Cakewalk Home Studio 2004 with an Allen organ

I want to use Cakewalk Home Studio 2004 to sequence and then playback with an Allen organ.  I have a Dell laptop with Windows 8.  I'm using USB to MIDI cables.  The laptop acknowledges the cable, but not the organ.  So, first off: should it?  I would think, like any other peripheral, it would have to recognize it.  Do I need to download some kind of driver?  I also tried to hook to my Roland stage piano.  No luck there, either, and its manual doesn't say anything more than what cables to use.  I used to use Allen's Sebastian software with a PDA I got in 2003, but somehow it became unreliable.