Red Hills Polka: A Song History
"Red Hills Polka" is a two-part polka in D that the Traditional Tune Archive associates with Missouri and Illinois.[1] The archive passes along a story, first told in an online forum post, that the Allen Street Band of Springfield, Missouri, learned the tune from an elderly woman who played it for them at a festival.[1] In that telling, a band member recorded it without learning its name or hers, so the band titled it after the festival's site, Red Hills State Park in Illinois.[1] The archive's own source note instead names Gary Harrison as the band's source, and it does not say how the two accounts fit together.[1] Beyond that, the tune's earlier history is unknown in the sources consulted here, though the archive reports that Gordon McCann had information suggesting it may derive from a German march.[1]
Three Bells Polka, lithograph, 1854. Another polka's sheet music cover, shown in fun; it has no connection to this tune.
According to the archive, Bob Holt of Ava, Missouri, learned it from the Allen Street Band and recorded it on Got a Little Home to Go To, issued by Rounder (CD 0432) in 1998.[1] Julie Henigan's review of that album in Musical Traditions calls Holt "well-known in midwestern old-time circles as a square-dance fiddler par excellence" and notes that Jim Nelson joins on second guitar for the polka.[2] The archive also lists the tune as printed in Beisswenger and McCann's 2008 collection Ozarks Fiddle Music.[1]
Dana Gruber includes it, in DAD tuning, in The Pickin' Porch, a collection of arrangements in standard notation and dulcimer tablature with guitar chords for jamming, published by Fingers Of Steel.[3]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Red Hills Polka".
- Musical Traditions: "Bob Holt: Got a Little Home to Go To".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Dana Gruber, The Pickin' Porch".
- Image: Three Bells Polka, lithograph, 1854. The Cleveland Museum of Art.