Google the two words “accordion jokes” and there are an abundance of sites solely dedicated to deprecating the instrument.
My own favorite accordion skewer involves a guy stopping for dinner with an accordion sitting on his car’s back seat. When he returns from his meal he discovers the car has been broken into. A window has been smashed but in the backseat there are now TWO accordions.
Somebody called the accordion the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments and only the bagpipe rivals it for being the one most picked on. Although the two may not have much in common in appearance or the sound they make, they do when they’re lampooned. Jokes about them both are mostly interchangeable.
I have my own joke about the accordion that was delivered by my mother at my expense. I don't remember exactly how old I was when I convinced my parents to let me take accordion lessons but I believe my mother agreed because she even said it was a promising vocational path for me in the future.
I wasn’t bringing home stellar report cards. So, maybe she thought I could grow up to be in a polka band and if I didn’t master the accordion, at least I could be an organ grinder. I bet she might have even staked me the money for a monkey.
Zeswitz was and after all these years still is a musical instruments store where I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. That’s where I had my entire accordion experience and at the time there were a lot of other kids taking accordion lessons with me.
I’d later realize that Mr. Michaels, the man who was our instructor, was actually a real life facsimile of Harold Hill, the charming huckster in stage and screen’s The Music Man. Like the Davy Crockett coonskin hat and the hula hoop that were crazes in the late 1950s, learning accordion was another one Michaels managed to create in my town through charm and persuasion.
We all started with beginner accordions that Zeswitz rented us for the first half dozen lessons. After that the store played hardball. To continue instruction a signed contract to purchase a new full blown accordion was required, otherwise Zeswitz took away the keys plus the buttons.
My parents, I’m sure against their better judgement, acquiesced to sign on the dotted G Clef and I plodded along for a while but quickly validated any doubts about my commitment when I started to regret having to practice.
At one point Reading’s accordion acolytes had a giant recital inside the field house at the local college. I think all of us, under the spell of Mr. Michaels, nearly filled the entire basketball court. If The Guinness Book of World Records had been advised of the event, we might have qualified for an entry— most accordionists per square foot.
The most proficient among us played that squeeze box rite of passage “Lady of Spain.” I was in the group that played the considerably easier "All Through the Night." My memory has fooled me into believing that I had already packed up my own accordion and was headed out the door while others were still performing.
A short time later I met my Waterloo (Napoleon’s, not Abba’s) when we had to deal with both sharps and flats for mastering “Oh, Them Golden Slippers.” At that point I also gave up any hope of my participating in Philadelphia's New Year's Day Mummers Parade and accompanying a thousand banjos down Broad Street. In my frustration I damaged my grandfather’s beautiful metronome as well.
My parents had been paying for my accordion on an installment plan. I don't know how they unloaded mine but I do remember that for years afterward every pawn shop in Reading had at least one accordion in its window. I no longer have a clue how to play one and I've been told that a true gentleman who does know how is someone who won’t.
But I do hope my accordion got adopted and had a good life. Maybe it ended up at a bar in Cajun country rocking zydeco or appearing at weddings in Williamsburg with a Klezmer band. And maybe it’s just occasionally lifted out of its box and for however long it’s played, no matter how faint the tune, somewhere there’s music .
And that’s the story that explains why I named my Substack The Pawned Accordion. And here I am with the only evidence I can provide that what I’ve told you is true…
Thanks Peter. It's a great story.