In the early twentieth century, African Americans, recently arrived from the South, brought the syncopations and slurs of ragtime, jazz, and blues, influencing Czech musicians such as Romy Gosz (1911-1966).
Born in Rockwood, north of Manitowoc, Roman Louis Gosz took over his father's band in 1928. Between 1931 and his death, Gosz recorded roughly 170 tunes for eleven labels—including Columbia, Decca, King, Mercury, and Okeh—that established a "Bohemian" polka instrumentation and sound scarcely diminished in eastern Wisconsin.
The overall Gosz style favored a slow tempo and heavy feel, anchored by stolid tuba and trap drums. A piano or piano accordion contributed rhythm and fills. Gosz's penetrating trumpet, often in chorus with a second trumpet and saxophones, introduced the melody, with clarinets frequently answering a phrase or chiming in with a countermelody. Parts were loosely arranged and distinguished by slurs, slides, and surges that fused old country Czech feeling with hot jazz intonation.
To the dismay of high school band teachers—who favored round notes and square rhythms while valuing external (i.e., classical) rather than local traditions—Romy Gosz inspired scores of young musicians, and his legacy remains formidable decades after his death. Like Kentucky's Bill Monroe, whose pioneering Blue Grass Boys provided both a standard and a training ground for subsequent bluegrass generations, and Muddy Waters, who inflamed legions of urban performers with his amplified makeover of Mississippi Delta blues, Romy Gosz and his band won regional disciples to carry his nineteenth- and twentieth-century Czech American synthesis into a new millennium.
CZECH MUSIC IN WISCONSIN
James P. Leary
James P. Leary is a professor of folklore and Scandinavian studies and the director of the folklore program at the University of Wisconsin. Born and raised in northern Wisconsin, he has done fieldwork in the Upper Midwest since the early 1970s, contributing to the production of numerous documentary sound recordings, public radio programs, and films. Leary is also the author of Midwestern Folk Humor, Minnesota Polka, Yodeling in Dairyland: A History of Swiss Music in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin Folklore coauthor (with Richard March) of Down Home Dairyland.
Czech immigrants initially settled rural Wisconsin in the 1850s, clustering in distinct regions, each with its particular topography and ethnic mix. In hilly, unglaciated west central Wisconsin, fanning from the lower Wisconsin River valley northward, Czechs clustered around such communities as Muscoda, Wauzeka, Prairie du Chien, Hillsboro, and Yuba, alongside Yankees, Upland Southerners, African Americans, Irish, Norwegians, and Germans. In eastern Wisconsin's Kewaunee and Manitowoc counties, fertile flatlands hugging Lake Michigan's shores, the Czechs of Pilsen, Stangelville, Tisch Mills, Francis Creek, Mishicot, and Two Creeks mingled with French, Walloon Belgians, and Germans. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a second influx of land-seeking, former peasant Czech Americans—Pennsylvania miners, Chicago factory hands, Cedar Rapids slaughterhouse laborers, and Nebraska sandhill farmers—to logged off or "cutover" acreage in such northern Wisconsin communities as Haugen, Moquah, and Phillips. Their fellow settlers included kindred Slavs—Slovaks, Poles, and Croatians—as well as Scandinavians and Germans.
Primarily Catholics, but also Hussite Lutherans and Freethinkers, Wisconsin's Czechs were widely dubbed "Bohemians" by themselves and their neighbors. Most hailed from Cechy, the westernmost sector of present-day Czech Republic, which, in the nineteenth century, was politically dominated and partially settled by Germans who called the place Böhmen, or Bohemia. Because Wisconsin is America's most German state, with more than half of its current population claiming German ancestry, the persistent Bohemian tag is hardly surprising. Small wonder, too, that, for several generations, Wisconsin's Czechs, as in Europe, relied on German rather than English as a second language, and that they were far more likely to modify their Central European customs slowly than to succumb quickly to the so-called American ways of Anglo-Protestants.
