Now, I don't mind accordions at all. In fact, they are right at home in certain kinds of music and especially evocative in, say, French popular music, such as backing Charles Aznavour or Edith Piaf. Scandinavian music as well.

My problem is with a fair percentage of accordion players. I remember in particular a woman who used to attend some of the "hoots" or song sessions in private homes during the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was into "songs of social protest," and she apparently felt her message was so important that she didn't have to abide by the usual courtesies—such as you don't start a new song yourself when someone else is halfway through a song they're singing. She would just honk away on her squeeze-box, drowning out guitarist and singer in progress, and launch right into her musical polemic. She was a royal pain in the patoot!!

Another one was when I was teaching in a suite of studios at the Broberg House of Music. I had been there for some months, teaching guitar (classic, not amplified electric) when this new accordion teacher made the rounds and told all the other teachers there that they would have to keep it down when she was giving a lesson because she would not tolerate any "extraneous noise." Pretty damned high-handed. But she didn't think anything of launching into a top-volume rendition of "Lady of Spain," drowning out everybody else's attempts to give lessons. Fortunately she left after a week or two. Two noisy, she complained.

And then there was a newly formed bluegrass group (guitar, fiddle, washtub bass, and full-speed 5-string banjo player) who used to show up at song fests from time to time. When they arrived, the ballad singers may just as well put their instruments away, because the crabgrassers would start in, drown everyone else out (they didn't consider British Isles or Anglo-American songs and ballads to be American folk music, hence dispensable), and go directly from one piece to another with no pause between.

Hoot killers.

It's not necessarily the instrument. It's the "musician."

Don Firth