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acknowledgments i am lucky to be able to thank a long roll call of people who helped make this book both doable and fun to write.If it weren’t for my accordion teachers,Walter Kuehr and Charlie Giordano in New York City and Peggy Minore Hart in Albany,New York,my involvement with the accordion would not have built up enough momentum for a book. The commitment, knowledge, and generosity of all the accordion people I have interviewed over the years inspires sincere gratitude. I am also grateful to the American Accordionists Association, the Accordion Teachers Guild, and all the “accordion people” who have made this topic so rich. I am so grateful to my advisors at New York University, Gage Averill and Michael Beckerman,for encouraging me to go forward with this project,which was full of challenges and uncertainty from the outset. My colleagues at the Albany College of Pharmacy, especially Erika Muse, Kevin Hickey, and Kenneth Blume, gave me intellectual support and the will to continue with the project while negotiating the challenges of my early academic career. The American Philosophical Society granted me research and travel funds without which my “accordion festival tour” would have been impossible. It was a great honor, as well, to receive the Parsons Fund Award for Ethnography from the Library of Congressin2009.Asaresearcher,IreceivedredcarpettreatmentfromtheWorld ofAccordionsMuseuminSuperior,Wisconsin,theLibraryofCongress,theNew York Public Library’s Research Division, and the Center for the Study of Free Reed Instruments at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. There Allan Atlas spent hours helping me sift thorough hundreds of photos and documents from the Pietro Deiro Archives, stashed in every nook and cranny of his office. The list of people who lifted my spirits with advice, music, photos, kind words, and free CDs would fill an entire chapter. I cannot express enough i-xiv_1-258_Jaco.indd 9 1/17/12 12:13 PM x . acknowledgments gratitude to Helmi Harrington,curator of the World of Accordions Museum,a wellspring of accordion knowledge and a supporter of this project.For making available photographs and rare materials from the Museum’s personal collections , I am also indebted to Alex Carozza of Alex & Bell Accordions, Guido Deiro, Jr., Tom Torriglia, Joan Grauman, Faithe Deffner, Robert Young McMahan , William Schimmel, Henry Doktorski, and Jacob C. Neupauer. Each of them also contributed valuable insights and comments on the project. Without images, this would have been an uninviting book. I am deeply thankful to all the talented photographers and artists who answered my desperate call at the eleventh hour, when I realized that only a handful of the hundreds of photos I had taken at museums and field trips would meet UIP’s publication standards. There is a place in accordion heaven for each of the amazing photographers who donated their work to this project: Jane Finch, Jayme Thornton, Bengt Alm, Danny Clinch, John Clayton, Martin Cooper, Brian McLernon, Jim Merithew, Hai Zhang, Sean Vallely (with a little graphic wizardry from Renee de la Prade, Tim Gennert, Rosie Steffy), Larry Utley, Frank Lima,Maria Sonevytski,Shannon Conyers,Michael Macioce,and Patti Davi. I especially benefited from Patti’s outstanding visual documentation of the Cotati Accordion Festival. I am especially thankful to the editors of World of Music for allowing me to guest edit their “Accordion issue.”Each author contributed an original perspective on the topic that helped inspire me and get out of my little piano-accordion box:MariaSonevytski,GraemeSmith,SydneyHutchinson,andYin-YeeKwan. Other incredibly supportive and helpful researchers of accordion-related topics who were often in my thoughts as I was writing this book were ethnomusicologist Helene Simonett and folklorist James Leary, who helped me track down information on Finnish-American music and culture. Without James Leary’s guidance—and his encyclopedic knowledge of Upper Midwest accordion traditions —there would be no chapter 4. Many thanks to my razor-sharp editor,Laurie Matheson,and the UIP copy editing team for shaping the book from the table of contents to the conclusion, and to the Mellon Foundation for funding this book series.I was lucky enough to participate in a round table for first-time authors at the American Folklore Society meeting in Boise in 2009,where I benefited from the insights of distinguished mentors and expert editors from the University Press of Mississippi, the University of Wisconsin Press,and the University of Illinois Press.I would especially like to thank Judith McCullough, Sheila Leary, and Simon Bronner for their input. Above all, this book...

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