7 
7 In the winter of 1981, Bruno Synkula of Ashland, Wisconsin—a house-party musician and maintenance worker born in 1919 to Polish immigrant parents—told me that he learned to play button accordion as a kid from an Italian neighbor, a disabled “ore puncher” who had toiled atop a dock jutting into Lake Superior to push iron ore from bottom-opening rail cars into the holds of Great Lakes vessels. One of Synkula’s favorite tunes, “Livet i Finnskogarna” (Life in the Finnish Woods), is a Swedish waltz associated with Finns that he first heard in the aftermath of a turkey shoot at a rural tavern frequented by French Canadians, Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, and Slavs. Its performer, Ole Lear, a former Great Lakes deck hand of Norwegian descent, had acquired the tune from Germans.1
Such occurrences were common in Synkula’s home region. From the 1880s through the early decades of the twentieth century, European immigrants of mostly peasant origins and their descendants, settling alongside and sometimes inter-marrying with Ojibwes, labored along Lake Superior’s South Shore. Extending east to west from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through northern Wisconsin to the port cities of Superior and Duluth, the South Shore’s citizens worked in mines, lumber camps, and mills; on shipping vessels and loading docks; in boarding houses, shops, and taverns; and on fishing boats and small hardscrabble farms. Mixing their respective languages with “broken English” on the job, they relied heavily on accordionists to create a musical lingua franca amid the house parties and hall dances that highlighted their scant hours of leisure.
As workers who “play,” whose labor is occasional, and whose workplace shifts, social-dance musicians, accordionists especially, have toiled mostly at the structural margins of everyday social orders, typically bundling varied repertoires and banding together with fellow border-crossing performers to unify often diverse audiences in festive settings that are dark, crowded, noisy, and rambunctious. In his pathbreaking book The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson chronicles ruling-class alarm about “Satan’s Strongholds,” evident in the “tendency of authority to regard taverns, fairs, any large congregation of people, as a nuisance—sources of idleness, brawls, sedition, or contagion.” Perhaps worse, such condemnations of unruly behavior had been long endorsed, albeit tacitly, whenever “those who have wished to emphasize the sober constitutional ancestry of the working-class movement have sometimes minimized its more robust and rowdy features.”2
Although Thompson’s study is confined to England from roughly 1750 to 1830, a pre-accordion era when ballad-singers and fiddlers stirred crowds, the self-serving, moralizing, top-down rhetoric he documents was later echoed throughout Europe by accordion opponents disturbed about the instrument’s proliferation. Mass-produced, portable, inexpensive, loud, pretuned, and enabling both novice and skilled musicians to play melody, harmony, and rhythm simultaneously, the accordion emerged alongside and was associated with such threats to social order as scandalous new couple dances like the polka and the waltz, emigrants’ abandonment of hierarchically stratified homelands, and gatherings of industrial workers inclined toward organizing. In 1907 the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén advocated genocidal measures: “Chop up all the accordions that come in your way, stamp them to a jelly, cut them to pieces, and throw them into the pigsty, because that is where they belong.”3 In Finland, an equally brutal coalition of churchmen, educators, composers, and romantic nationalists, including folklorists, argued that, like heretics, accordions should be burned as “the arch enemy of folk music.”4
The essays in this volume testify to the accordion’s defiant, persistent global vitality, especially as wielded by and for the people who have made their living through physical labor in an industrializing world. In America’s Upper Midwest, the accordion, broadly considered, has been the most ubiquitous and emblematic folk-musical instrument from the late nineteenth century through the present. In its varied yet kindred manifestations (diatonic and chromatic button accordions, piano accordions, “Chemnitzer” or “German” concertinas, and Bandonions), the free-reed, push-pull squeezebox has been not only an integral part of numerous ethnically distinct “polka” traditions but also essential to the Upper Midwest’s pervasive, creolized “polkabilly” sound.5 The immigrant and ethnic populations of the region’s major urban centers—Chicago, Milwaukee, the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the “twin ports” of Duluth and Superior—have likewise fostered a profusion of accordion importers and manufacturers, accordion schools, accordion-instructional publications and sheet music, accordion clubs, and, most recently, an accordion-repair curriculum in a state-supported technical school, several musical halls of fame dominated by accordionists, and an accordion museum.
Thanks to the sustained efforts of musicians, entrepreneurs, cultural activists, and, in recent decades, scholars, we know a good deal about the Upper Midwest’s array of accordion-based genres, its virtuoso performers and influential proponents, and its primarily urban accordion infrastructures. We know less, however, about the historical emergence, human particulars, and cultural significance of the accordion as an instrument of choice among local performers in the region’s rural and industrialized hinterlands. Heeding E. P. Thompson’s admonition that considerations of working-class culture must focus on “real people” living “in a real context,”6 this essay draws from interviews and field-recording sessions conducted from February 1979 through June 1981 with dozens of rural and working-class musicians and their audiences in the accordion-infused subregion of the Upper Midwest that is the South Shore of Lake Superior. Although they included indigenous peoples, European Americans whose ancestors had arrived several generations earlier, and a few born in the old country, most were the children of immigrants. Ranging from their sixties through their eighties, they collectively recalled the accordion’s regional emergence. Complementing their firsthand testimony with newspaper accounts, the work of other folklorists, and subsequent interviews with musicians, my focus here concerns: 1) how South Shore musicians acquired and learned to play assorted accordions; 2) the audiences for whom and contexts within which they performed; and 3) the sources and nature of their repertoires. The resulting cumulative historical and ethnographic portrait illuminates the accordion’s significant role in establishing a common, creolized, regional, and enduring working-class culture that was substantially formed between the 1890s and the 1930s.
