Roll Out The Barrel Of Polka Records

 

 

 

 

 

Yah sure, yoobetcha! Today I'm talking about Polka!

It's odd to think it, but at this point there are possibly entire generations of youngsters who don't even know what polka is. Weird, when you think how culturally pervasive it was as recently as forty or fifty years ago. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, band leaders, jazz musicians, country swing groups, and even household name crooners worked polkas into their repertoires, because it was such a popular art form!

Especially in the small rural communities here in the upper Midwest, it was a go-to form of social engagement to catch up with the community on Saturday night. Not to mention a key component to shaking off the stress from the previous week–on the farm, at the factory, what-have-you–and limbering up for that quickly encroaching Monday morning, where the reins of the ol' weekly drudgery would be dangling, waiting to be strapped on again.

 

What was once a major component of the country's popular culture has been diluted from the main stream, settling in stagnant pockets along the fringe known as "niche culture". Polka has gone from pop to outré. I mean , there was a time when Lawrence Welk was as big as Elvis Presley (albeit to septuagenarians)! Being from Minnesota, it's always been a kind of minor thread stitched into the fabric of my existence. I'm not sure when I first heard it or became aware of it. I'm sure being a lifelong "Weird Al" Yankovic fan helped cement it into my consciousness; but even aside from that, it had been steadfastly present in most of the corners of my life since I was a tot. My grandmother used to watch reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show, Saturday evenings on PBS, and occasionally my parents would drag me to some supper club or bar, like Bass Camp, in Minnesota City, where there would be a guy with an accordion and another guy with a tuba, rolling out the barrel, so to speak.  And maybe because older folks in Minnesota and Wisconsin embraced polka as part of their cultural identity, and much of my childhood was spent with senior citizens, it was difficult not to be aware of it while growing up here.

 For a long time I assumed it was just a Midwest thing. Of course, being a child who had never traveled much further than LaCrosse, WI, until I left for college, how was I to know that Polish, German and Scandinavian settlers had scattered across the country, setting up pockets of polka-happy peoples from upstate New York to Southern California? I was also under the early impression that polka music was a German thing, since nine times out of ten when I was subjected to it, the perpetrators were garbed in lederhosen and some sort of Tyrolean wool hat with a crimson feather jabbed into the hatband. They generally had the look of the stock "European villagers" from Universal monster movies. There was more than one instance where I sat patiently waiting for the Frankenstein monster to stagger through a wall and chase the oompah men away. Sadly, this never happened.

It was decades later that I learned that this is not the case. But go to any of the Gasthauses or Bierstubes in or around the Twin Cities area, and you'll be certain to see the expected polka band with the lederhosen and the Tyrolean hats, as if it's as German as Käsespätzle mit Weißwurst. Not to say it isn't recognized in parts of Bavaria, but it seems we Americans broadly associate it with Germany more than any given German might. Is it of Polish origin? A coworker once thanked me for playing polka music in the workplace on the shared office Pandora account, because it was "the music of her people." "People", it turned out, meant Polish. I don't know how Polish she actually is, she seemed predominantly Republican American, to me. But no, it isn't traditional Polish folk music. Polka is actually Czech in origin. Has it been embraced by Germans and Poles and incorporated into their own forms of folk music? Absolutely!

 Polka has also been wholeheartedly embraced and adopted by cultures throughout the entire world. Or at the very least other cultures have developed similar forms of music along parallel lines, prominently featuring the accordion and syncopated 2/4 time signature. Don't believe me? Listen to Mexican Norteño music. Around 2006 I was working as an "Entertainment Specialist" for a certain big box retailer. The store I worked in was in a Latino-affluent part of Saint Paul, and we not only carried CDs by Taylor Swift and Green Day, but also a lot of music from the likes of Los Tigres Del Norte, Los Huracanes Del Norte and a bunch of other Del Nortes.  The constantly cycling music video loop that would play on the TVs in the store's electronics department, would have Latin artists interspersed with whatever Rihanna and Justin Timberlake videos were all the rage at the time. The first time I heard it, I thought to myself "Hey, this sure sounds a lot like the polka music I used to hear as a kid." An experience similar to when I had been taking film studies classes in college, and suddenly I'm watching Emir Kusturica films and hearing Serbian music that sounded similar as well! And more recently, being exposed to the similarly different sounding work of Balkan brass band Fanfare Ciaocarlia, and the Serbian hornmeister Boban Markovic, that may have different instrumentation and play at different tempos than your standard polka fare, but has a similar spirit to it. At least similar enough to me to trigger the same synapses that make me think about the oompa-pa'ing I was exposed to as a child.

