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A patron at an Oktoberfest gig might wrote:...so when did you begin playing this type of music?

...and I would NEVER assault any of those people with all of this, but - since you peeps are obviously bored...

As a mid-teen, I had been playing quite a few guitar and bass guitar jobs - many of which didn't involve actually reading music, and which either involved, "playing by ear", learning tunes on the fly (at gigs), or reading chord changes (with some occasional "notes on staves" when specific pitches needed to be played").

Unlike parts of the country such as South Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, there is no strong tradition of central European ethnic music in the Mid-South (mostly three-chord "county" and "R&B").

In the 1950's into the early 1960's, sending children off accordion lessons (nationwide - actually an entire accordion store/school in Memphis, called "Central Academy of Music" - which was soon to be replaced with guitar lessons) was a big thing, but - later - the best and most-interested of those young accordion players became (pop/rock/jazz) adult pianists - yet never lost their accordion skills.

As Oktoberfest (again, in this part of the country) was only an excuse for society folks' "theme parties" - and there were no formally -formulated 12 - 20 piece "German bands" (with no folders of printed sheet music) in this part of the country, those latent accordion players dusted off their instruments, pulled melodies and chord changes from old scratchy public library l.p.'s onto pieces of typing paper (plus, a few polkas/waltzes that they had learned as childhood students), pulled in a good jazz multi-horn player, a good jazz drummer (singing with a boom mike definitely being a plus), a bass player (bass and TUBA - all the mucho-better), a pretty singer, a couple of wives stitched up some fake lederhosen, and -thus - seasonal Mid-Southern regional "polka gigs" (again: referred to by the musicians as GIGS, but not as BANDS) became yet another dependable income stream.

Actually - for a year - in 1980 (when the Memphis music scene was booming enough for it to be a no-brainer for me to walk away from a university teaching job and return home) - there was an amazingly elaborately-decorated German bar built in downtown Memphis, called "Wolfgang's". The band featured an accordion, bass/tuba, multi-woodwind, trumpet, drummer, and female vocalist. That having been said, traditional central European music (wrinkled lead sheets stuffed into an onstage portfolio, but no music stands) was mixed about 55%:45% with rock, pop, country, R&B, etc. This place was a huge flash of light for about a year (with the band playing four hours a night, seven nights a week, was wildly popular for seven or eight months) and then - as the college crowd grew weary of it - went down in flames, and was closed. However (though we're dying off) that left Memphis with perhaps twelve to fifteen jazz musicians who also (then) possessed an "extemporaneous" central European folk music (polkas, waltzes, schottisches, etc.) repertoire. We had a bunch of fun, and the singer (a statuesque German singer with a sultry Marlene Dietrich type of voice, who also had been part of the cast of the early/mid-1960's national TV show, *"Hootenanny") could do (yeah...and usually not before 9:30 P.M.) amazing renditions of the Janis Joplin rep.

...so "polka/German" music - around this part of the country - is not quite like it is in heavily-German-populated parts of the country (where - again - there are formal bands with quite a few players, and written out music...but if you might be interested in hearing four guys who can play all the verses of several Strauss waltzes - without looking at pieces of paper, and a multi-horn (mostly: pop/jazz) player who can pick up a flute and ad lib 12-to-the-bar on any of the strains of any of those waltzes - you might view "what we do around here" as a bit of a curiosity.
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootenanny_(TV_series)
https://cdnmetv.metv.com/bfSCs-15154359 ... enanny.png

"What this town needs is more X"

Make X.

Create market for X.

Sell X.

pretty much...
Luckily - when that bar owner (owned a well-established restaurant/bar facing the Mississippi RIver which backed up directly to the German bar "experiment"...literally a back-stairs trip down to the other restaurant, called "The Pier" - we had a ready-to-roll-out product for him.

...and we knew enough about Oktoberfests to know about grand marches, the silly "Schnitzelbank" song, (later: the bird song, aka "chicken dance" - which - right then - was becoming popular at German music events), toasts - etc., etc. - to not have "authentic" people ever come up and tell us "you're doing it wrong".

I was in an Army Reserves band in the northern Chicago area many years ago. One day my Commander called me while I was getting on the train heading to my regular job. Me- oh shiz it's the boss, turn up the volume, S P E A K C L E A R L Y Bob! He said that another band in our division was filling in for the Army Band in Alaska, they needed a tuba player for their strolling jazz band and he had suggested I could fill in with them. They had 1 tuba player for their brass quintet but the new tuba player for the jazz group was stuck in BCT Limbo (Navy NCO who had to go through BCT!). It was a phenomenal experience, I didn't have much of a jazz tuba background and stumbled pretty hard at the beginning but recovered enough to successfully gell with that excellent group. Alaska frigging rocks, if any of you have any doubts I highly recommend it.

The reason for that back story on this group is that we played a mission somewhere and as we did our exfil fadeout thing behind a building I ended up kneeling, bending over and sticking my tuba bell in the grass to further fade out and the whole group got their LOLs on. One of them brought back a Veteran who had been an Army tuba player, so that was a nice chat.
Hell, I played with them in Green Bay a few weeks before we flew out. We were playing for the local news and the band had a set list. I was still very new and learning the tunes so when the band leader called a new tune at the end I didn't have it in my flip folder and didn't yet know it. The band didn't wait and blasted on though; the Commander was right in front and instantly saw the issue. I struggled along for a few bars, saw Chief mouthing for me to give him my flip folder, thought I had it from there and totally did not catch up. The song ended, Chief and I had big eyed faces, and no one else in the combo even noticed I cut out.

As of 2022 around here, the accordion players - who grew up playing accordion in the 50s and early 60s (again: before guitar became “the thing” - and picking up European folk music later) - have mostly all died off. One guy - who grew up in Holland before/during WWII and is a great jazz pianist, and also played the accordion – is now 89 years old. I posted a picture of him a couple of days ago.
I actually ended up owning a really good quality accordion with built-in pick ups, but there’s no one around here to play it.

Without an accordionist, it’s a little bit tricky to produce full-sounding polka band music with only four people. As explained in the first post: There’s no tradition of 12 - 20 piece polka bands (with sheet music arrangements) around here, and there’s also no tradition of Oktoberfests funding bands that size.

This - probably - is the only other "German" band that solicits any gigs anywhere around Memphis.

Rather than three (primarily jazz musician type) people plus a drummer, this one is five (primarily jazz musician type) people plus a drummer, but the group of five features no keyboard (ie. no accordion) instrument.

This little group (rather than playing "extemporaneously") reads out of 5 (of probably a set of 20 or so) books.

Here's a short collage of that group (sight-)reading out of those books:

https://www.facebook.com/howard.lamb.54 ... 6392204483

https://www.facebook.com/howard.lamb.54 ... 8438959483

...and (same group) quite a few years earlier...

https://www.facebook.com/nwilensky/videos/1102367845363

LOL...
All of these remind me of the Shmenge's