At the end of 2015, I read many articles about all the music stars who passed in 2016. Today I’d like to salute one more performer who was very very well known within his own musical world, but his passing did not get a mention… Read More
In one of my Lazy Allen stories, My Dog’s Bigger than your Dog, I mentioned the Clown Prince of Polka, Walter Solek. In the story, the narrator, Lazy Allen, tells his buddy Staashu about the day he played poker with Walt Solek at a stag… Read More
Mexican polka that is – Conjunto – Norteno – Tex-Mex. Here’s Joel Guzman squeezing out the Rosa Ana Polka. Mighty fine, mighty fine.
When I was a boy, most of the music around our place came from my dad’s records. For the longest time, the only music I heard my mom listen to were a few Englebert Humperdinck records, and even then, not so often. That is until… Read More
Let’s go to Buffalo NY’s historic Polonia district in the 1970s and 1980s, and check out the Broadway Grill. Back then, up here in Toronto, I had no interest in polka and had no idea that in Buffalo, just down the highway, some of the… Read More
I came across this strange video tonight. It features a duet with French bagpipes and accordion doing a polka suite. OK, it’s a bit off the beaten path. What’s really strange though, is the video is full of bizarre visual distortion – the background around… Read More
Here’s the fabulous Ampol Aires from 1991 performing the Circus Polka. I only know one person who maybe knows who these guys are and that’s my pal from Chicago Anthony Stagg, so this one goes out to him. ….and since we’re on a roll, here’s… Read More
Somebody entered “she likes kielbassa better than fish” into a search engine and came up with this blog. You asked for it buddy, you got it. It’s polka time on 27th St. Here are Buffalo’s own Scrubby and Trojak But while we’re on a Polish… Read More
I’ve been teaching my button accordion student a little polka called the Bertha Polka and I wanted him to get a feel for some of the different approaches to attacking a polka, so we took a few minutes to surf around YouTube listening to some… Read More
I’ve been enjoying listening to Chemnitzer concertina music lately and that led me to Wanda and Stephanie, who were a mother-daughter team known as America’s Polka Sweethearts. They were polka performers but in the polka world that is broken down into styles. The style Wanda… Read More
