@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 🚀⌛️

@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 😠

@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 🤷🏽‍♀️