BY DAN SCHEUERMAN

“It drives you crazy, ” says Bucky Halker. After combing archives, listening to more than three thousand scratchy 78s, and grinding down any good will his wife once harbored toward the Irish jig, he was bogged down by record company indifference.

Inspired by the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Halker, a musician and labor-song historian in Chicago, has spent the last six years compiling a recorded anthology of Illinois folk music. Finding the music was the fun part. The bureaucratic nightmare of tracking down its original copyright holders, sometimes a half-dozen bankruptcies removed, and forcing them to care—now that was a challenge. “They are not going to go back and put out some Swiss record from the 1930s. They're not going to put out a tamburitza band from whenever. There's not going to be big money made in that.”

"Polkabilly" stars the Moser Brothers pioneered a creolized form of polka.
—The Folklore Program and Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, University of Wisconsin

After six years of digging, listening, researching, and pleading, Halker and the Illinois Humanities Council have produced an exhaustive three-volume compilation. Folksongs of Illinois reels through country ballads, polkas, Mexican corridos, labor anthems, waltzes, gospel hymns, Croatian kolos, and bluegrass tunes over the course of sixty songs. What emerges—aside from disbelief at the manic energy and virtuosity of traditional dance tempos—is an aural ethnology of the state.

If folk music is, as its German root word volk suggests, the music of a given people, the folk music of Illinois represents the musics of several distinct peoples. Before World War II galvanized American culture into a discernable nationality, Halker says, the lines between immigrant groups were quite pronounced. Illinois itself was a cultural Frankenstein. It had gone through life as a French colony and then a British one; accepted wave after wave of Irish, Polish, Croatian, German, and Mexican immigrants; and attracted multitudes of African Americans during the Great Migration. “The state served as a crossroads between East and West, North and South,” say the liner notes, written by Halker and University of Wisconsin folklorist Nicole Saylor.

Groups that found themselves foreigners in Illinois often used their native styles to maintain a connection to the Old World. Folklorist and musician Paul Tyler notes in his essay from Volume 2 that Slavs, Poles, and Serbo-Croatians “chose to conserve their music and cultural identity through conscious separation from the mainstream.” Serbo-Croatian tamburitza music brought families together for kolos, or circle dances. The music is played on tambura, stringed instruments related to the lute that are made out of hollowed-out gourds. “Prijedorska Carsija,” a song performed by Tamburitza Orchestra Javor, captures the style, and sheds light on immigrant nostalgia with its lyrics romanticizing a marketplace in northwestern Bosnia.

Cover illustrations for the Folksongs of Illinois series were done by Chicago artist Heather McAdams.
—Illinois Humanities Council

Tyler's essay details a similar homesickness in the story of Sigurd Olsen, a Swedish fiddle player who arrived in Chicago in 1927. Having come from Darlana, “a province with a rich fiddling heritage,” Olsen missed his native music so much that he taught another immigrant, Ture Anderson, to play so he could have a musical partner. They played together every week, and as more pupils were added, the lessons became weekly parties, which Olsen held at home until his death in 1979. Don Peterson, one of Olsen's many students, is represented here by “Vallerskogsvalsen,” a traditional Swedish waltz he performed with his Nordic Cowboys.

Although many musical forms were preserved by insular immigrant communities, one venue where styles mixed was the dance hall. German fiddlers would play standards from the Anglo-American repertoire, writes Taylor, adding their own twist. A selection on Volume 1, "Dziura Polka" by the Polish Mountaineers, interprets a distinctly American song, "Camptown Races," as a polka, but with the addition of lap steel, an instrument associated with early country music. Halker describes the musical miscegenation from a professional standpoint: “You had to be able to play everything because there were so many ethnic communities. You'd show up at a wedding, and there were Poles there, but there were Serbs there, and there were Anglos there, and you had to play something for everybody.”

Some of the music preserved in Folksongs of Illinois simply could not be recreated today. Recordings such as “Jodler Landler” by the Moser Brothers and “I'm Coming Home” by the Staples Singers document singular talent. Halker says his first earful of the Moser Brothers completely shocked him. “They were unbelievable1v he says, “Harmony yodels—and they're just going at breakneck speed.” The Staples Singers selection, meanwhile, shocks by its sheer gravity. The gospel dirge is led by a single trembling guitar, and remains dynamic over its seven minutes' length by the textured wails of the four siblings.

Folksongs of Illinois offers a snapshot of a moment in music history that would not survive the homogenizing effect of radio. After World War II, says Halker, “radio becomes much more national in its programming, and the record industry becomes less interested in ethnic markets.” Meanwhile, he says, with the rising economic tide, “immigrants don't want to be immigrants either.” Their kids started buying Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney records. Ironically, vinyl records, the recording technology that preserved ethnic folk music, very nearly killed it.