In 1899, four-year-old Lucille Milanowski arrived in Wisconsin with her Polish-immigrant parents, settling in a small frame house beneath Ashland’s massive ore dock, where so many newcomers toiled through sweltering summers and freezing winters. As she told me more than eighty years later, button accordions were simply around. Compelled by their sound, Lucille began “fooling” with one while in her teens. “Nobody taught me.”7 Her experience as a self-motivated young musician who learned to play “by ear” in a working-class milieu with access to accordions mirrors that of many along the South Shore.
John Wroblewski, for example, was born in Washburn, Wisconsin, in 1907, the eldest of Adolph and Elizabeth Wroblewski’s eleven children. Adolph, a Polish immigrant, worked on the city’s coal dock and as a seasonal hired man on surrounding farms. Of German and Polish descent and raised downstate in Stevens Point, his wife took in boarders, a common practice in that era. Either single men or sojourners who had left wives and children to earn money, the Wroblewskis’ boarders included musicians who entertained and doted upon the family’s many children. When John Wroblewski was seven, as his widow Frances told me, a boarder “bought John a little button accordion. . . . That started it. John wore out five accordions. . . . He wouldn’t put that thing down. He ate and slept with it. His mother said they couldn’t control him.” Born likewise in 1907 to Polish immigrant parents, but just across Chequamegon Bay in the port and sawmill city of Ashland, Frances Milenski Wroblewski was the eldest of eight children. Her father also worked on the docks, while her mother, like Elizabeth Wroblewski, ran one of many boarding houses on Ashland’s east side. Here too were musicians aplenty. “In those days you either played a harmonica, or a fiddle, or an accordion.”8
More than a few played several instruments. Fritz Swanson, born in 1897 to immigrants from Småland, encountered a fellow Swede, John Nyquist, while working as a cook in his father’s Ashland County lumber camp around 1913. An itinerant logger and woodworker, Nyquist toted a gunny sack that held a bucksaw and his precious fiddle. As an old man in the 1930s, he often “played for drinks” by pairing his fiddle with Swanson’s accordion in the latter’s Indian Lake tavern. Once Nyquist fell after having a few too many, smashed his fiddle, and had to rely on the harmonica.9 Other immigrants—like the Finns Kalle Piirainen, who worked as a miner in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and Matti Maki, who toiled successively in Minnesota lumber camps and in mines on the Gogebic Range before homesteading north of Washburn—were adept at both fiddle and accordion.10
Harmonica and accordion, however, and especially button accordion, were the most common combination for the region’s multi-instrumentalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stan Stangle’s Czech-born mother, Ludmila, learned to play harmonica and button accordion on the family farm. When she emigrated as teenager around 1905, she slipped the harmonica in her pocket, while her parents made room for her accordion in a big steamship trunk.11 Since each harmonica’s reeds are tuned in a particular key, with each reed yielding a different note depending on whether the player is exhaling or inhaling, the instrument’s design is fundamentally the same as the button accordion, substituting breath for bellows. Youngsters raised around both instruments often progressed from harmonica to button accordion. Art Moilanen, born in 1917 in the Finnish logging hamlet of Mass City, Michigan, took up harmonica but was soon squeezing out tunes on a button accordion.12 Matti Maki’s son Hugo did the same. Matt Radosevich (b. 1914) began playing harmonica as an eight-year-old farm boy in Benoit, Wisconsin. After “goofing around” secretly with his older brother’s three-row button accordion, he entertained for house parties hosted by his Croatian-immigrant parents.13 Similarly, Tom Johanik, the son of Slovak immigrants who farmed near Moquah, Wisconsin, began playing “harmonica before grade school,” then “started out goofing around with an accordion, an old leaky one that my dad had.”14 Bill Hendrickson (b. 1901) was raised to the west of Johanik in the Finnish settlement of Herbster, where he worked in the woods and fished commercially before running a grocery store. His immigrant father “played mouth organ and could sing real good.” When Bill showed promise, his dad offered to buy him “a two-row ’cordeen.”15
Some were content with the harmonica, which was far more portable and inexpensive than a button accordion. Bill Hendrickson’s neighbor, Helmer Olavie Wintturi, stuck with harmonica like his father, Matti, who had learned in Finland.16 In the nearby Finnish settlement of Oulu, Einard Maki recalled that “all the kids used to play harmonica.” He purchased his first at age fifteen for fifty cents from an Iron River candy store in 1922.17 Les Ross Sr. was born in Eben Junction, Michigan, a year later into what he called a “harmonica family.” His grandfather, Franz Rosendahl (b. 1864), who immigrated from Finland in 1898, played harmonica, as did both of Les’s parents, Frank Ross and Helmi Herrala. “Grandpa played a longer harmonica, maybe eight inches. His moustache was draped over the plates. . . . He mostly played church hymns.” When Les was very young, his grandpa bought him a harmonica, and he and his sisters all played.18 Significantly, however, Les Ross, Einard Maki, Olavie Wintturi, and many other harmonica players in the South Shore region used their tongues deftly to open and close certain reeds, producing both melody and bass rhythm. The resulting sound simulated the right- and left-hand button/reed workings of an accordion and was aptly dubbed “accordion style”—a testimony to the primacy of the button accordion.
Despite their greater weight and bulk relative to fiddles and harmonicas, accordions were among the prized possessions brought to the South Shore region by more than a few immigrants. Reino Maki remarked that his father left Finland with “a button accordion in a gunny sack, that’s about all he had.” Similarly, Matti Pelto’s father Emil and his Uncle Anton, immigrants from Finland to Michigan’s Copper Country, as well as Eskel Hokenson’s mother, who came from Sweden to settle on Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula, Clara Sveda’s Czech immigrant father Joe Belofsky, who toiled as a seasonal harvest and mill hand before finding steady work on Ashland’s coal dock, and Phil Johanik, who left Slovakia for a cutover farm near Moquah, all packed and played their accordions across oceans and continents.19 When I visited Tom Johanik in 1981, he had preserved two of his father’s old button boxes, both made in Czechoslovakia, as family heirlooms: a small one-row model and a fancy inlaid two-row instrument with leather bellows, still in its original case along with the bill of sale, a tune book, and a catalog of instruments from the Antonín Hlaváek Company.
