Hello there and thanks for stopping by. My name is Howard Bridgewater, but nobody has called me Howard since my mother passed, so it's Howie. I'm 58 years old and I sell milking systems, bulk tanks and barn equipment to dairy farmers across six counties of east-central Wisconsin, which means I put about forty thousand miles a year on a Buick and know every back road and every good kitchen table between Fond du Lac and Green Bay.

And on the weekends I play the accordion. I've been playing since I was nine years old, and for the last twenty-three years I've led a four-piece polka band that plays weddings, church festivals, Friday fish fries and every Oktoberfest within a hundred miles that'll have us. Most of them will.

My wife Janice got me this computer last Christmas so I could do my sales reports at home, and I've been doing this page instead. Don't tell my district manager.

Yes, that's really the name. When we started in 1976 I was already selling dairy equipment, and our first drummer said if I was going to talk about cows all night anyway we might as well be named after them. It stuck. We wear red vests, white shirts and green ties, and people come up at every single job and ask where the black-and-white spots are. We're working on it.

What we play: polkas, mostly, and waltzes, which are the other half of any good polka dance. Plus schottisches, a few laendlers, a two-step or a fox trot for the folks who need a breather, some old country tunes, the Chicken Dance (yes, we know), and the Beer Barrel Polka, which we could play in our sleep and once or twice probably have. We do a little bit of all three American polka styles, which you can read about further down, but our sound leans Slovenian because that's how Dad played and that's how I learned.

I play a piano accordion, the kind with a little piano keyboard for your right hand. People who play the button box (the diatonic kind, with buttons on both sides) like to tease us piano accordion players, and we tease them right back. It's all in fun. Mostly.

The one I play now is a black Excelsior I bought in 1971 with money I saved from my first two years on the road. It's a full-size: 41 piano keys, 120 bass buttons for the left hand, and four sets of reeds. It weighs right around 27 pounds, which was nothing when I was thirty and is something now. It's tuned on the "wet" side, which means two of the middle sets of reeds are tuned just a hair apart so they beat against each other and give you that shimmer. That shimmer is the polka sound to me. A dry-tuned accordion sounds fine for a church hymn, but it doesn't make anybody want to get up and dance.

The first one was a little red 12-bass Hohner that Dad found at an auction in the spring of 1950, when I was nine. It still sits on the shelf over the piano. Twelve bass buttons and two octaves of keys, and Dad said if I could make that one sing I could make anything sing.

Care tips, since people ask: keep it in its case when you're not playing it. Don't leave it in a hot car or a cold one, because the reeds are set in wax and heat is no friend of wax. Always close the bellows and strap them shut before you set it down. And once every few years take it to a good repair man to have the reeds checked. Mine goes to a fellow over by Manitowoc who has been fixing accordions longer than I've been playing them.

My father, Franklin Bridgewater, milked forty cows on a farm in Calumet County his whole life, and on Saturday nights in the 1930s and '40s he played accordion at barn dances, wedding dances and the old dance halls all over that part of the state. He never made a record and he never had a band with a name. He just played, and people danced.

He taught me at the kitchen table after chores, on that little red Hohner. He'd sit across from me on a kitchen chair with his own accordion and play a phrase, and I'd play it back, and if I got it wrong he'd play it again, slower, and never say a word about it. That's how I learned. I didn't read music until I was in high school band, and to this day I'd rather hear a tune than see it.

The first time I played for people was a cousin's wedding when I was twelve. Dad and I played side by side, and he leaned over during the Clarinet Polka and said, "Smile, Howie, they can see you." I still think about that every time I play. Smile. They can see you.

Dad passed away in the fall of 1991, at 73. We played at his funeral lunch in the church basement, the whole band, because he'd told my mother years before that he'd haunt anybody who played anything slow. We played the Clarinet Polka. I'm not ashamed to say I didn't make it through it. Gus kept time and Loren took the melody on the tuba until I could come back in.

I play his accordion at Christmas. The rest of the year it stays in its case, where it's safe.

The polka started out in Bohemia back in the 1830s and danced its way all over Europe, and then the immigrants brought it over here. Every group that came brought its own way of playing it, so in America there isn't one polka, there are several. These are the big three. Polka people can argue about this stuff all night, so please take this as one accordion player's opinion.

There are other kinds too: the Eastern Polish style out in New England and New York, the Czech and German bands in Texas, the Mexican norteño players who took the polka and the button accordion and made something all their own. If I've left out your favorite, write and tell me about it.

1. Take your partner in a regular ballroom hold, man starting on his left foot and lady on her right, and listen for the beat: polka music goes ONE-two, ONE-two, nice and quick.

2. The basic step is "step, close, step," with a little hop sneaked in just before the next step, so it comes out hop-step-close-step, over and over, first leading with one foot and then the other.

3. Once you've got that, turn as you go and travel around the floor counterclockwise with everybody else, and don't worry about getting it perfect, because the only real rule of the polka is that you have to be smiling by the end of the song.

(Yes, that last one is a long sentence. I'm an accordion player, not an English teacher.)

We've played something like four hundred weddings since 1976. Here's what we've learned. Brides, grooms and mothers of the bride, please read before you write.

1. We play the Beer Barrel Polka once. Twice if the bride's uncle asks. Three times only if the bride's grandmother asks, and then with pleasure.
2. No Chicken Dance before nine o'clock. Let people eat their supper in peace.
3. The dollar dance goes as long as there's a line. We don't stop playing while somebody's still waiting with a dollar in their hand. That's how Loren got his reputation for stamina.
4. Your first dance is your choice. If it's something we don't know, give us two weeks and a tape, and Donnie will work it out. We've done polkas, waltzes, country songs and one Elvis tune.
5. We take a fifteen-minute break every hour. Four men in vests under the lights need water.
6. Nobody in the band drinks on the job. Gus may have one beer during the last set. It is a tradition and we respect it.
7. We play to the dancers, not to the walls. If the floor's full of grandmas we play waltzes. If it's full of the groom's college buddies, we play the fast ones until they beg for mercy.
8. We don't use a drum machine, a tape or a keyboard that sounds like a band. Four guys, four instruments, the way Dad would have wanted.
9. We will play the last waltz at the end of the night. Every time. And everybody dances.

For dates and rates, please e-mail me. We're getting booked into next summer already, and yes, we still have a few open Saturdays left for 2000. Imagine that. 2000.

Fish fries, church festivals, four Oktoberfests, a Polka Mass, a Halloween dance, a Deer Widows' Ball and a New Year's Eve party for the year 2000, Y2K or no Y2K.

See the Fall 1999 Schedule

Other Pages I Like

• The Wiley Burkhalter Orchestra, 1952-1995: Leon Burkhalter's page about his dad's band, forty-three years of Saturday night polkas, waltzes and schottisches in Green County. A son writing about his dad's music. I read it twice.
• Gwendolyn's Champagne Music Page: Gwendolyn danced to Lawrence Welk in 1936 and still watches him every Saturday. Mr. Welk was an accordion man too, so he's family.