Links

Bands, organisations and the wider polka world

The polka scene is held together by a dense web of small organisations, working bands, festivals, record labels and other stations. No single site covers it, and anyone trying to follow the music seriously ends up assembling their own map.

Organisations

National and regional associations run the halls of fame, the annual conventions and the awards, and they are usually the best starting point for finding out what is happening in a given part of the country. They also do the unglamorous work of preserving recordings and documenting band histories, which nobody else is doing.

Bands

The working bands are the reason any of this exists. The touring roster at any given time runs to well over a hundred groups in North America alone, ranging from long-established names with decades of recordings behind them to bands formed in the last few years by musicians in their twenties.

Following a band directly is the most reliable way to know where they are playing. Dates change, halls close, and a printed calendar is out of date the week it is published.

Businesses

Record dealers, instrument specialists, and the small labels that still press polka releases make up the commercial end of the scene. Concertina and button-box repair in particular is a specialist trade with very few practitioners, and knowing who does it is worth more than knowing where to buy the instrument.

Other stations

Internet polka radio is a small world and the stations are not really competitors: audiences overlap heavily, and hosts turn up on more than one station. Terrestrial polka programming still exists too, usually as a weekend show on a community or ethnic station.

A note on outbound links

Sites in this scene are run by volunteers and change addresses often. Links that worked a few years ago frequently do not, and rather than send readers to dead pages or to domains that have since changed hands, this page describes the landscape rather than listing addresses.