Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) ⁠1d ago
Tell me some thing blasphemous and/or sacrilegious 
Show threadAccordionBruce23h ago

@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 🚀⌛️

Show threadSellaTheChemist18h ago
@AccordionBruce @catsalad The accordion displaced the bagpipes (in their many variants) across Europe, pushing them to the margins - mountain valleys (Appenines, Pyrenees) on the mainland or islands (Sardinia, Ireland. Scotland).
Show threadAccordionBruce14h ago

@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

Show threadSellaTheChemist6h ago
@AccordionBruce @catsalad By the way, where is the Alan Lomax archive? A producer friend introduced me to it when we were Hutu g for music for a radio programme…
Show threadAccordionBruce

@sellathechemist @catsalad
Again not the expert

Lomax has a lot of recordings at the library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2004004.ms010201/

And other stuff here I believe
https://culturalequity.org/alan-lomax/friends/ledbetter/chronology

#FolkMusic

1:07pmToot!
Show threadAccordionBruce1h ago

@sellathechemist @catsalad
I had a lot of fun with one of the more interesting chapters in my book I think, the somewhat Baffler-style trenchant, “The Folk Revival: The Accordion Betrayed”

I tried not to make fun of Alan Lomax and others too much. But at least one reader might have complained. Figures like him did so much good though they can take a ribbing

Wish I could’ve asked him about his accordion phobia though