Folk Music and Modern Sound

Slovenian Style in Milwaukee

Slovenian Style in Milwaukee Charles Keil WHEN OUR FRIEND, downstairs neighbor, colleague, and polka book collaborator, Dick Blau, left our American Studies in Buffalo to create and administrate some fine arts in Milwaukee , we looked forward to expanding our polka horizons. Sure enough, after a time, we were invited to a conference on ethnic studies and the arts that would pay our way toWisconsin and give us a few days to investigate some very disturbing clues to missing persons and mistaken identities. For, according to Dick and the people who were giving him his ethnic orientation to Milwaukee,Polish-American polka bands were conspicuous by their absence and, on the other hand, a considerable number of musicians with Polish last names were to be found playing in the bands and musical organizations of other ethnic groups. All this would not have seemed so mysterious if the Poles were just one small minority group among many trying to find their way in "a German town," but, in fact, the Poles were easily the largest ethnic group in the city with a population approaching half a million. A large Polish population in the city and in the city's surrounding suburbs and in the farm country west and north was surely one of the reasons why the International Polka Association had chosen Milwaukee for its convention and festival five years in a row. But the continuing presence of the IPA convention only deepened the mystery. How could Milwaukee be a polka 32 Slovenian Style in Milwaukee 33 center, host to the big event of the year, and not have any bands of its own? Polish bands, that is. For it soon became apparent, after the conference, that there were plenty of polka bands in Milwaukee, all of them Slovenian, so the question to follow in afew days of fieldwork was two sided: why no Polish bands and why so many Slovenian? The broad outlines of an explanation seemed to be fairly obvious. Milwaukee was famous for being a German city, a city that could make various brands of beer famous; the Germans were famous for pushing around Slavs and trying to fit them to their mold; the Slovenes were famous for being the most German oriented of the Slavic speaking peoples. So the Poles, outnumbered and "outclassed" by the earlier German immigrants and their Slovenian allies had lost out, either in skirmishes and battles of the KulturKampfthai extended to a Milwaukee front, or through slow steady American acculturation pressures intensified by very successful German and Slovenian neighbors. Unfortunately, conversations with conference participants from Milwaukeedidn't offer much specific substantiation for this theory. The Poles were reported to be quite solid in their South Side parishes, well represented politically, doing all right economically,just not sovisibleculturally or musically. The Germans were not any more visible than the Poles, havinghad their high morale of the nineteenth century lowered severely by World War I and eliminated by World War II. The Slovenes were never a large population, were split by factions of some kind, and had lost their old neighborhood to the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans twenty years ago. Yet their style wasthe people's musicofMilwaukee. Why? The day after the conference I wandered down Lincoln Avenue, in the heart of the Polish neighborhoods, not really knowing what I was looking for. As always, the churches were impressive. I passed a basilica that was certainly a fit place for the Pope to hang his hat if he should come to Milwaukee . And every corner had its tavern. Polonia. I stopped awhile at a big old music store that had probably seen better 34 E T H N I C V O I C E S days. The record racks had old albums I'd never seen before— "Gene WisniewskiPresents Walt Jaworski and Eddie Olinski," coming from an era when a Connecticut bandleader's introduction could help two Buffalo bands find work out of town; an old Solek album with terrific pictures of Walt in twenty different costumes on the cover; records by other Buffalo bands—Big Steve, the New Yorkers playing Rhinelanders—on Lil' Wally's Jay Jay label, that I never knew existed. There were many rows of 45s as well, with titles and leaders' names neatly tabbed. I began to look around for the 78s and a listening booth to try them in. Asit turned out, there were still a few...