How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music

Polkabilly AMERICAN MUSICSPHERES Series Editor Mark Slobin Fiddler on the Move Exploring the Klezmer World Mark Slobin The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship Jeffrey A. Summit Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music Yolanda Broyles-González Four Parts, No Waiting A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony Gage Averill Louisiana Hayride Radio and Roots Music along the Red River Tracey E. W. Laird Balkan Fascination Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America Mirjana Lausevic Polkabilly How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music James P. Leary POLKABILLY How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music ķĸ James P. Leary 1 2006 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leary, James P. Polkabilly : how the Goose Island Ramblers redefined American folk music / James P. Leary. p. cm. — (American musicspheres) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-514106-1 ISBN 0-19-514106-7 1. Goose Island Ramblers. 2. Polkabilly music—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. ML421.G66L43 2006 781.62Ј130775—dc22 2005023081 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface The syncretic and emergent qualities of American folk culture, influenced by complex interethnic relationships and popular culture, are often excluded from public presentation. —Baron and Spitzer 1992 he phrases “American folk music” and “Goose Island Ramblers” are Thardly synonymous in Americans’ thoughts and speech. And yet I have come to think of them as inextricable. Nor does the term “polkabilly” trip off of many tongues. And yet I am convinced that it should. What links these words? What do they mean? Why have their connections and significance been largely unnoticed? Why should we care? Notions of what is “American” or, conversely, “un-American” have been debated from the nation’s origins through the present. Concepts of “folk,” particularly when applied to music, likewise have sparked controversy as often as consensus. Meanwhile, distinctive regional styles of music, however enduring and pervasive, have sometimes escaped widespread recog- nition until christened with a succinct, compelling name (blues, jazz, salsa, zydeco, hillbilly, polka) and promoted by entrepreneurs, practition- ers, scholars, and other advocates. In December 1997, I served with a dozen folklorists and ethnomusicolo- gists on a panel convened by the Folk Arts Program of the National En- dowment for the Arts to decide which traditional artists—nominees from all over the United States—would be honored as national treasures—as 1998’s recipients of prestigious National Heritage fellowships. Gathered in a room for three days, we discussed the lives, viewed the works, heard the sounds, and assessed the worth of several hundred traditional crafts- persons, storytellers, dancers, and musicians—especially musicians. In the end, the 11 awardees included 7 musicians or musical groups: the Aspara Ensemble, exponents of Cambodian court music from the greater Wash- ington, D.C., area; Eddie Blazonczyk, a Polish-American polka band leader from Chicago; the Tejano conjunto accordionist Tony De La Rosa; the Ep- stein Brothers, klezmer musicians raised in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Lower East Side; a Greek Byzantine chanter, Harilaos Papapostolou, from Potomac, Maryland; the African-American blues and gospel guitarist and singer Roebuck “Pops” Staples from Chi- cago by way of the Mississippi Delta; and the Kansas City swing fiddler Claude Williams. In previous years, including three when I’d served on the panel, fellowships were awarded to a mariachi musician, an Armenian oud player, and a Lao singer, all from California; a Finnish accordionist from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; southern Appalachian fiddlers, banjo players, guitarists, and ballad singers; Cajun and zydeco musicians from Louisiana; an Apache fiddler from Arizona; an Irish flautist from the Bronx; and many more. Participants in each panel unfailingly invested their discussions of a dazzling array of genres and individuals with remarkable expertise. Again and again, they were able to situate and evaluate the significance of this musician or that style within the larger fabric of American cultural life. The Goose Island Ramblers, however, mystified them. Here were three men from south-central Wisconsin, togged out variously in cowboy hats and Viking horns, playing a shifting array of instruments (guitar, man- dolin, fiddle, eight-string fiddle, one-string electric toilet plunger, harmon- ica, Jew’s harp, jug, piano accordion, and bandonion), singing in Norwe- gian, German, Polish, English, and “broken English,” while favoring a repertoire that shuffled, bent, and fused British and Irish fiddle tunes, bal- lads, and sentimental songs with Hawaiian marches, Swiss yodels, and the polkas, waltzes, schottisches, and mazurkas of Central and Northern Eu- rope. Panelists were baffled, several blurting, “What kind of music is this?” or “I don’t know how to evaluate this.” The Goose Island Ramblers defied their categories and eluded their experiences. Neither thoroughgoing performers within an old time Anglo-American country music tradition, nor single-minded proponents of a particular ethnic American genre, the Goose Island Ramblers clearly inhabited and sustained a hybrid, or syncretic, or creolized musical territory. Bewilder- ing to my colleagues, the Ramblers’ “soundscape,” to borrow Mark Slobin’s useful phrase, was one in which I’d been immersed for most of my life. I was born in 1950 and raised in the small northwestern Wisconsin city of Rice Lake. Like most in my community, I heard various forms of popular music from afar during the 1950s and 1960s via radio, television, and commercial recordings. Yet I also encountered other sounds in homes; on the school playground; in churches, halls, and taverns; and through broad- casts of locally generated programs. Perched on a hill west of town, WJMC radio allotted air time to the Erik Berg Band’s blending of Scandinavian dance melodies with late nineteenth-century pop tunes, to the Polish Barn Dance’s mixed Slavic-hillbilly repertoire, and to occasional yodeling by Schweitzers like John Giezendanner from nearby Barron. Sixty miles to the south, in Eau Claire, the Rhythm Playboys from Osseo had a weekly show on WEAU-TV that combined honky tonk songs with Scandinavian and German dance pieces. Similar shows, fusing various strains of “country” music with Scandinavian, German, Czech, Slovenian, and Polish tunes, beamed our way from KSTP in St. Paul, WCCO in Minneapolis, and, if the weather was right, WDSM in Duluth. Around my town and the surround- vi Preface ing countryside, I encountered schoolmates singing bawdy, blasphemous comic songs in mock “Scandihoovian”- and “Dutchman”-inflected En- glish. Small combos with an accordion, drums, and perhaps a guitar or fiddle entertained for wedding dances at the Moose Club, in the ski lodge at Mount Hardscrabble in the Blue Hills to the east, or at rural watering holes like Sokup’s Tavern and Virgil’s Bunny Bar. Otto Rindlisbacher, pro- prietor of the Buckhorn Bar and Café on Rice Lake’s Main Street festooned his walls with “the world’s largest assortment of odd lumberjack musical instruments.” The son of Swiss immigrants, he was not only adept at playing alpine ländlers on the button accordion, but also masterful with both the nine-string hardingfele, or Hardanger fiddle, of Norwegian immigrants and the conventional four-string fiddle on which he deftly bowed the jigs, reels, and “crooked tunes” of Irish, French, metís, and Ojibwe lumber- camp musicians. Adventurous players in the Rice Lake of my boyhood days, like the Goose Island Ramblers 250 miles to the south, drew on a broad span of locally performed, ethnically grounded musical traditions, then combined those influences with several genres whirling their way through mass media to fashion an eclectic yet regionally understandable style. However discernible to experienced insiders, that style nonetheless has lacked both larger recog- nition within American culture and a distinctive name. Perhaps because I had not yet fully grasped these truths on that Decem- ber day in Washington, I was momentarily as baffled by my colleagues’ ig- norance as they were by the Ramblers’ music. Had I been quicker, I might have pointed out that observers a century before were similarly perplexed and astonished by the nameless New Orleans sonic melange that came to be known as jazz. Had I been much, much quicker, I might have pointed out

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