@catsalad
Pirates never played accordions
🏴☠️🚫🪗
(Because they hadn’t been invented yet)
Accordions were invented during the 1800s Industrial Revolution at the same time as the telegraph, steam engine and the typewriter
100 years after the Golden Age of Piracy 1600s–1700s
So every pirate movie with an accordionist is a science fiction movie with a time-travel sub plot 🚀⌛️
yeah... i go through this at every ren faire, pirate movie, etc. showing a guitar. what we'd recognize as a guitar was a 19th century evolution of earlier instruments... i wasn't a wizard in history but do know that the renaissance was pre-1800s...
🤯
Despite your username, I had to look this up and it's true. Absolutely wild.
there truly are experts in every single thing on Mastodon (not sarcastic).
@Jeanniewarner @davidr @AccordionBruce @catsalad
Yes, the concertina was the invention of Sir Charles Wheatstone, patented 1829, public launch 1835, so Tom the cabin boy couldn't have used one to play the Trumpet Hornpipe for Captain Pugwash[1] on The Black Pig. 3:O(> There were lots of competing designs, so as with computers: "Any student of the concertina has to choose between ten incompatible operating systems."[2] 3:O))>
[1] Pugwash is coeval with this moose!
[2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-concertina-celebrating-sir-charles-wheatstones-invention-at-kings
@Jeanniewarner @Cadbury_Moose @davidr @catsalad
You’re right!
Outside my areas but seems like the great Pirate Queen Zheng Yi Sao might have had South East Asian free reeds (variants inspired early accordions) onboard
And they would likely/definitely have been around on shore
Now that’s a story to be told! 🪗 🏴☠️ 🐉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao
@Jeanniewarner @Cadbury_Moose @davidr @catsalad
We were just talking about the Chinese sheng, mouth organ last week
https://mastodon.social/@AccordionBruce/116340900565911951
Where I linked to an article but didn’t include the author’s name (making it hard to search up)
How the sheng became a harp,
by the very cool 😎
Carmel Raz
Sound Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume 6, 2020 - Issue 2: Special Issue: Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux
https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1794648
Title refers to the harmonica mouth-harp not
@AccordionBruce @catsalad dude..
That's off the charts cool trivia.
@adam_wysokinski @catsalad
The Jungian telegraph needs to be included at least
Developed by the same guy as the English concertina, Charles Wheatstone
He also measured the speed of light, did that circuit thing, and invented 3-D glasses 😵💫
(Which IIRC is the title of a #JohnWyndham #SciFi short story in The Seeds of Time which defined the term.)
@AccordionBruce @catsalad It fucks me up knowing that the bodhrán was invented in the 19th century, cus it feels like something that must have been around forever.
Granted it does depend on who you ask, there are people who insist it's ancient, but I think it's a question of how rigorously you define it. Like frame drums are probably older than dirt, but we're talking about a specific type of frame drum.
@Owlor @catsalad
The origin-stories of traditions are some of my favourite things
Like ~every~ tradition has to have been started by real live people just sitting around one day
The accordion is particularly interesting because it gained real global popularity after the 1860s or so
And recording started in the 1890s
So we have records of people who might have known the very first players of some “traditional” styles
@Owlor @catsalad
Folk glorious of the 1800s and early 1900s hated the squeezeboxes
So they never talked about them or recorded them or interviewed any of the players
So folklorists can’t do something similar to a comparative analysis of today’s research on the impact of the boombox 100 years later
Mostly it makes you conscious of the question of the historical origins of “authenticity” and how it was used as a sales-pitch, or simply nostalgic amnesia
@Owlor @catsalad
So when I learned Bill Monroe invented #Bluegrass at the same time be-boppers invented modern #jazz… 🎷 🪕
But one music still projects as “modern” while the other has an aura that’s more and more antique and folkloric
Monroe’s mom played #accordion and was a really good fiddle player, and as far as I can tell, no interviewer ever asked him about that 😠
(The key question? “What kind? And what repertoire?” Because a button accordion would’ve indicated an older tradition)
@matthewskelton @Theosoreass @catsalad
They gave Spencer Tracy a Hurdy Gurdy in Captains Courageous
Which is funny, because Kipling features an #accordion in the book, set contemporaneous to its 1897 publication
We can guess the era because the rich kid’s dad is a railway magnate and steams over to pick him up
https://youtu.be/sXDasPDVJWM
@BoredomFestival @catsalad
There was lively chatter on message boards when the young adult novel series about Mary “Jacky” Faber featured her playing a little Accordion
They start in 1801 which puts them before the 1829 development of the first accordions
It wasn’t featured much after that until the very last book (published 14 years later, two years after the author died) when she played it again, almost as if he was tossing one to all of the people who complained 🪗 😂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Jack_(novel)
@AccordionBruce
This makes me love pirate movies even more.
@sellathechemist @catsalad
Alan Lomax went to Europe in the 1950s to escape the McCarthy era
And he seems to have come back with a deep hatred of the Accordion
He called it a “pestiferous instrument”
And seemed to apply a generic filter based on the fact that it had chased around fiddle and bagpipe traditions in many parts of Europe
Not unearned. But not helpful
@antares @sellathechemist @catsalad
There’s people who study just Lead Belly and I’m no expert
But I think Lead Belly’s only five known “windjammer” 🪗 recordings were made late in his life in the 40s by Mos Asch
They’re all on this set
https://folkways.si.edu/leadbelly
Not sure he owned an accordion when Alan Lomax knew him
He’d picked one up again, maybe in nostalgia for the instrument he learned first back in 1909
Or because he thought it would sell records? Who knows? Nobody asked 😠
Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, the first career-spanning box set dedicated to the American music icon, is a 5 CD, 140-page, large-format book featuring 5 hours of music with 16 unreleased tracks. The limited-edition poster and t-shirt package has sold out. Lead Belly is “the …
@antares @sellathechemist @catsalad
Ironically all the folklorists wanted to hear was his Mexican 12 string guitar, which wasn’t traditional at all
They never asked about his little “windjammer” button accordion
Or the Black square-dance tradition it was played for that dated back to before the Civil War
And that his accordion style predated his 12 string guitar, and blues guitar in general
But nobody knew or thought to ask 🤷🏽♀️
And those Pirates you mention also didn't sing shanties; because they hadn't been invented yet.
Shanties were the work songs of merchant seamen from approx. the late 1820s and reported to be dying out in the late 1870s.
So, a 19th century working-class culture hijacked into "Pirate" fantasy-land.
PS. also, no, not every song mentioning the sea or sailors is a shanty.
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