“German” or “Chemnitzer” concertinas, as well as Bandonions, although not as abundant as button accordions, were also brought by immigrants to the South Shore region. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Julius Chopp (b. 1912) recalled that his father arrived from Croatia in Copper City with “a beat-up concertina.”20 Born the same year as Chopp, his fellow Croatian John Kezele remembered:
One of our neighbors had a concertina. That was my first love. I didn’t think there was sweeter music than listening to a concertina half a mile away, especially on a quiet summer evening when he’d be out on his porch and we’d be out on our porch—listening to the music. Nobody wanted to breathe deep for fear we were going to miss something.21
Earl Otchingwanigan, of Ojibwe and Swedish heritage, learned to play Bandonion from Poles in the Crystal Falls area.22 And Alan Lomax recorded a Lithuanian immigrant concertinist, Charles Ketvirtis (1893–1968), in Newberry, Michigan, for the Library of Congress in 1938.23 In Wisconsin, Bob Mathiowetz (1918–2008) was raised in a Czech-German musical family in Ashland, where his father led the Mathiowetz Concertina Orchestra in the 1920s.24 Mathiowetz’s Polish friend Louie Kolonko was another Ashland concertinist, while Anton Wolfe in Moquah was such a devoted concertina player that he eventually learned to make them.25 There were also players in the port cities of Duluth/Superior, where Polish immigrants like Ignatz Czerniak formed trios with fiddle, clarinet, and concertina.26
Sometimes conserved within families for decades, the button accordions and related squeezeboxes brought by immigrants more often fell apart from frequent use, or were sold and traded to eager youngsters from the second generation. Such transactions generally originated in local dance halls and lumber camps. Founders of the Finn Settlement north of Washburn built a hall where Matti Maki played the button accordion he’d brought from Finland. His sons Reino, Hugo, and Walter admired their dad’s playing but were forbidden to touch his precious instrument. Reino learned nonetheless when his father was out and “Mother turned her back,” while Hugo acquired a castoff instrument from a neighbor who also played at the Finn Hall. Young Eskel Hokenson worked in a lumber camp with Ojibwes and French Indians from the nearby Red Cliff Reservation. There the DePerry family and others hosted house parties with square and step dancing to fiddle, pump organ, and accordion.27 Hokenson bought “a one-row button accordion from an Indian” about 1913. When it burned in a fire a few years later, he purchased a two-row from a neighbor that eventually fell apart. Fritz Swanson acquired his button accordion as a teenager in a lumber camp in 1913, while Matt Saari, born in 1902 to Finnish immigrants on a farm near Maple, Wisconsin, was inspired by the playing of lumberjacks like Jack Kauti. A kid with little money, he brought a team of horses to help a neighbor make hay and received a button accordion in payment.28 Saari’s neighbor, Ed Pearson, born in 1911 to Swedish immigrants, saved money from trapping weasels to buy a neighbor’s button accordion, then practiced in the “back forty” (rural area) until he mastered several tunes.29
Figure 7.1 Bob Mathiowetz brandishes his concertina in a trio of photos on display in his basement “music room.” Ashland, Wisconsin, 1980. Photograph by James P. Leary.
Rudy Kemppa, raised in the Finnish settlement of Toivola, Michigan, likewise ran a trap line but coveted a new accordion he had seen advertised in a Sears catalog for $4.50. He caught a large weasel, then sent its pelt to a fur company with a note asking them to either send him $4.50 or return the pelt. He received a check for the exact amount and soon possessed a new Hohner two-row.30 While mail-order suppliers like Sears were often the best new-accordion option for dwellers in such hamlets as Toivola, the port and sawmill town of Ashland, the “Garland City of the North,” had stores like Garland City Music by the early twentieth century.31 Felix Milanowski was only three in 1915 when his Aunt Lucille and her husband bought him the two-row Hohner he still played sixty-five years later.32 In 1939 Tom Marincel, raised in the Croatian farming community of Sanborn, south of Ashland, allied with his brother to purchase a three-row button accordion, crafted by the Cleveland-based Slovenian immigrant Anton Mervar, from Garland City Music. Lacking the necessary nineteen dollars, the Marincel boys put down a few dollars each, then conspired with the salesman to conceal the full price from their father, who, amazed by an apparent bargain, paid the balance.33
By the late 1930s, however, the button accordion had been losing popularity for more than a decade to the piano accordion, referred to by some, like Eskel Hokenson, as “the big accordion.” It is impossible to determine exactly when the modern piano accordion entered the South Shore region. The Ironwood (Michigan) Museum’s collection includes a photograph of John Shawbitz, posing with an Italian piano accordion manufactured by the Olverini Company sometime prior to World War I. Although developed earlier, the piano accordion was not well known in the United States before Guido Deiro, who arrived in Seattle from Italy in 1908, began performing on the vaudeville circuit in 1910 and made influential recordings a year later.34 Perhaps the critical mass of Italians and Slovenians like Shawbitz on the Gogebic Range, centered around Ironwood and Hurley, fostered an early awareness of Deiro and his instrumental innovations.
Many of the musicians I interviewed along the South Shore had listened to 78 rpm recordings made before World War I, like “Sharpshooter’s March,” by Guido Deiro and his younger brother Pietro, but their recollections of the piano accordion’s emergence were roughly a decade later. John Kezele recalled a few piano accordions in Michigan’s Copper Country in the early 1920s, but they were not common until later that decade. Clara Sveda remarked similarly about Ashland, where the former button accordionist Fritz Swanson bought his first piano accordion in 1926, with Lucille Milanowski and John Wroblewski following suit about that time. Stan Stangle mentioned a piano accordion “boom” in the late 1920s, when George Vivian sold them “like crazy” out of his Ashland music store. Swanson, Milanowski, Wroblewski, Bill Koskela,35 and many more were former button accordionists. Even left-handed Elizabeth Bowers Lind, who had learned to play button accordion upside down and backwards, soon did the same with the piano accordion.36 By the early 1930s, used piano accordions were also common outside of cities like Ashland. John Kezele bought one for forty dollars, while the button accordionist Art Moilanen acquired one through his older brother, whose piano accordionist coworker was killed in a mining accident.
