The Awesome Polka Babes on the Loose

Confessions of a Political Polka Perpetrator

By Marjorie Smith, 10-12-06

One thing about playing in a polka band – which I believe I have confessed to doing before in these pages – you really get around the countryside in the autumn. It seems as though half the bars and non-profits in the state want to schedule an Oktoberfest (although given the vagaries of the Montana climate, many of these are scheduled in the latter half of September). And what could be more Oktoberfestive (well, after the beer and the brats) than a polka band?

While other years have taken us to Helena and Virginia City, this year the Awesome Polka Babes had gigs in Paradise Valley, Laurel and Miles City as well as Bozeman. So it was that on a rainy Saturday morning in September, we drove into Miles City, heading for the local Eagles Club where we were to be the musical and comic relief for an Oktoberfest celebration put on by the Miles City Democrats.

“Actually,” I had said to various and sundry who expressed doubts about our itinerary, “there aren’t just a half dozen Democrats in Miles City. This is the second year we’ve been hired for this gig, and last year about 100 people showed up.” Even so, it warmed the cockles of my progressive little heart as we drove through the streets of the town to see “Jon Tester” and “Monica Lindeen” signs sprouting from random lawns in the old historic residential area.

This idea of Democrats in Miles City has been a revelation to me. My mother grew up there, and the town and adjoining countryside are still strewn with our relatives and I would be surprised to learn that any of them had ever even considered voting for a Democrat. But as the crowd of party faithful who gathered at the Eagles Club that Saturday demonstrate, there’s a whole ‘nother side of Miles City society I never knew about.

In between the political speeches and the pie auctions, we played our liveliest polkas and assorted ethnic waltzes. I extricated myself from my accordion at one point and stepped up to the mike to bellow out my revised (and possibly politically more correct) version of that old classic, “She’s Too Fat for Me.”

I don’t want him, you can have him, he’s too much for me.

When I was writing the parody, I’d wanted to make it “he’s too far right for me” but some of the other Babes felt we ought to be a little more even-handed. Thus it is that at one point in the song, I complain, “He’s a red-neck.” Chrysti disagrees: “He’s a beatnik.” Tana chimes in, “He’s a train wreck” and I conclude, “And he’s such a neat-nik.” If that ain’t even-handed male-bashing, I don’t know what is.

Writing parodies of other people’s songs is something I’ve always done and I was as thrilled as satirist Mark Russell back in 1994 when the Supreme Court ruled that parody was a form of free speech. When I was in high school, I scripted an entire pep assembly to send the Bozeman High School team off to the state basketball tournament. Set to tunes by Lerner and Loewe, it was called “My Fair Hawk.” Some years later I used the same inspiration for a skit at the Guam Press Association’s annual Gridiron Show, but that one was called “My Fair Island.”

The tourists are coming in the morning,
hoot hoot the ships are going to call

That parody marked one of my all-time rhyming triumphs when I managed to fit the name of an unusual traditional Guamanian instrument into the song.

We’ll book Eddie Duchin
on the belambatujan,
But get me to the wharf on time.

Okay, writing cleverish lyrics to other people’s tunes is a cheap trick, but forty some years later I get almost the same thrill out of the climatic lines of “He’s too much for me.”

Will he watch a ballet? No, no, no, no, no.
Does he hear what I say? No, no, no, no, no.
Does he care what I think?
(Chrysti suggests:) If you give him a drink.

Then I swoop in with the coup de grace:

Could he possibly vote for Hilary? No, no, no.

Our biggest hit in Miles City was my newest parody, “The Global Warming Blues.” We had played the previous night at the Laurel Oktoberfest, a three-day fund-raiser for a good-hearted group called Making a Difference, and that was where we unveiled this opus. I must confess, I had a little trepidation watching my lyrics unroll to what appeared to be a fairly conservative audience. Tana and Chrysti sing this one, and since the chords are easy, I have a good view of the audience as I squeeze away.