Seasonal and life-cycle observances, churches, taverns, and fraternal halls linked Czech immigrants and sustain their contemporary descendants, often contributing to a flurry of festivals emergent since the rise of ethnic American consciousness in the 1970s. In Haugen, one example among many, weddings, funerals, the springtime blessing of seeds, and late-summer harvest celebrations have revolved around Holy Trinity Catholic Church.
The typically Wisconsin combination tavern, store, dance hall, and service station established by the Sokup family served locals into the early 1970s, while the venerable ZCBJ Hall—affiliated with the Západni Cesko-Bratská Jednota (Western Fraternal Life Association)—still offers a well-used stage and dance floor. The community launched Haugen Days in the late 1970s, featuring Czech food and music. Indeed, polka music is especially popular in Haugen and throughout Czech Wisconsin.
Although "polka music" has become a generic term encompassing polkas, waltzes, ländlers, schottisches, mazurkas, and other dances, the polka itself is a couple dance in 2/4 time that originated in the Bohemian villages of northwestern Czechoslovakia, near the Polish border. By the late 1830s, the village polka had entered the genteel parlors and courtly ballrooms of Prague, and by 1845, Bohemian military bands and dancing masters had carried polkas to Vienna and Paris. Soon they were the fashion in London and urban America. The polka's rise coincided with the development of the accordion, the standardization of wind instruments prominently used in military bands, the mass movement of European peasants to urban centers and North America, and the transformation of feudal monarchies into modern nation-states. Czech immigrants to Wisconsin, consequently,
brought accordions, fiddles, an array of brass and reed instruments, marches and couple dances, and an evolving repertoire of songs, both starkly realistic and sentimental, regarding peasant life, European wars, experiences in their adopted country, and fond hopes for their abandoned homeland.
In 1868, Martin Rott, Sr., an immigrant, established a Bohemian brass band in Yuba that consisted of his own bass horn or tuba, a baritone horn, a cornet, two clarinets, and a violin. Performing solemn marches for funeral processions, the Yuba Bohemian Band, active until the early 1950s, specialized in rollicking dance tunes for weekend gatherings, weddings, Fourth of July galas, and a two-day pre-Lenten festivity, Maso Pust. Its sound persists today in the playing of the She and He Haugh Band at Yuba's summer Ceský; Dm (Czech Day).
As a second-generation Czech American born in 1875 on a Prairie du Chien area
farm, Albert Wachuta learned to play the accordion and picked up songs "mostly from my mother, but some from other people too because in [those] days there was a lot of Bohemian singing" (Leary 1987, p. 48). One Wachuta favorite was the fatalistic account of a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army from his mother's home village, Bechene, but made over in Wisconsin as "Vojak od Prairie du Chien" ("Soldier from Prairie du Chien"). Another, "Koline, Koline," was the bitter-sweet invocation of a city on a beautiful plain where wars raged.
The overlapping combination of informal singing, domestic squeezebox playing, and organized brass bands distinguished most of Czech Wisconsin. For every respected accordionist or concertinist (Albert Wachuta, Yuba's Joe Yansky, Haugen's Wencel Mancl, and Phillips's Frank Hatina), there was an equally esteemed brass band (Martin Rott's Yuba Bohemian Band, the Sokup and the Subrt bands of Haugen, and the Peroutka Orchestra of Phillips). In the more populous Czech communities of Manitowoc and Kewaunee counties, however, brass bands dominated, with the Pilsen Band (affectionately known as the "Pilsen Pissers" because of their fondness for piwo, or beer) setting the standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet whatever their instrumentation, Wisconsin Czech bands favored stately tempos, rich arrangements augmenting main melodies with introductory and transitional flourishes, and a love of vibrato, slight dissonances, improvisation, and feeling.
