Joe Cain Day — the uniquely Mobile Sunday that sits between the Ionic and Comic Cowboys parades in the Mardi Gras calendar — gained two newer musical traditions by 2013: Grayson Capps’ annual appearance at Callaghan’s Irish Social Club and the Pine Hill Haints’ Joe Cain Sunday residency at the Alabama Music Box.
A Hometown Band on a Hometown Holiday
For 2013, the Haints returned to the Dauphin Street venue once again for their Joe Cain Day show, with music starting at 8 p.m. and the event open to ages 18 and up. Few acts fit the day’s blend of revelry and reverence better than the Haints, whose graveyard-folk sound has long drawn on Mobile’s own history and folklore — Joe Cain himself being the city’s most storied piece of it, the man who revived Mardi Gras after the Civil War and is buried in Church Street Graveyard.
The Alabama Music Box marked the occasion as part of its ongoing run of original-music programming during Carnival season, while just blocks away Callaghan’s hosted Capps for his own parallel tradition. Together the two shows gave Mobilians a full day of local music bookending the afternoon’s processions.