City Rolls Out Polka Hall of Fame Plans
Move over rock ‘n’ roll and make room for the polka.
While Cleveland has been named as the future site for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, enthusiasts here, including Mayor George Voinovich, are raising money for a Polka Hall of Fame.
Why Cleveland?
“The base is here, the music is here,” said Tony Petkovsek, chairman of the committee organizing the museum. “Cleveland is the polka capital of America.”
Polka King Frankie Yankovic, who in 1986 became the first polka artist to win a Grammy, lives here when he’s not on tour with his band. He is one of an estimated 80,000 Slovenians living in Cleveland, more than anywhere else in the world outside Yugoslavia, Petkovsek said.
“Polkas have sparked up a bit,” Yankovic, 73, said last week from his hotel in New Orleans where he was playing polkas for the Fraternal Order of Eagles convention. “Now disc jockeys are playing it and teen-agers are starting to try it. They can’t really dance it but they and jump around and have a good time.”
Cleveland Style Emphasized
The National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame will be in the Euclid Civic Center. Petkovsek said it will document the evolution of Slovenian folk music into the Cleveland-style polka. Artifacts, recordings, button box accordions and items honoring individuals and bands will be on display, he said.
There is already a Polka Hall of Fame and Museum in Chicago--Yankovic was the first polka artist inducted there--but the Chicago museum’s emphasis is on the Polish polka, said Yankovic, who has been touring the country for 57 years, entertaining crowds at county fairs, conventions and polka festivals.
Petkovsek said Cleveland’s reputation as the polka capital and the emphasis on the Cleveland style are why the hall is being established here.
“Slovenian is more middle-of-the-road. Polish has more brass, more of a hop,” Petkovsek said. “Bohemian has more brass, and German is more oom pah pah--they’ll have tubas, baritones and trumpets. Slovenians will have an accordian, sax, drum, bass and perhaps a banjo and guitar.”
Voinovich, a museum committee member, said he first danced the polka as a boy and later, as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives in 1967, introduced legislation designating Cleveland as polka capital of the world.