I smell that smoke a-comin’ each morning when I rise
It’s tearin’ at my throat and it’s clawin’ at my eyes,
It’s forest fire season, and I can’t catch my breath
Oh that global warmin’, it’s gonna be our death.

I probably didn’t need to worry. People were dancing so hard I doubt if any of them heard the words. In case you haven’t guessed, the words are sung to “The Folsom Prison Blues” and to my amazement, that song turns out to be a great up-tempo country swing number. Who knew!

When I was just a baby, the world was always green
With glaciers in the mountains and great jazz in New Orleans
But we humans got so greedy, we had to have it all
Cars and air conditionin’, now watch those big trees fall.

Now I gotta confess, my attitude toward this Johnny Cash classic has undergone a drastic revision in just a few weeks. Years ago I heard the recording made in the audience when the man in black sang that song to the inmates at Folsom Prison in January of 1968. The roars of those hundreds of incarcerated human beings has made the song seem almost sacred to me in a strange way. I once startled a friend when we were at a cabaret show and a guy sang “Folsom” and I muttered the words along with him: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” My friend was shocked because she saw me as an opera fan, which I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand when music is wrenching people at their very cores, a capability that I believe makes music the most powerful of the arts.

I bet there’s folks who’re sayin’ s’got nuthin’ to do with me
I work hard for my money, gonna spend it how I please
But it’s time to pay the piper, listen to those flames whush
If we’re gonna cool this planet, we can’t listen to George Bush.

When the band that took the stage after the Awesome Polka Babes at the Rocky Mountain Accordion Festival in Philipsburg this past August let loose with a fast dance version of “Folsom” (with Johnny’s lyrics) I was indignant. “That’s not a jolly dance song,” I told Nyla, our tuba playing Babe. “Folsom Prison is a sort of mea culpa for all the awful things we humans do to each other.” I also told her about my old friend, Art, who with his wife, Bernice, had been on a long freighter trip I took across Micronesia back in November of 1969. Art was the retired warden of Folsom Prison and to the inevitable question he sighed sadly, “Yep. I was the warden when Johnny Cash gave that concert.” In the years after that, when I was a single mother struggling to make a living in San Francisco, Art and Bernice were like a pair of spare grandparents we could visit up in the gold country whenever I could manage to borrow a car. The dichotomy of the kind, gentle man I knew whose entire life’s work was reduced for most people to the image of one evening in 1968 juxtaposed against the incredible animal energy of the caged men reacting to the song – it’s just one of those conundrums of the human condition that make me believe there is still scope for all of us in the arts to continue trying to explain ourselves to ourselves.

Now, only six weeks after I objected to treating "Folsom Prison" like one more country swing song, there I was, playing my accordion and grinning and wondering if anybody but the Babes heard the words as the Laurel Oktoberfesters danced.

If the oceans keep on risin’ and the icebergs all do melt
We’ll have the hottest summer we Montanans ever felt
We’ll have crowds of people comin’ just to keep their feet dry
We’ll have to change our slogan: Welcome to the Big Smoky Sky!

After the Laurel show, we drove to Billings and stayed with Chrysti’s ever-patient mother who had waited up for us with chicken noodle soup and fruit salad. And I do confess that as Nyla, Cynthia and I rolled out our sleeping bags on the family room floor I wondered if bunking on a borrowed floor was a suitable thing for a woman who just that day had signed up for Medicare to be doing.

But the next day, in Miles City, I had no doubts. We passed out copies of the lyrics to “The Global Warming Blues” so the Democrats of eastern Montana could sing along with us and they loved it. In fact, I've been invited to sing it for a environmental action convention next month.

Okay, I’ll admit it – that warmed the cockles of my polka-perpetrating heart almost as much as seeing those Tester and Lindeen signs sprouting in eastern Montana. I’m so glad there are people like Jon and Monica willing to work their butts off so people like me and the Babes can keep writing and singing silly, (but occasionally heartfelt) songs.

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