with fiddle player Leo Soileau early on, and they became a popular duo playing Cajun music and some of the stuff that was called “hillbilly” back then and what we call country and western today.
LaFleur was killed just after he and Soileau made their recording of “Hé Mom” for Victor Records, just weeks after Joe and Cléoma Falcon put out their Columbia recording of “Allons à Lafayette,” generally regarded as the first Cajun song to be put onto vinyl.
There are several versions of what happened on that deadly October 28. According to the Ville Platte Gazette, Mayeus was providing the music at a “blind tiger” (makeshift bar) operated by Alexon Bellon in Basile. Two Crochet brothers rammed Bellon’s porch when they stopped there to get liquor. Bellon demanded $10 for the damage, but the men didn’t have it.
The Crochets went to Basile and “reported the difficulty” to [Kenneth] Manuel, who went to Bellon’s place to settle the dispute. That led to an argument, and then a fistfight between Bellon and Manuel, which ended when “Manuel drew his gun and began shooting.”
Bellon was shot four times and died from his wounds. Mayeus was shot through the heart when he tried to help the wounded Bellon. He was only twentytwo years old when he died.
The New Era, a newspaper published in Eunice at the time, gave a slightly different account of the incident and also reported this: “The voice of a dead man pierced the gloomy atmosphere of Second Street last Saturday morning, when a song recorded by Meus [sic] LaFleur, before his untimely death, thrilled hundreds of those who yet speak and understand the Acadian French. . . . To those who had learned of his alleged murder, the song seemed to grasp their very heart strings, and some even wiped away tears which forced their way to the eyes of those sympathetic listeners, while others not so well informed were happy again for having heard a folk song of their nationality which had never been written but handed down from generation to generation.”
LaFleur had said he was going to use the $100 he received for recording “Hé Mom” to find his longlost mother. We don’t know whether she ever heard his recording. We do know that he never did. You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