Like any innovation, the piano accordion was embraced by some and shunned by others. Heavier, more expensive, and arguably more complicated to play than the button accordion, the piano accordion was valued for, in the words of the quickly converted Hugo Maki, “its tone, range, versatility.” Most crucially, since button accordions were limited to one or two keys, musicians wishing to play semiprofessionally in ensembles quickly saw the piano accordion’s advantages, since it could be played in any key. As Frances Wroblewski put it, the piano accordion was “in style.”
Figure 7.2 Bill Koskela with his piano accordion. Ironwood, Michigan, 1981. Photograph by James P. Leary.
Local musicians were also clearly inspired to make instrumental changes by stellar piano accordionists who barnstormed through the region in the 1920s, some of whom doubled as sales agents. Lacking the money to buy piano accordions on their own, Eino Okkonen (b. 1903) and Bill Hendrickson of Herbster pooled their resources to purchase a single piano accordion from a touring performer. The Norwegian-born Thorstein Skarning and His Entertainers from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, featuring the twin piano accordions of Otto and Iva Rindlisbacher, made appearances in the Ashland area.37 Meanwhile, Viola Turpeinen, who had learned to play button accordion from her Finnish immigrant mother in Crystal Falls, switched to piano accordion in the early 1920s, then teamed with the fiddler John Rosendahl and the piano accordionist Sylvia Polso from Ironwood to form the most influential Finnish American band of her generation. Turpeinen and company made scores of 78 rpm recordings in New York City, toured Finnish American communities from coast to coast, and were even renowned in Finland, but they were especially beloved in their home region, where her distinctive playing is still emulated.38
The rise of the piano accordion in the 1920s did not, however, result in the disappearance of button-accordion and concertina players. While some performers welcomed the new, others held fast to the old, often within the same extended family. Lucille Milanowski made the switch, while her nephew Felix did not. Hugo Maki, Gus Mattson, and Eddie Pelto abandoned the button box, but their brothers Reino, Charles, and Matti remained steadfast. Some working musicians—Tom Johanik, Tom Marincel, Bob Mathiowetz, and Matt Radosevich among them—even continued well into the 1980s to lug several button accordions or concertinas to dances so they could switch instruments to play in a range of keys. For the most part, however, those who “played out” for public dances favored the piano accordion, while button-accordion devotees performed at home and “helped out” with music at neighborhood house parties.
For South Shore dwellers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, home and neighborhood were where most first heard and played accordions. In the case of Stan Stangle,
We had a little band of our own in the family. My dad played clarinet, mother would play ’cordion, I’d play trumpet, my brother would play baritone horn. My sisters both played baritone. And it was that way almost through the whole neighborhood. . . . They made their own music.
Stangle’s parents were Czech or, as they sometimes called themselves, Bohemian, as were most of their neighbors on Ashland’s east side. Well-organized, they built a spacious Bohemian Hall with a stage, ample bar and kitchen, and a wooden dance floor. Polish immigrants had their own enclave on Ashland’s east side, where Alex Siedlecki was born in 1908. His maternal uncle Leo Chmieleski and brother Ed were fine accordionists, and neighborhood social gatherings were frequent: “Someone would bring an accordion or a violin, we’d roll up the rugs and have a little party.” Although there was no formal Polish hall, several family-run taverns served the purpose. Moskau’s “Sailor’s Retreat,” for example, had a hall for extended Polish weddings.39 Tom Johanik was raised similarly to the strains of his father’s button accordion, while the family enjoyed house parties with fellow Slovaks and eventually built a hall in Moquah. Reino and Hugo Maki in Washburn’s Finn Settlement likewise heard their dad squeeze out tunes and enjoyed parties in neighbors’ homes and in the community’s Finn Hall.
Widespread though it was, this pattern of an accordionist raised in an accordion-playing family, surrounded by house-partying kindred immigrants and enjoying dances at an ethnic hall, was not universal. Communities with mixed ethnicity, whether clustered around a workplace or made up of small farms, were as common as ethnic enclaves. Just as the accordion helped sustain a group’s sense of being Czech or Polish or Finnish, so also did the instrument unite musicians and dancers who, despite various cultural backgrounds, were nonetheless conjoined as farmers or laborers in a common locale. Within such settings, where large families prevailed, musically inclined second-generation Americans commingled easily with youthful peers of diverse heritage.
