Inez Catalon (c. September 23, 1913[1][a] – November 23, 1994)[2] was an American Creole ballad singer, who was one of the most well-known performers of the genre known as Louisiana "home music".
[5] 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.
[9] By the time Inez was a child, all but one of her older siblings had moved away from the home[4] but none of Catalon's sisters were interested in learning the songs that were passed down from prior generations.
[12] She also enjoyed singing other styles of traditional music as well as popular songs of the day,[12] including blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley and Jimmie Rodgers tunes.
[18] Catalon was also a frequent performer at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival,[19] usually accompanied by folk singer and folklorist Marce Lacouture.
[13] 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,[20] 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.
[24] The archive of that interview plus 33 others comprise the "Crescent City Living Legends Collection",[25] which was selected in 2002 by the Library of Congress[26] for inclusion in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[5] In 2000, Lacouture released her first solo CD (re-released in 2004), titled La Joie Cadienne[28] that includes the songs "Inez" and "Lula" which are tributes to the women who were her major influences and mentors.