Polka happiness

Polka Happiness celebrates an extraordinarily durable style of dance music that was immensely popular in nineteenth-century Europe and has delighted millions of Americans throughout the twentieth century. Virtually ignored by scholars until recently, polka performance remains an important part of Polish-American family gatherings, weddings, local institutions, and national festivals. For twenty years, Charles Keil, Angeliki V. Keil, and Dick Blau have been a part of the social world of polka music and dancing in the Polish-American bars, church halls, and ballrooms of Rust Belt America. Their exuberant descriptions and images reflect the infectious enthusiasm embodied in polka sociability. The polka scene is more than music and dance. It is a year-round carnival that is improvised anew every weekend: a secular ritual full of high jinks and theater, hilarity and tears, that draws its power from sources deep in both Polish and American experience. After tracing the history of polka's spread throughout the world and the emergence of its distinct styles in the United States, the authors focus on Polish-American polkas in Buffalo and Chicago, comparing them with Slovenian-American polka