Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk MusicIncludes CD

by James P. Leary

A freewheeling blend of continental European folk music and the songs, tunes, and dances of Anglo and Celtic immigrants, polkabilly has enthralled American musicians and dancers since the mid-19th century. From West Virginia coal camps and east Texas farms to the Canadian prairies and America's Upper Midwest, scores of groups have wed squeezeboxes with string bands, hoe downs with hambos, and sentimental Southern balladry with comic "up north" broken-English comedy, to create a new and uniquely American sound.
The Goose Island Ramblers played as a house band for a local tavern in Madison, Wisconsin from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. The group epitomized the polkabilly sound with their wild mixture of Norwegian fiddle tunes, Irish jigs, Slovenian polkas, Swiss yodels, old time hillbilly songs, "Scandihoovian" and "Dutchman" dialect ditties, frost-bitten Hawaiian marches, and novelty numbers on the electric toilet plunger. In this original study, James P. Leary illustrates how the Ramblers' multiethnic music combined both local and popular traditions, and how their eclectic repertoire challenges prevailing definitions of American folk music. He thus offers the first comprehensive examination of the Upper Midwest's folk musical traditions within the larger context of American life and culture.
Impeccably researched, richly detailed and illustrated, and accompanied by a compact disc of interviews and performances, James P. Leary's How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music creates an unforgettable portrait of a polkabilly band and its world.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

At once the rollicking history of the good timey Goose Island Ramblers, a musical ethnography and thoughtful piece of academic research, a call to expand our collective notion of what folk music is, Polkabilly is also one of the more enjoyable books on music I have ever read.

Polkabilly - the music - was born in the upper Midwest as a fusion of non-Anglo European dance music, folk songs and subject matter with American folk music at large, most often considered of Anglo/Scot/Irish and African American traditions. Leary, for my money, succeeds in explaining the marginalization of polkabilly within the greater American folk culture and why it deserves an equal footing at the table.

All of this might be rather dry and academic were it not for Leary's passion and obvious fondness for his subject, the Goose Island Ramblers, a multigenerational troupe that held court during the 1960s at Glenn & Ann's (the modern day Nitty Gritty), a mom and pop pub a stone's throw from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This is no tale of rebellious counter culture, but rather one of a blue-collar band that found its audience in a mix of working class folks and open-eared college students. If anything the Ramblers appear revolutionary for bringing unlikely people together to simply enjoy music rather than change the world. If that is an oversimplification then I must admit to my fondness for this band and its history, which I discovered just recently. Oddly enough, in telling the Ramblers story, Leary might as well, after changing the genres and decades, be telling the story of the Replacements or Guided by Voices.

The book also includes a cd that provides a choppy overview of the band's music. A stronger and more enjoyable introduction to the Ramblers is "The Best of the Goose Island Ramblers" on Cuca Records of Mt. Horeb Wis.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on the neglected world of Upper Midwest "roots" music.