Polka

Polka is a fast duple-meter dance, typically 140 to 160 BPM, anchored by accordion and brass. Tubas or string basses mark the off-beats, snare drum chops on top, and clarinet or trumpet handles the melody, with the accordion as the unmissable lead voice. The rhythm is direct, predictable and physically buoyant — the music exists to make people jump. Vocals appear in some traditions but the form is fundamentally instrumental dance music.

Polka emerged in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, in the 1830s and was sweeping Prague ballrooms by 1840 and Vienna shortly after. It became the great middle-class dance craze of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Czech and Polish immigrants carried it to the United States, where it took particularly strong root in the Upper Midwest and along the Texas-Mexico border, producing the regional styles of Wisconsin, Chicago and Tejano music.

Listen to how the off-beat (the boom-chick) is split between bass and snare or accordion bellows — the tightness of that pattern is what separates a good band from a mediocre one. Regional variants differ mainly in tempo, vocal style and the front-line instrument.

Jaromír Vejvoda's Škoda lásky (1934), better known in English as the Beer Barrel Polka, is the canonical single. Frankie Yankovic's Pennsylvania Polka (1942) is the American-Midwest counterpart.

Vejvoda wrote the Beer Barrel Polka melody as a young brewery musician; it later became one of the most-recorded songs of the twentieth century, in dozens of languages, and was played by Allied bands across Europe at the end of World War II.