@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 🚀⌛️

@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
I have to leave the history of the bodhrán to others

It’s too tempting to grab the story that it only got popular after Seán O Riada gave it a name on TV in the 60s

@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