 |
 |
 |
|
By Charles Keil, Angeliki V. Keil and Dick Blau
What happiness can compare with the shared joy of dancing to music that at every instant announces its unique community of feeling? This is our music and our dance. The Polka dancer steps outside daily routine and everyday cares to move in complicated communion with music, a partner, and a revolving group of dancers, all at the center of a long and evolving tradition that has been sustained by generations of polka dancers in a specific community. Probably all dancing "in the tradition" delivers such happiness, but in the middle of the twentieth century it has taken extraordinary efforts to keep polka alive, and even greater energies will be required to sustain it in the future.
The documentation of polka in North America, long overdue, might contribute something important to the effort to sustain polka happiness. Slavic polkas (Polish-American and Slovenian-American), Germanic polkas (German-American and Czech-Bohemian-American), and southwestern polkas (Mexican-American and Papago-Pima) have all existed in the Americas for over a century. Since the late 1920's these six styles--and we may have missed some--have come to define a certain persistent quality of ethnic working-class identity. People who still polka in the 1990's must not care much about what fashionable people think of them because in the wider society "polka" has long been a symbol of the "corny, dated, two-beat, and square." So these six styles of hyphenated American expression within three broad polka streams represent at least a hundred years of resistance to the melting pot, a refusal to disappear into mediated entertainment, a "no" to monoculture, and an ongoing vernacular alternative to the sorts of fun manufactured and sold by the culture industry.
Back in 1971, when we first asked Scrubby Seweryniak, singer and concertina player with Buffalo's Dyna-Tones, what made the 500 to 1,000 polka fans who often come out to dance different from the other 300,000 Polish-Americans in western New York, he replied quickly, "We're crazier!" Twenty years later Scrubby gives the same answer, and we still don't know exactly what he means. Why do some people stomp and spin together on weekends in an ethnic working-class idiom while most don't? What does a polka party do that a rock concert or discotheque cannot? Why do some people prefer live music to recorded music?
This book traces our explorations of the Slavic stream of polka happiness, concentrating on Polish-American polkas in Buffalo and Chicago but including a comparative chapter on Slovenian-American style in Milwaukee.
There was no polka scholarship to draw on when we started. What we have assembled here is just a beginning because polka happiness is first and last a local phenomenon. Every urban Polonia and every Polish-American polka belt (such as the Connecticut River valley or the Pennsylvania-Ohio border area) evolves a different music in response to local history, personalities,economic conditions, and the particular mosaic of ethnic working-class neighborhoods... We have concentrated on the communities we know best.
Published in 1992 this relatively unknown work is an outstanding historical album of polka history. |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
- Filled with black and white photos. (221 pages)
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