Vivian Eckholm Brevak (b. 1919) was one of eleven children. Her father, Carl, emigrated from Sweden at age fifteen, while her second-generation Norwegian American mother hailed from Clear Lake, Wisconsin. The family lived on a small farm near Barksdale, a railroad stop between Ashland and Washburn, where DuPont ran a munitions factory. Carl Eckholm worked there, while the family kept a few cows and took in boarders. He was a fiddler, his wife played guitar, and Frank Holmes, a Finnish lumberjack boarder with an Anglicized surname, played accordion. Carl Eckholm also made “moonshine” during Prohibition, supplying neighbors and hosting house parties. Vivian played some “second fiddle” but mostly accordion. “All the neighbors got together,” she told me, including Anglo-Canadians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Germans, and Hungarians, one of whom she married.40
One of thirteen children on a farm in southern Ashland County near Mason and Grandview, Fritz Swanson had similar experiences. His Swedish-immigrant father and a fellow countryman, Bill Lind, played accordion. The elder Swanson also ran lumber camps, employing Norwegians and French Canadians, where music flourished in the evenings. The Swansons’ rural neighborhood likewise included many musical families—including the Vervilles and their six boys and six girls—who enjoyed house parties and a few drinks. Rose Verville Swanson, who married one of Fritz’s brothers, told me that her father, a French Canadian timber cruiser and butcher born on Isle Royale, and her mother, from St. Paul’s Irish community, often played fiddle and harmonica for house parties, joined by local accordionists like the Swansons. In the 1920s Fritz roamed to Detroit for training as an auto mechanic, then worked in Milwaukee and Chicago, where he enjoyed performances by the stellar New York City–based Swedish piano accordionists John Lager and Eric Olzen. When hard times hit in 1929, he returned home to purchase “ten acres with a log cabin” and a dance hall. With the end of Prohibition, Swanson’s Indian Lake Tavern quickly became a hangout for musicians and dancers, including Charlie Guski, an accordionist from “Polack Hill” in Washburn, and his sister Angie, whom Fritz soon married. Attracting all sorts of people—including the renowned Norwegian accordionist Ole Lear, who would “chew two boxes of snuff and drink a quart of booze in an evening of playing”—Fritz hosted midsummer picnics for members of the Swedish American Vasa Order and sometimes played for “Swede-Finn” dances at the Runeberg Society Hall on Ashland’s west side. Although none of the Swedish Baptists settled just across Indian Lake set foot in Swanson’s tavern, they enjoyed his music too as it wafted to their farms on summer evenings.
Unifying though it often was, the accordion also contributed to social divisions. Prior to Father Frank Perkovich’s invention of polka masses on Minnesota’s Iron Range in the 1970s, the accordion in the Lake Superior region was regarded as an almost exclusively secular instrument associated with dancing and drinking. Like Vivian Eckholm’s father, Matt Radosevich’s parents made “moonshine and homebrew” to share at house parties, while teenage Felix Milanowski played button accordion for house parties “with dancing and lunch, homebrew and whisky, just about every weekend.” Those of an especially pietistic religious orientation, including Swedish Baptists and Finnish Apostolic Lutherans, might appreciate dance melodies from afar but regarded dancing as devilry. Meanwhile, mainstream Finnish and Scandinavian Lutherans, many secular left-wing Finns, and some traditionalist and Christian Ojibwes enjoyed dancing but were strong temperance advocates. Their inclination aligned with federal law during the Prohibition era (1919–32), but even before and after its duration certain public accordion-driven dances accommodated temperance-minded clientele by officially banning alcohol. Einard Maki recalled, however, that while there was no drinking inside at Oulu’s Finnish Hall, plenty had a drink outside “on the sly.” Eskel Hokenson remembered similarly that the mostly Swedish and Red Cliff Ojibwe musicians and dancers thronging the Men’s Club on Little Sand Bay were not permitted to drink openly, yet “there were a hundred cars parked there and, by every steering wheel, a pint of whiskey.”
Accordion-smitten teens from anti-dance families paralleled these surreptitious drinkers as, anticipating the guitar-driven teenage rock rebellion of the 1950s, they fell in with bad companions to have fun unbeknownst to strait-laced elders. Les Ross Sr.’s childhood home in Eben Junction was a short walk from the Blue Moon Tavern, frequented by Finnish and a few Irish lumberjacks: “I’d ask them to sing a song, and I’d play along. . . . Many a time I was told, ‘You’re under-age.’ I’d go outside, and then they’d accommodate me. There’s many, many songs I learned from them boys . . . a rowdy bunch.” Later, while they were piling wood, Les’s pietistic grandfather, who played only church hymns, asked: “‘Did you learn to play yet?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘What did you learn?’ I said, ‘The Five Card.’ He said, ‘My boy, that’s a sin.’ After that we mixed our signals.” The Finnish Lutheran parents of Matt Saari similarly opposed dancing in Maple, yet he too learned tunes from old lumberjacks. As a teenager, Matt and likeminded pals climbed through the window of the local one-room school to dance in secret. In Oulu, where many Finns regarded dancing as sinful, young Einard Maki, Eino Sarkinen, and their friends sneaked into houses abandoned during the Depression: “We’d walk five, six miles and be up all night dancing.”
Teens in Slavic Catholic communities also gathered mostly on their own for dances to an accordionist. Although their festivities occurred with drinking, they were generally undertaken with their parents’ knowledge and sometimes culminated in religious worship. Joe Johanik reminisced with his cousins, Tom and Elmer, about teenage parties with fellow Slovaks near Moquah.
We built that shack on Zurian’s land somewhere in the Depression years—’33, ’34? And we used to get George Letko to play over there. . . . He was an easier man to wake up than Tom’s dad [Philip Johanik]. . . . We could get organized there at ten o’clock and go and get Mr. Letko. And he’d gladly come down and play until any hour of the night [on a one-row button accordion]. We’d be sure that he had something to drink, pass the hat. Maybe he’d get a dollar, dollar and a quarter.
Letko’s bellows came apart, unfortunately, on a particularly rowdy occasion: “That’s the last time Letko played. The last time I saw his accordion it was sitting on the lilac bush.”41 When Felix Milanowski was fifteen or sixteen, he began playing at house parties for a group of mostly Polish-American peers. In winter, they went on “sleigh-ride parties” to barn dances in the country. “We’d leave the party at three or four in the morning, then make it to church in Ashland, 5:30 mass.”
Although accordion playing regularly countered ethnic and religious constraints along the South Shore, it seldom transcended class divisions. It was a thoroughly rural and working-class instrument fostering egalitarian social relations. In contrast to the American South, for example, where African American musicians entertained upper-class whites regularly, I encountered only one instance wherein an accordionist performed for so-called betters. Felix Milanowski’s dad was working on Ashland’s ore dock in the mid-1920s when his boss, knowing that Milanowski’s youngster played button accordion, asked if Felix might entertain his guests at a little party. As Felix told me, his father reckoned, “I don’t know if he’s good enough for this type of thing, but I’ll ask him.” The boss replied that it didn’t matter, as long as they had a little live music. When Felix agreed to play, his father took him to a big house on Ellis Avenue just after midnight, where he push-pulled “polkas and waltzes until 6:00 in the morning.” It was Prohibition, but instead of the usual “home brew” and “moonshine” colored with brown sugar or charcoal, these “big shots,” as Felix regarded them, drank and even shared “good stuff” smuggled in from Canada. “I was about fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen at the time. Then the food came out, and I never seen a table so saturated with food.” Nor did he ever again play for such an event.