Grounded in Old World traditions, Wisconsin Czech musicians were nonetheless open to change. As early as 1870, Charles Mon Pleasure, a Franco-American fiddler, recruited Czechs to play quadrilles for high-tone balls:
At that time we used the old-fashioned post horns and bugles, so we had the first violin, second violin, double bass, post horn, clarinet, and bugle. They were all Bohemians but myself…. The first ball that we played was for old George F. Switzer, a big old fat Dutchman, a darned good fellow too…. I had the only quadrille band in Prairie du Chien. Jim Williams, a Negro, had a band across the Mississippi at South McGregor [iowa]. (Mon Pleasure 1910; quoted in Leary 1997, p. 37)
In the early twentieth century, African Americans, recently arrived from the South, brought the syncopations and slurs of ragtime, jazz, and blues, influencing Czech musicians such as Romy Gosz (1911-1966).
Born in Rockwood, north of Manitowoc, Roman Louis Gosz took over his father's band in 1928. Between 1931 and his death, Gosz recorded roughly 170 tunes for eleven labels—including Columbia, Decca, King, Mercury, and Okeh—that established a "Bohemian" polka instrumentation and sound scarcely diminished in eastern Wisconsin.
The overall Gosz style favored a slow tempo and heavy feel, anchored by stolid tuba and trap drums. A piano or piano accordion contributed rhythm and fills. Gosz's penetrating trumpet, often in chorus with a second trumpet and saxophones, introduced the melody, with clarinets frequently answering a phrase or chiming in with a countermelody. Parts were loosely arranged and distinguished by slurs, slides, and surges that fused old country Czech feeling with hot jazz intonation.
To the dismay of high school band teachers—who favored round notes and square rhythms while valuing external (i.e., classical) rather than local traditions—Romy Gosz inspired scores of young musicians, and his legacy remains formidable decades after his death. Like Kentucky's Bill Monroe, whose pioneering Blue Grass Boys provided both a standard and a training ground for subsequent bluegrass generations, and Muddy Waters, who inflamed legions of urban performers with his amplified makeover of Mississippi Delta blues, Romy Gosz and his band won regional disciples to carry his nineteenth- and twentieth-century Czech American synthesis into a new millennium.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barden, Thomas. (1982). "The Yuba Masopust Festival." Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 8(1):48-51.
Greene, Victor. (1992). A Passion jor Polkas: Old Time Ethnic Music in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Janda, Robert. (1976). "Entertainment Tonight: An Account of Bands in Manitowoc County Since 1900." Occupational Monograph 28. Manitowoc, WI: Manitowoc County Historical Society.
Leary, James P. (1987). The Wisconsin Patchwork: A Commentary on Recordings from the Helene Stratman Thomas Collection of Wisconsin Folk Music. Madison: University of Wisconsin Department of Continuing Education in the Arts.
——. (1997). "Czech Polka Music in Wisconsin." In Musics of Multicultural America, ed. Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen, pp. 25-47. New York: Schirmer Books.
Leary, James P., and March, Richard. (1996). Down Home Dairyland: A Listener's Guide. Madison: Wisconsin Arts Board, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Wisconsin Folk Museum. Cassettes/book package of forty half-hour radio programs and companion essays, including "The Manitowoc Bohemian Sound" and "Czech and Slovak Music in Wisconsin."
RECORDINGS
Deep Polka: Dance Music from the Midwest. 1998. Smithsonian Folkways CD 40088. Includes performances by Croatian, Czech, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Polish, and Slovenian polka bands from Wisconsin.
Polkaland Records has reissued the bulk of the recordings made by Romy Gosz and many other northeastern Wisconsin polka bands from the 1930s through the 1970s. Contact Greg Leider, Polkaland Records, 109 North Milwaukee Street, Fredonia, WI 53021.
Start prev 19 of 28 next End
Czech Music in Wisconsin © 2002
_forumlogo.png.a607ef20a6e0c299ab2aa6443aa1f32e.png)
