The Muddy Waters of Polka?

On the odd chance there are Bagatellen readers not yet acquainted with polka icon Li'l Wally, I'd like to present one of the most fascinating articles on music I've read recently. Robert Andrew Powell's remarkably well-researched 1999 mega-feature in Miami New Times was a pot of musicological gold when I took to the information superhighway in search of any morsel about a man whose unbridled, um, happiness struck me as the trace of a lost mythology while my mind boggled in delighted disbelief bathing in the garish glories of an especially eye- and ear-catching thrift store vinyl acquisition. My jaw and head had already moved in their respective directions a few months earlier while giving the relic a hasty audition, and today I was bitten by the Li'l Wally bug again. I hold the jazz-equivalent reed/brass/drumkit timbres and punk-equivalent energy of polka in enough esteem to add any slab of the style to my "educational vinyl" queue when the price is right. I've long felt a storm cloud of polka obsession gathering momentum somewhere in the tangled trails of my future musical journey, and so it's sheer practicality that honors opportunities for preparation. While my polka stash continues to gather dust, the "suggestive and hot" provocations of Li'l Wally couldn't go ignored.

My parents met at a polka dance. Faint childhood memories linger of the infrequent occasions where me and my brother would be forced to soldier the tedium of a festive polka powwow as my parents indulged their horrific hobby. Such events really had little to offer to a five-year old with only the weakest affiliations to Polish-American culture. I was frightened of all the ferociously friendly adults who'd take the occasional stab at entertaining me and my brother in our stranded situation at some table aways from the dance floor, and the colors, costumes, music, and stench of a sagging subculture begat sensory suffering. This would've been around the greater Philadelphia area, including New Jersey. I believe polka still holds its own quite well in some parts of the country, and none of my memories about this should be trusted.

Fast-forward twenty-some years and I find comfort in having some polka fixes on hand in both digital and analog media. There's no special reason; it's really just that at this stage of my listening pathology there's not a single style of music I don't enjoy if it has some character of authenticity, regardless of geographical and genetic affiliations. I'm sure many music-addicts find themselves in the same spongy situation of universal aesthetic compliance. The only music I honestly can't abide is the saccharine, slick forms of modern R&B and gospel, but give me the old stuff and I'm all ears. Now, on any given day of the week I'll take some klezmer over polka (and my genes are approximately 0% East European and 0% Jewish, incidentally; I'm an Nth generation West European American), but every musical form has its unique charms and polka is far from being an exception. Fact is, polka kicks ass. Toss me in the middle of a polka party at this point in life and they'd have to drag me off the dance floor at 3am before I'd lose my groove. This is all hypothetical of course; for the foreseeable future I'll continue to restrict my public pleasure-seeking to sterile avant-garde improvised music concerts, rare groove hipster hoedowns, and the like.

Take a look as this album cover.

Take a look at the reverse cover.

Let's talk some Wally. This album is more than hot and happy polka jams; this is the reckless, refined outpouring of a polka genius tormented by indestructible happiness. This is mythologically extreme happiness, happiness taken to fantastical, transcendent extremes as the mirror image of the deepest blues. Little did I know that my faint suspicions were the tip of the joy-terrorism iceberg. I just thought "this cat is really hardcore" and couldn't believe the boldness of vocal stylings and lyrics I was hearing. This is no ordinary happy polka singer. I mean, just check his credentials: "star of radio - tv... a great performer, composer - arranger - singer- drummer - concertino player, announcer and executive"; just look at the dashing outfit he sports on the cover; just ponder titles like "She Hugs Me Very Nice". "millions sold"?! I'd never heard of this guy before, but somehow this had the makings of more than just another disposable, generic polka album. And the music! Well, instrumentally it's airtight, but nothing to write home about; it's all about the vocal delivery, which is nothing short of surreal. What's more, I didn't really notice it at first, but this stuff actually is "suggestive and hot"! Here are my transcriptions of "She Hugs Me Very Nice" (minus indications of repeated verses) and "Better In Than Out":

She Hugs Me Very Nice

She hugs me very nice
She's full of love and spice
She is my doll
Really knows how
I like it once
But prefer it twice

Oh and you hug me dear
And whisper in my ear
Feeling is such
I love your touch
Oh darling, baby, you mean so much