Perhaps Felix Milanowski’s upper-class audience was slumming; perhaps they were rags-to-riches sorts reconnecting with their cultural roots. We’ll never know, but we do know that live music for social occasions, eventually dominated by the accordion, was pervasive along the South Shore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the era’s outset, in the words of Stan Stangle, “There was no radio, TV, no piano, no Victrola.” Tunes were learned by ear, by watching, by trying to play. The region’s overall repertoire was comprised chiefly of non-Anglo-European Old World songs and “couple” or “round” dances (polkas, waltzes, schottisches), as well as Anglo-Celtic-French-Indian jigs and reels for step and square dancing. These distinctive yet complementary repertoires were linked historically with fiddling.
The most pervasive European folk-musical instrument from the eighteenth century through much of the nineteenth century, the fiddle—established along the South Shore in the late 1700s, sustained through the fur trade and lumber camps—persisted well into the twentieth century. In 1938, for example, Alan Lomax recorded fiddle tunes like “Devil’s Dream” and “Red River Jig” on the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation from Joe Cloud. Born in 1885, Cloud learned to play in 1900 from his father, Menogwaniosh Anakwad (1849–1911), a fiddling lumberjack also known as George Cloud.42 Likely the first late nineteenth-century immigrant musicians to juxtapose their recently imported old-country melodies with established New World sounds were lumber-camp fiddlers like the aforementioned Swede, John Nyquist. According to Fritz Swanson, Nyquist “could play anything,” from Swedish dance tunes to Irish reels.
Just such a mixture of round dances and square dances, ranging from Swedish waltzes to “Turkey in the Straw,” characterized Eskel Hokenson’s early twentieth-century experience in the Little Sand Bay and Red Cliff area, where Swedes, Ojibwes, and French Indians mingled in lumber camps and community halls. By this time, however, button accordionists like Hokenson shared instrumental prominence with fiddlers. Edith Hukkala told me that around 1914, in southern Ashland County, her mother joined a throng of Finnish immigrants and old-stock Americans to enjoy round and square dances in High Bridge to the strains of a solo button accordion.43 By the 1920s, active fiddlers were scarce, as accordionists held sway.
In that decade, the old lumber-camp stock of jigs and reels was also fading, in part because of the emergence of “modern” couple dances like the fox trot, in part because older fiddle tunes were superseded by a new crop of “hillbilly” tunes spread by radio and records, but also because a good many new immigrants never learned them in the first place. At Washburn’s Finn Hall, according to Reino Maki, accordionists like his father squeezed out “waltzes, polkas, and schottisches” almost exclusively. There was “not much square dancing, like the Swedes and Norwegians [do].” Partially confirming Maki’s sweeping assertion, Fritz Swanson, who enjoyed John Nyquist’s square-dance fiddling, nonetheless paralleled Reino in favoring his father’s mostly Swedish repertoire of “polkas, waltzes, schottisches, and hambos.”
Such ethnically specific dance-hall repertoires were often first encountered as the music of home and heart. Eskel Hokenson and Stan Stangle learned Swedish tunes like “Nikolina” and Czech tunes like “Baruška,” respectively, from the singing and playing of their button-accordionist mothers. Tom Johanik’s father played button accordion at home, while his mother sang Slovak songs, with the kids joining in. “Some people like to fight, but we would sing.” Les Ross Sr. likewise long remembered Finnish polkas his father sang and played around the house. Bruno Synkula’s parents were married in Poland, but his father emigrated first to work in Pennsylvania mines, Chicago slaughterhouses, Dakota wheat fields, northern Wisconsin lumber camps, and on the Ashland ore docks before earning enough to send for his wife. Neither parent was a musician, but “Mother liked to sing and hum tunes . . . some of them old pieces she heard in the old country.” Those tunes stayed with Bruno, and he worked them out on button accordion. “I used to play ’em for her, and she really enjoyed that.” Mary Stelmach was born in Ashland in 1904, but her button-accordionist older brother Stanley spent his early childhood in Poland. “He was a shy mama’s boy” who never married. Steeped in melodies learned at home from his parents, “he could hear a song once and then he could do it,” and so he was in demand for Polish weddings. “They’d ask him to play, but he would not do it unless my mother was there. She had to sit there. Then he would do it.”44 Immigrant households along the South Shore frequently reverberated with songs and hummed melodies, whether accompanied or not, and these were in demand amid public events. As Frances Wroblewski said of her accordion-playing husband’s experience: “Everyone knew these tunes, people sang ’em, fellows would hum tunes to John at dances, and then he’d play the tunes.”
Many of the tunes that “everyone knew” were, of course, learned through oral/aural tradition and had well-known names in, for example, Croatian (“Samo Nemoj Ti,” “Sino
Si Meni Rekla”), Czech (“Modré Oi,” “Svestkova Alej”), Finnish (“Iitin Tiltu,” “Isontalon Antti ja Rannanjärvi”), Swedish (“Kväsar Vals,” “Johann På Snippen”), and more. Limited at first to a family, neighborhood, or ethnic group, such tunes became widely known by the 1920s, and dedicated accordionists might be expected to play them. More obscure yet compelling melodies sometimes lacked names altogether, or their names were long forgotten and thus reinvented, or they had names that varied. Charles Mattson learned a tune from a fellow worker’s humming as they cut hay in 1925. When I recorded him fifty-six years later, he simply called it a “hayfield tune.” Vivian Eckholm Brevak knew no proper titles for many tunes she learned from her father and the family’s Finnish boarder. Instead, she kept a list of personalized titles in her accordion case—“Dad’s Waltz,” “Leonard’s Schottische,” “Sweetie Pie’s Polka”—that she jokingly called “sheet music.” Many polkas that Les Ross’s father performed lacked names, while others had recognized names but combined musical phrases from several sources, thus departing from the standard tune. And although Fritz Swanson knew the real name for “Spikkroks Valsen” (Stove Poker Waltz), he and his pals called it “Pluggen’s Roost” in reference to a local hangout of hard-drinking French Canadian lumberjacks.
