The Chemnitzer Concertina: A History and an Accolade
The Chemnitzer concertina, sometimes dubbed the “German concertina” in America’s Midwest, is a boxy bellows and reed instrument less well known than such “squeezebox” cousins as the English concertina, the button accordion, the piano accordion, and that mainstay of Argentinian tango music, the bandonion.
Invented in the Saxon city of Chemnitzer in 1834, and manufactured thereabouts through the mid-1960s, the concertina was brought to Chicago by promoters and performers in 1893 where it flourished, eventually captivating musicians on either side of Lake Michigan and, especially, throughout the hinterlands of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Ever a working class instrument with strong ethnic associations, the Chemnitzer concertina has been embraced in the new world by Saxon, German Bohemian (Sudeten German), Czech, and Polish immigrants and their offspring.
Nowadays, all but forgotten in the land of its invention, the instrument continues to be made by skilled craftsmen in small Midwestern shops.
Due to several influential bandleaders – particularly Chicago’s Walter “L’il Wally” Jagiello, and Hans “Whoopee John” Wilfahrt of New Ulm, MN – the concertina is a mainstay of the German American or “Dutchman” and the Chicago Polish “Honky” and “Dyno” polka sounds.
Drawing productively on a pair of his prior books – “The Whoopee John Wilfahrt Dance Band” (1992), and “German Bohemians,” “The Quiet Immigrants” (1995) – Rippley’s well-researched Chemnitzer study traces the instrument from its German origins to its establishment in the American Midwest, considers its diffusion throughout the region by zealous promoters and distributors, profiles two generations of enormously influential concertina makers and performers (Minnesotans Christy Hengel of New Ulm, and Jerry Minar of New Prague), offers a primer on “How the Concertina is Played,” and sketches the experiences of performers amidst house parties, dance halls, and festivals, and on record, radio, and television.
Amassing hard-won evidence from field research with concertina players and makers in Germany and America, Rippley likewise constructs the instrument’s story from business records, correspondence, promotional fliers, trade journals, and photographs – hundreds of them!
Nearly every page is enriched with several images, most accompanied by succinct remarks detailing some phase of the instrument’s history or profiling one of its players.
In addition, a trio of appendices offers portraits of 201 inductees to the Concertina Hall of Fame, album covers for 141 concertina-driven polka bands, and color plates of 48 concertina models extending from the 1830s to the early 21st century.
Hence, “The Chemnitzer Concertina” succeeds as both a history and a richly illustrated encyclopedia.
Rippley’s book is also, as he puts it, an accolade. His warm relationship with scores of concertina players is evident throughout. Their personal collections and collective memories constitute the critical “archive” upon which the book is based, and they will likely figure as its primary market.
Yet, this book belongs in every university library and on the shelf of every scholar interested in the profound relationship between musical instruments and ethnic identities in such multi-cultural societies as America’s.
We have only a few such studies – on the Ojibwe dance drum, the Cajun accordion, the African American banjo – and so we welcome Rippley’s illumination of “The Chemnitzer Concertina.”
“The Chemnitzer Concertina: A History and an Accolade,” by Lavern J. Rippley. Northfield, MN: St. Olaf College Press. 2006.