See?! We're all connected! Maybe the UN could benefit from a Polka Summit.

I've come around to polka. Not that I ever hated it, but as a child I felt more like I was subjected to it, rather than enjoying it. So why the change in attitude? 

 There's zero pretension to the music. Look at the album covers I've interspersed throughout this article; no one is posturing as if this were the game changing moment where the world wows at how cool they are. Not to say there can't be egos within the polka community, but ain't nobody gracing any of these album jackets referring to themselves as "The Boss", "The Edge" or "The Papa Roach." There's no reason for any of these people to be making any of this music for reasons other than fun and/or love of the game! No one here is too cool for school. With musicians calling themselves "Whoopee John", "Li'l Wally", "The Six Fat Dutchmen" and "Uncle Fuzzy And The Cousins", you know they're not taking themselves too seriously. 

Secondly, it's so goddamned happy!Yeah, if you've heard three polka songs, you've probably technically heard all polka songs, but try not to enjoy yourself while listening to it! There could be a tune called "Gonna Hang Myself With An Electrical Cord Because My Wife Is Shtooping The Mailman Polka" and darn if it wouldn't be as jaunty a half-step tune as any other given polka number!

I'm not saying everyone should love it, and even for someone like myself who enjoys it, a little can go a long way. But if you've been polka shy, or don't even really know what it is, I recommend giving it a try.

You can watch Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade, broadcast from Minneapolis's own KTLA in 1957 here. Try to tamp your vomit down when looking at those Farmer John's Meat Products!

You can listen to the recently wrapped but delightfully unhinged archives of WFMU's Dance With Me Stanley with DJ Stashu Program here. 

If you want to see what else is out there as far as weekly polka radio shows, upcoming events, etcetera, you can check out the MPA - Midwest Polka Association here.

You can take a peek at local PBS affiliate's Funtime Polka program here.

Minnesota Noirror

Minnesota: Land Of 10,000 Lakes, if you believe the official license plate tagline. Actually there are more than 10,000; I don't have an actual hard total, that isn't really the point I'm going for. When you sate your need for fantastic fiction on the kinds of material Otto Penzler compiles into his wondrously weighty tomes, you find a lot of crime fiction taking place on the misty streets of San Francisco or the cloistered concrete jungle of New York, a lot of horror and supernatural shenaniganery going on in the old attics and alleys of New England or the swamps of the Deep South, but you very rarely get any kind of action here in the Midwest. 

Particularly Minnesota.

Not a popular setting for pulp adventure or b-movie madness. If it weren't for Fredric Brown or Ray Bradbury, we wouldn't have any representation whatsoever. Of course there's always Chicago, popping up as the backdrop for a crime story or a horror tale, and I'm sure some human encyclopedia on film noir and pulp magazine minutiae could take me to task and point out some obscure so-and-so who appeared for a forgotten string of stories somewhere that was North Star State-based. Usually you get some vague, fictional small college town with a mad professor on staff at the local university  that you can kind of relate to yours in its generalities. I understand the point of great escapist material is to transport us to foreign settings that pricey plane tickets likely will not, but every once in a while it's nice to see your environment depicted as the "scene of the crime" as it were.