To me you are my world
You are my lovin' girl
You flip me up
My buttercup
Cause when you hug me
It rises up

Just hug me like you do
You make me to love you
You have that touch
That means so much
You have me baby
Oh through and through

Better In Than Out

[wild whoops, hoots, yelps, etc in the background in between verses—not rare for polka]

When you're with me you just thrill me; please don't let me go
Cause you have that special something and I love it so
Cause you have that special something and I love it so

When you feel me, when you're in me it's better than out
Cause when I am in you baby I just don't want out
Cause when I'm in you baby I just don't want out

Leave it in you; leave it in you and enjoy it too
Cause it takes the two to make love like the birdies do
Cause it takes the two to make love like the birdies do

Hugging hugging then a-cuddling, that's the beginning
Better in than out of love and love is everything
Better in than out of love and love is everything

But the iceberg is right there in the article I linked above. Read it. Some choice quotes:

"Li'l Wally was an extremely important figure from a polka-history perspective, comparable to Charlie Parker in jazz," says ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, coauthor of Polka Happiness(Temple University Press, 1996). "He turned the whole style around, as much as any single individual."

"Imagine if you listened to the blues and all you heard were the biggest songs of B.B. King,or maybe somebody even blander than that," Hedeker continues. "You'd say that the blues don't have much power to them. Then all of a sudden you discover Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, and you realize that the blues are amazing. That's what happened to me when I discovered Li'l Wally. He's right up there with those great American artists. I have to say he's one of the true undiscovered musical gems left in this country."

[...]

Wally's fans often send him jokes in the mail... Then there was one from the former editor of Polka News: "He says that this guy dies and he goes to Heaven, and he hears polka music and drumming and singing, but especially drumming. And so he tells Saint Peter that he didn't know Li'l Wally was here in Heaven. And Saint Peter says, 'That's God playing the drums. He only thinks he's Li'l Wally.' I think that's very cute."

One often hears talk of singer-songwriters like Lata Mangeshkar and Sinn Sisamouth in terms of their sheer prolificacy, but Li'l Wally's analogously prodigious output has a twist to defy belief: "In the 61 years he's been performing, Wally has composed more than 2000 songs, all of them happy." On the matter of record releases, Rod's Music in Minnesota has no less than 96 Li'l Wally albums listed in their online catalogue. Neither the record jacket itself nor Google can give me any hint of the year this particular record was made, though I've ascertained its official title as Suggestive and Hot in the face of the less than straightforward textual format characteristic of a bygone vinyl era. Speaking of websearching, I nearly resigned myself to the conclusion I was pursuing a hopelessly obscure figure requiring more than casual sleuthing when my initial queries came up with paltry googits of a curiously unrelated flavor, and it's only when I tried some alternative keyword strategies that I chanced upon Powell's great piece and eventually realized I'd accidentally but repeatedly misconstrued Mr. Jagiello's name as "Li'l Willy" instead of the correct and googit-heavy "Li'l Wally".

Though my polka-loving father is still perfectly alive, his record-listening days seem behind him and for whatever reason a stack of his polka records was passed along to me some years back. As it were, I didn't even have a turntable until fairly recently. Writing up this quick entry I'd be remiss not to dig them out of the closet and see if there might be a Li'l Wally in there. Nothing of the sort. In fact, perusing the twenty-odd platters and playing a few for the first time, I'm struck that they seem to be part of a different polka lineage than Wally's. Spinning through well-worn discs like Bernie Witkowski Orchestra's Chicken Hop Polka, Connecticut Twins Orchestra's My Girl Duda, Frank Wojnarowski and His Orchestra's Polka Party with Frank, and Ray Budzilek's Domino Polka, I hear little of the raw humanity of Li'l Wally and the emphasis is squarely on more flashy playing or conventionally pretty vocals. In some ways I think I prefer the faster instrumental polka style some of these other groups refined to impressively virtuosic levels, especially the ripping clarinet playing. I frequently listen to 33rpm records on 45rpm to give a lift to boring music and even not-so-boring music, but some polka albums have the rare distinction of sounding like they're on 45rpm even when they're played on the intended 33rpm speed, though Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Music crew are certainly kindred spirits. Nevertheless, there's an element of songcraft in the Wally school that connects to something less tangible and more endearing, and the master himself clearly has that spirit and personality defining the singularities in any genre.

~Michael Anton Parker