Every summer in Washington DC the Smithsonian Institution puts on a big Folklife Festival cultural show in the National Mall. They feature cultures and countries from all around the USA and the world. As it happened, Wisconsin’s 150th anniversary as a state was 1998, and Wisconsin was one of the featured cultures that year.
Wisconsin is a big place, and the displays included Native American wild rice gathering, native flute making, cooking tips from a Milwaukee sausage maker, a simulated tavern-stage to feature the communities that gather in taverns around the state, a continuous polka band stage, and more.
Weddings in Wisconsin are tradionally celebrated with polka bands, and there are lots of different ethnic varieties of bands with different instrumentation, different sounds and rhythms, and different songs.
Richard March of the Wisconsin State Arts Board was in charge of curating the polka band portion of the Smithsonian exhibition. Rick is a long time friend of polka bands in Wisconsin, and had the contacts needed to bring together five different ethnicities of bands: German (“Dutchman”), Bohemian, Czech, Norwegian, and Polish.
Norm Dombrowski’s Happy Notes, from Stevens Point Wisconsin, plays Polish style polkas. Stevens Point has a very strong Polish Catholic culture; Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla came there to visit because there were so many Polish Catholic people, and many services were held in Polish. The world’s largest circulation Polish language newspaper was published a few blocks from my house. A few years later Cardinal Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II.
Lots of our polkas started out as Polish folk songs, and we still sing many of them in Polish. All of the Happy Notes are Polish in heritage, well, most of them. I am a friend of the band, happily Norwegian and British in my own heritage, and enjoy helping out with the bass guitar and the piano, sometimes the 6-string acoustic as needed. And I sing backing Polish vocals. Our lineup in 1998 included Norm, three of his grown children, and two friends of the family.
It was a great honor for us to be asked to play in Washington for the Folklife Festival that year. They flew us out there, put us up in a hotel, fed us, and paid us union wage for performing two 45-minute sets per day for two weeks, with the rest of the day off and the weekends off. As band jobs go, it was about as good as it could possibly get.
The crowds were huge, especially on the Fourth of July during the day. We probably played our music for over 10,000 people that day. Way to make us feel like superstars.
At one point NPR came by in the person of Robert Siegel and a technician. I had heard him many times on the radio, and it was a great thrill to meet him in person and talk to him a little bit. He interviewed all six of us in the band, finding out who we were, what we played, where we were from. I heard later that a friend in Alaska heard our interview on the radio there. Robert was totally unassuming, very friendly and professional, and truly interested in what we had to say. He spent some time with Norm finding out why we called ourselves a Polish polka band when we were from Wisconsin.
The answer is a combination of how we got started, the specific song selection, the language used, the instrumentation, and our ethnicities. When Norm was little, his parents spoke Polish around the house. The music played came from Poland, or from artists who sang in Polish.
Of course, lots of our songs are in Polish, and came from Poland originally. We play the large Chemnitzer concertinas, which are typical in Polish music, and which make up the heart of our sound. Where German (Dutchman) style bands usually have a tuba on the low end, we use an electric bass guitar (that’s me!), or sometimes a full sized stand-up bass (me again). Also, a typical Polish band has clarinets and trumpets in the horn section, as we do. We do switch around instruments a lot, and the clarinetist picks up a saxophone now and then.
I can tell you for sure: bass fiddles are a real pain to haul around and are difficult to properly amplify. Bass guitars can sound nearly the same and are much easier to carry.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. In 1998 when we were there, besides Wisconsin they also celebrated the Baltic states, the Philippines, and the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin. They put all of us artists and musicians in the same hotel, and hosted a reception every night where we would all mix and talk and play music with each other. We all had a great time hanging out together. Wisconsin Polish and German musicians playing along with Estonian polkas, with Tex-Mex harmonies added as the other musicians wandered in and out.
The twenty-piece Philippine bamboo band was something marvelous to see and hear: they hand-made all their instruments out of bamboo, and their sound and enthusiasm blew me away. Bamboo trombones, trumpets, and even a tuba? Yes!
In the end, the evening receptions were the highlight of the trip. The feeling of being part of a world-wide friendly mix of cultures stuck with me to this day.