Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America

4. Crossover Accordionists: Viola Turpeinen, John Brugnoli, and Frank Yankovic

chapter four Crossover Accordionists Viola Turpeinen, John Brugnoli, and Frankie Yankovic accordionist viola turpeinen began her career entertaining Finnish-American farmers and mineworkers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the 1920s. Furthering her art through studies with Italian accordion teachers, she moved to New York City, where she won a larger audience in the city’s Finnish halls as well as in theaters and ballrooms throughout Manhattan.Although Turpeinen recorded for Victor and performed on radio broadcasts,it was her live performances and her regular appearances in her hometown of Iron River that earned her a unique Finnish-American title: Hanuriprinsessa (accordion princess).1 In the 1940s, John Brugnoli, an accordionist from Borgotaro, spent five nights a week in his Manhattan cabaret near Times Square playing lively arrangements of tuneful waltzes,polkas,and pasodobles,entertaining compaesani as well as non-Italian audiences who were ready to pay for “good accordion music.” He also played, and arranged, pop standards and Irish-American favorites for accordion.When Brugnoli’s business venture succumbed to rising Manhattan rents, he and his fellow Italian accordionists continued playing at casinos, restaurants, and social functions and making commercial recordings for ethnic labels. In 1946,riding a “national polka craze,”2 Columbia Records eagerly signed Frankie Yankovic and His Yanks,whose leader was a young Slovenian accordionist ,tavern owner,and factory worker from Ohio.Within two years,Yankovic had composed two hits that each sold over a million copies: “Just Because” i-xiv_1-258_Jaco.indd 116 1/17/12 12:14 PM crossover accordionists . 117 (1947–48) and “Blue Skirt Waltz” (1948–49).3 Such results were unexpected by both Yankovic and Columbia, who had been concentrating their efforts on regional polka audiences in heavily German-American and Polish-American centers such as Buffalo,Cleveland,and Milwaukee.Explaining why his music succeeded in the nation’s entertainment capitals and with the media generally, Yankovic commented: “I’m a blue collar guy and so was my father. I’m just an average guy who is lucky enough to understand what a lot of average guys in the country like to hear.”4 The experiences of Brugnoli,Turpeinen,and Yankovic,along with a handful of other accordion soloists,bandleaders,and recording artists,suggest a complex picture of accordion culture in America at midcentury.As musicians,each of these three individuals shared a common trajectory.Two of them graduated from button boxes to the piano accordion.All aspired to a national reputation. All made recordings with the explicit intent of disseminating them beyond their local ethnic audiences. All learned and developed skills for entertaining diverse listeners, earning the status of royalty—particularly Turpeinen the accordion princess and Yankovic the polka king. Their stories reveal, however, that American piano accordionists worked under a variety of conditions and influences, maintaining different degrees of autonomy over their work, different business strategies, and diverse attitudes about their work. These artists, along with the recording industry, did help to shape accordion culture. Their efforts entwined them in a variety of social and political relationships with their respective “regional”audiences and beyond that help to define the parameters of accordion playing. To understand these parameters, and to get beyond the sentimental,kitschy notionofethnic music foraccordion that emergedinAmerica at midcentury,we need to explore the identities of these musicians and the ways they themselves adapted their own repertoire and style to the demands and structures imposed by their audiences and the music industry.What were the circumstances and conditions under which these accordionists worked? What were their creative processes? How did they market and sell the music they produced and how did they identify themselves? Through such inquiries, we can reveal the ways American piano accordionists negotiated their musical and cultural worlds in a changing context increasingly defined by the workings of the commercial music industry. As this chapter will show, these accordionists were deliberate actors in a specific historical moment and represent much more than a vague, nostalgic, and shadowy impression of a distant past. A significant theme in my previous discussions of Welk,King,and Contino, one frequently found in American popular music studies,is that of ethnic and i-xiv_1-258_Jaco.indd 117 1/17/12 12:14 PM 118 . chapter four regionally based performers catering to their audience’s assimilation to the media-disseminated strains of American popular music in order to become successful in their careers. Unlike these performers, who were...