Figure 7.3 Tom Johanik with his father’s leather-bellowed button accordion in the community hall, Moquah, Wisconsin, 1980. Photograph by James P. Leary.
The titles and musical structures of many pieces played by accordionists stabilized in the 1920s, as what American labels called “foreign series” records became widely available in the region. Some records featured old standards; others offered new compositions. As might be expected, what Alex Siedlecki called “tough ones that can’t be sung in church” remained exclusively in oral tradition. Siedlecki, Tom and Elmer Johanik, Matt Saari, Rudy Kemppa, Jingo Viitala Vachon, Les Ross Sr., Matti and Eddie Pelto, and many more performed a few earthy peasant or bawdy lumberjack tunes with colorful titles like one Matti Pelto translated from Finnish as “Get Your Hands Off My Tits before I Sock You in the Mouth.”45 Likewise, Vivian Eckholm Brevak’s parents and their large family could not afford to buy records, perhaps because, as she put it, they were already “instrument poor” and preferred homemade music. Nonetheless, most of the region’s accordionists learned some of their repertoire from records, including records made by touring performers who frequented the region.
In the early 1920s, Rudy Kemppa bought his first records at Dover Music in Hancock, Michigan. “Somehow that grew into me.” Eventually he became a disc jockey for a Finnish-American radio program. Finns in northwestern Wisconsin sometimes bought records while visiting Duluth or Superior, where the Finnish socialist newspaper, Tyomies, advertised the latest by such regionally based performers as Arthur Kylander, Elmer Lamppa, the Maki Trio, Hiski Salomaa, and Viola Turpeinen. Stores in Ashland sold records aplenty too. Ed Siedlecki bought Polish 78s from Garland City Music, then played them over and over until he could replicate what he heard on button accordion. Julia Gaik, who worked in an Ashland dime store, invited pals like Felix Malinowski to hear new Polish records she’d purchased on labels like Columbia, Okeh, and White Eagle: “We used to go there and listen to ’em, and then we’d go home and see if we could play ’em on the accordion.” Dazzled by Viola Turpeinen’s accordion wizardry at Minersville Hall near Marengo, Fritz Swanson bought several of her records. Turpeinen’s driving style and minor-key melodies departed from his usual Swedish repertoire, but he persisted: “After three weeks I could play a Finn polka.” As was the case in house-party or dance-hall contexts, many of the region’s accordionists not only crossed ethnic lines in their record-buying, repertoire-building pursuits, but also acquired popular tunes like “Red Wing” and “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More” from the American musical mainstream.
Established from the 1890s through the 1930s as the South Shore’s central house-party and dance-hall instrument, the accordion flourished in immediately ensuing decades, especially as its regional prominence was reinforced by larger, mass-mediated musical trends in American culture. To cite the most significant examples, in the mid-1930s Frank Kuczynski, a Polish American piano accordionist from Milwaukee, joined the guitar-picking Texas-born crooner Gene Autry to create an accordion/string band “singing cowboy” fusion that swept the nation.46 In the late 1940s, Cleveland’s Frankie Yankovic popularized a modern polka sound, combining twin piano accordions with stringed instruments and harmonized English vocals, which resulted in million-selling records, incessant touring, and numerous network-television appearances.47 And in the early 1950s, having settled in Los Angeles, the North Dakota accordionist and bandleader Lawrence Welk launched his eponymous musical variety show that would become the longest-running program of its kind on national television.48 Accordionists followed suit along the South Shore, forming ethnic-country polkabilly bands, emulating Yankovic’s Americanized Slovenian polka sound, and producing their own regional variety shows, like the still-syndicated Chmielewski Funtime.
Successive honky-tonk, rock, and folk-music explosions in the 1950s and 1960s, however, moved many third- and fourth-generation South Shore residents to abandon accordions for guitars. Captivated by Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and the Duluth-born Bob Dylan, the sons of Vivian Eckholm Brevak, Tom Marincel, and Les Ross Jr., for example, formed country and rock bands. Yet none forgot their regional squeezebox roots. They all continued to make music with their parents. And in the 1990s, the younger Les Ross formed a Finnish-American reggae/rock band, Conga Se Menne, that paid periodic homage to the regional accordion sound by featuring his dad and other old-timers in live and recorded performances. More recently, in late 2008, the second Wisconsin CD by the roots rock guitarist Bucky Halker was dedicated to the memory of fellow musician and Ashland resident Bob Mathiowetz (1918–2008): “I’m glad I was able to communicate with and see him again while I worked on these recordings. Bob was elected to the World Concertina Congress in 1999 and kept performing right until the end.”49
The album’s final track, “Concertina Galop,” combines a field recording I made of Mathiowetz in 1981 with guitar backup laid down twenty-seven years later by Bucky Halker and Steve Yates. In a similarly retro-contemporary tribute to the South Shore’s squeezebox spirit, and at just about the same time that Halker and Yates laid down their rhythm and bass tracks, J. Karjalainen, often dubbed “the Finnish Bruce Springsteen,” teamed with the two-row button-box player Veli-Matti Järvenpää on an album, Paratiisin Pojat (Paradise Boys), that likewise concludes with a revitalized field recording paying tribute to the accordion.50 Originally performed for the folklorist Alan Lomax in Newberry, Michigan, 1938, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Emil Mäki’s fanciful lyrics imagine a house party in heaven where St. Peter and the prophets laugh and swing their beards as strings and free reeds resound eternally:
Sun kloorin kloorin halleluuja!