I honestly can't say whether the 1951 Red Scare drama The Whip Hand takes place in Minnesota or not. A cursory search online gives both Wisconsin and Minnesota as the setting, though I guess initially it was supposed to take place in New England, and feature Nazis instead of communists. The only geographical reference we have in the film itself to the location of the fictional small town of Winnoga, is about an hour in, when our intrepid New York reporter protagonist gets word out to his publisher that the place is actually running as a front for Nazi scientist Wilhelm Bucholtz and his bacteriological experiments, and the publisher in question walks over to a large wall-sized map of the United States, pokes a finger into a non-specific spot in the Upper Midwest and says "Winnoga...Winnoga...ah here it is. That puts Bucholtz and Corbin within a couple of hours drive of our Duluth office." 

Carla Balenda as Janet Keller, hostage of Bucholtz
in The Whip Hand.

The story is a fine little suspense yarn that could have easily been an episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted NBC series Thriller. Matt Corbin, a magazine reporter, is on a fishing trip in the scenic but empty town of Winnoga. A storm breaks out, reporter slips and gashes his head on a rock in the stream while wading to safety, and tries to get medical attention. The first sign of civilization he comes across is a gated driveway to a hidden estate, and is turned away by the surly gatekeeper. He then heads to the town proper to see the local doctor and finds Raymond Burr (talking in a register two steps above Perry Mason and with a talcum-grayed wig on) holding court as a hotel operator and ringleader to a bunch of unfriendly, tight-lipped locals who don't care much for nosey interlopers. Of course the young man finds out what is really going on–that the empty town is a facade run by commies servicing a Nazi scientist working on deadly bacterial agents that will wipe out the population of the United States–and tries to get word to the outside world with the help of the attractive and naive sister of the town sawbones. 

The film was based on a treatment by Roy Hamilton, who, while not having a lengthy career in Hollywood, did write a few episodes of The Adventures Of Superman and an episode of Dick Tracy, as well as contributing to the screenplay for the 1953 schlock classic Cat-Women of the Moon.  

Carla Balenda c.1955

Our protagonist was radio drama superstar and impressionist Elliott Reid (who was apparently asked to do his Kennedy for J.F.K, an impression that garnered the President's stamp of approval), who appeared in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a slew of television shows, and co-starred with Fred MacMurray in some mid-60s Disney films (Son of Flubber and The Absent-Minded Professor). Of course we're all familiar with Godzilla-hunting, Hamilton Burger-thwarting Raymond Burr. Incidentally, if you've not seen his bonkers Bride Of The Gorilla of the same year, I highly recommend you do, because it's amazing. At least if you have tastes similar to my own. And the connection between Bride Of The Gorilla and The Whip Hand go beyond a mere set of production dates! The Whip Hand featured uncredited screenwriting work by Curt Siodmak, the writer of films like The Wolf Man (1941), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) and...you guessed it!...Bride Of The Gorilla, which he also directed!  Our leading lady, Carla Balenda (born with the burlesque dancer-ready name Sally Bliss), doesn't have a lot of credits to her name, aside from being probably best known for her short stints as Mickey Rooney's girlfriend in the short-lived The Mickey Rooney Show (1954-55), and as little Timmy's teacher Miss Hazlit on Lassie (1958-1963).

William Cameron Menzies

The film has two director credits: William Cameron Menzies, the man who created the term "production designer" and director who directed Invaders From Mars and won the Academy Award for his production design on Gone With The Wind; and Stuart Gilmore, a noted editor who worked on films like Hatari!, The Alamo and The Andromeda Strain. Presumably Gilmore did the re-shoots that replaced the Nazis with surly Communist yokels. 

The film is available on Warner Bros. Archive Collection series, meaning you can order it and they'll burn an on-demand, professionally produced DVD-R copy of the film for you. The Archive Collection is actually pretty ingenious; it allows film buffs to get their hands on older, more obscure films that wouldn't necessarily be lucratively marketable in mass production. The films I've ordered from the collection (The Great Gildersleeve movie set, the Hollywood Legends of Horror collection) have all arrived in slick professional cases with full-color labels and production and remastering that rival any of the more mainstream releases. 

Otto Waldis as Bucholtz behind bulletproof glass, scoffing at the Feds
before being struck down by his own human guinea pigs.