Published: September 10, 2008 09:48 pm            

MARK BENNETT: Festivals keep nostalgic piece of ethnic Americana alive

TERRE HAUTE — Fears? Maybe. Beers? Sure. Tears in those beers? No way.

Many of the folks who have kept the German Oberlander Club’s popular Oktoberfest alive for 36 years worry that the musical genre at its heart could fade if younger generations don’t follow in their footsteps. They’re not frowning, though.

There’s no crying in polka.

“It’s such a happy music — happy people having a good time,” said Jerry Tye, one of the Oberlanders’ most astute polka aficionados. “It’s something you can just sit and listen to, and watch the people.”

Tye and fellow club members tirelessly prepared for this year’s festival, which runs today through Saturday. They cook all the food served at the Oktoberfest. They set up the tents and chairs at the Clabber Girl Marketplace in downtown Terre Haute. They pass out flyers and posters to an event with no admission charge. They donate proceeds for college scholarships. And, they hire the entertainment — polka bands.

That sound came to America 150 years ago with eastern European immigrants. As recently as the 1960s and ’70s, regions with large Czech, Polish, German, Slovenian and Italian populations overflowed with polka clubs. Eddie Korosa Jr., whose band will play all three days of the local Oktoberfest, practically grew up in his parents’ Babydoll Polka Club in Chicago. Forty years ago, that city had 20 polka bars on its northside and 20 on the southside.

The Korosas sold the Babydoll in 2004, six years after the death of Eddie’s father — Eddie Sr., a polka legend. Managing the place got to be too much for Eddie’s mother. “Now it’s just a neighborhood bar,” Eddie, 50, explained Tuesday. “There aren’t that many polka bars” now.

As the ages of that audience advance, so do their concerns about polka’s future.

“It seems like we cannot get the younger people to come out, and we’re getting older,” said Erika Hale, a longtime Oberlander member and a native of Germany. Hale joined the club, which still is 200-plus members strong, while in her 30s. She’s now 69.

That situation isn’t unique to Terre Haute. Tye, also 69, and his wife, Sandy, travel around the Midwest to hear polka at the surviving clubs and festivals. “It’s an older crowd, just like it is here in Terre Haute,” he said. “There used to be all kinds of polka clubs, where you’d go on a Saturday night and hear a band and have a beer. Young people are not club kind of people.”

That generational change puts polka merely in transition, not on life support, said a folk music expert at Indiana University.

“I guess I’m inclined to say the picture’s not as dire as it gets painted,” said Alan Burdette, director of the IU Archives of Traditional Music.

Yes, polka bar era may be dying, but the music remains alive and relatively well on a circuit of festivals, such as the Oberlanders’ Oktoberfest.

“The festivals are still going on, but the bars are gone,” said Korosa, whose four-piece band travels a 400-mile radius around Chicago, playing 150 gigs a year. “The younger generation is not the German, the Polish, the Slovenian club crowd. They’re the rock ’n’ roll crowd.”

Reaching that crowd isn’t impossible, Burdette said. It just might take time. They may not become polka groupies at 25, but they might at 55.

In a way, polka adds avid fans at the same rate that Denny’s adds senior-citizen discount customers. You grow into it.

“They do tend to renew themselves, and attract the interest of younger folks — or new ‘younger’ older folks,” said Burdette, 43. “They’re past middle age, and now they have time to participate in those kinds of activities.”

Still, a unique beauty of polka is that it typically lures people of all ages to the dance floors. Acts playing the age-segregated genres heard on commercial radio usually don’t draw a big cross-over crowd. Country fans go hear country bands, and rock fans listen to rock bands. But almost anyone can end up doing the “Chicken Dance” at a polka festival, where grandparents bring their grown children, who bring their kids.

“You tend to see a lot more gray hair than teenagers,” Burdette said, “but you’ll see a lot more of a range of people from children to those in their 80s.”

In some regions of the country, the genre remains a passionate part of the culture, where youngsters aren’t strangers to the sounds of 21st-century polka greats, such as 15-time Grammy Award winner Jimmy Sturr. In Wisconsin, polka is the soundtrack of the society, with “good food, getting together, not drinking hard liquor but beer, dancing, working hard, but playing hard, too — it fuses the culture,” said James Leary, director of the folklore program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Leary, a 58-year-old who also earned a degree at IU, said UW students know polka. “When the subject comes up among my students, there’s almost no one who hasn’t grown up with some experience,” he said.

Polka has even crept into, yes, rock ’n’ roll, that music form often blamed for polka’s supposed demise. Bands such as the Polkaholix employ accordions and songs with an oom-pah, 2/4 tempo. “With all the crunching on their guitars and the fuzz, it gives it a kind of youthful feeling,” Leary said.

That optimistic spirit, like the music itself, keeps Korosa happy about polka’s future. His schedule, which fills up a year ahead each November, validates that outlook. (The homemade German food makes the Terre Haute Oktoberfest one of his favorites.)

“Polka music is for everybody, and the festivals bring that out,” said Korosa, who began playing at age 4, “because, everybody likes to ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and do the ‘Chicken Dance.’”



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

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