Siellä harput ja hanurit ne soi.
[Glory, glory hallelujah!
The lyres and accordions ring out.]
Interviews with individuals are only cited the first time. Unless otherwise indicated, all interviews were conducted by the author and are part of the Ethnic Music in Northern Wisconsin and Michigan Collection, Mills Music Library, University of Wisconsin. Place names are in Wisconsin, unless otherwise indicated.
1. Bruno Synkula, personal interview, Ashland, 1981.
2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 57, 59.
3. Qtd. in Birgit Kjellström, “Dragspel,” Sohlman’s Musiklexikon 2 (1975): 329–35.
4. Ilkka Kolehmainen, “‘Do Not Dance to the Screeching, Insidious Accordions: Burn Them’: The Accordion in Finnish Folk Music,” Finnish Musical Quarterly 2 (1989): 29–31.
5. See Victor Greene, A Passion for Polkas: Ethnic Old-Time Music in America, 1880–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); James P. Leary, “The German Concertina in the Upper Midwest,” in Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-America, ed. Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel (Madison, Wisc.: Max Kade Institute for German American Studies, 2002), 191–232; and James P. Leary, Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
6. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 9.
7. Lucille Milanowski, personal interview, Ashland, 1980.
8. Frances Milenski Wroblewski, personal interview, Washburn, 1981.
9. Fritz Swanson, personal interview, Ashland, 1980.
10. Charles Mattson, Covington, Mich.; Hugo Maki, Washburn; Reino Maki, Washburn; interviews by the author and Matthew Gallman, 1981.
11. Stanley Stangle, personal interview, Ashland, 1980.
12. Art Moilanen, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Mass City, Mich., 1981.
13. Matt Radosevich, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Benoit, 1981.
14. Tom Johanik, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Moquah, 1981.
15. Bill Hendrickson, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Herbster, 1981.
16. Helmer Olavie Wintturi, interview by the author and Joel Glickman, Herbster, 1979.
17. Einard Maki, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Oulu, 1981.
18. Les Ross Sr., interview for the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Negaunee, Mich., 2002.
19. Matti Pelto, interview by Matthew Gallmann, Boston Location, Mich., 1979; Eskel Hokenson, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Little Sand Bay, Bayfield County, 1981; Clara Belsky Sveda, personal interview, Ashland, 1980.
20. Julius Chopp, personal interview, Copper City, Mich., 1984.
21. John Kezele, interview by Joel Glickman and Marina Herman, Copper Country, Mich., 1979.
22. Earl Otchingwanigan, personal interview, Crystal Falls, Mich., 1996.
23. Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Ketvirtis is misspelled as “Ketvertis” in the catalog (Patti Ketvirtis to Hilary Virtanen, email communication, January 14, 2009).
24. Robert Mathiowetz, personal interview, Ashland, 1980.
25. Anton Wolfe, interview for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Stevens Point, 1986.
26. Joe Czerniak, interview by Richard March for the Wisconsin Arts Board, Duluth, Minn., 1988.
27. Dolores “Dee” Bainbridge, interview for the Wisconsin Arts Board, Ashland, 1996.
28. Matt Saari, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Maple, 1981.
29. Edwin Pearson, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Maple, 1981.
30. Rudy Kemppa, interview by Matthew Gallmann and Sarah Poynter, Hancock, Mich., 1979.
31. Anonymous, “Garland City Music,” Edison Phonograph Monthly 6.6 (1908): 14.
32. Felix Milanowski, interviews by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Ashland, 1979–81.
33. Tom Marincel, interview by Richard March and Joel Glickman, Sanborn, 1979.
34. Henry Doktorski and Count Guido Deiro, liner notes to Guido Deiro, Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1, CD 5012 (Champaign, Ill.: Archeophone Records, 2007).
35. Bill Koskela, personal interview, Ironwood, Mich., 1981.
36. Rose Verville Swanson, personal interview, Mason, 1980.
37. James P. Leary, “Ethnic Country Music along Superior’s South Shore,” JEMF Quarterly 19.72 (1983): 219–30; and James P. Leary, “Old-Time Music in Northern Wisconsin,” American Music 2.1 (1984): 71–87.
38. James P. Leary, “The Legacy of Viola Turpeinen,” Finnish Americana 8 (1990): 6–11.
39. Alexei Siedlecki, personal interview, Ashland, 1981.
40. Vivian Eckholm Brevak, personal interview, Barksdale, 1981.
41. Joe Johanik, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Moquah, 1981.
42. James P. Leary, “Sawdust and Devils: Indian Fiddling in the Western Great Lakes Region,” in Medicine Fiddle, ed. James P. Leary (Bismarck: North Dakota Humanities Council, 1992), 30–35.
43. Edith Hukkala, interview by the author and Matthew Gallmann, Washburn, 1981.
44. Mary Stelmach, personal interview, Ashland, 1981.
45. James P. Leary, “Woodsmen, Shanty Boys, Bawdy Songs, and Folklorists in America’s Upper Midwest,” Folklore Historian 24 (2007): 41–63.
46. Wade Hall, Hell Bent for Music: The Life of Pee Wee King (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 30–31.
47. Robert Dolgan and Frank Yankovic, The Polka King: The Life of Frankie Yankovic (Cleveland: Dillon and Liederbach, 1977).
48. Lawrence Welk, Wunnerful, Wunnerful! The Autobiography of Lawrence Welk (New York: Bantam, 1971).
49. Bucky Halker, Wisconsin 2, 13, 63, vol. 2, CD 08 (Chicago: Revolting Records, 2008).
50. J. Karjalainen and Veli-Matti Järvenpää, Paratiisin Pojat: Finnish-American Folksongs, CD 367 (Tampere, Finland: Poko Rekords, 2008).
