For one Texarkana native, riding around town listening to polka tunes on 8-track tapes as a youth has led, years and years later, to inclusion in the International Polka Association Hall of Fame.
Carl Finch and his Denton, Texas-based band, Brave Combo, concoct polka their own unique way, blending it into their extensive repertoire with other world music styles to dish up songs that are delicious, original and just pure fun. Although they weren't seen as serious by some, they're outsiders who were invited to become insiders, says the frontman.
Finch and Brave Combo's dedication to mastering different styles of music in an authentic way, ranging from salsa to zydeco, conjunto to polka, served them well over the years and won them respect.
And now after three-and-a-half decades of Brave Combo, Finch will be inducted into this Hall of Fame come September at the IPA Polka Hall of Fame and Music Awards in Buffalo, N.Y., during the 48th annual IPA Polka Festival and Convention. Color him amazed.
"Oh yeah, totally surprised. I couldn't believe it," Finch said about hearing the news. He recognizes there's a long list of people considered for such honors. "So when I found out, it just made no sense to me."
"The polka world, as with a lot of musical genres that are more ethnically based or roots based or tradition based, they exist comfortably and almost inextricably without any support from the mainstream," Finch said, noting polka has been "healthy and rocking full on for a long time."
And when you talk about polka, it's not all the same. There's German, Italian, Czech and Polish, all of which show differences. Here in the United States, it's immigrant music, at root, splintering into different types of sounds as it developed here.
Starting Brave Combo in 1979 gave Finch and crew an education about just how vast the polka tradition is. "When we got into this, we started to see the bigness of this world," he recalled. It was new to them. After all, none of the original members had serious polka backgrounds.
But Finch, a 1970 Texas High School grad, would ride around Texarkana with a friend and they'd listen to his friend's father's polka 8-tracks in the car. These were musicians like Myron Floren, the accordionist for "The Lawrence Welk Show." Tooling around Texarkana, it was an oddball soundtrack that made a lasting impression on young Carl.
Years later, after he'd earned an undergraduate art degree from North Texas State University in Denton, he returned to Texarkana and found, in the window display at the Woolworth downtown, tons of vinyl records, including polka for a buck, he recalled.
"I used to buy records like I was addicted to them," Finch said. Polka wormed its way into his collection. When Finch got back to Denton, he used polka music in the audio art installation sound sculptures he was making.
Finch liked the music and searched for a way to express that appreciation. Polka was often the "joke" music for people, in a sense, but not to him.
"I didn't get it," he said about that perception. He wanted to even it all out and present a positive polka experience.
"That's led us on a long journey," Finch admitted. This journey includes seven Grammy Award nominations and two wins, an appearance in "The Simpsons," recording with Tiny Tim, playing David Byrne's wedding reception and providing the score for the first PBS animated series.
Finch says they've mined the polka traditions just as much as they've given back by blending polka with a rock aesthetic.
"You can see evidence of our influence, but it's no greater than how they have influenced us," he says, mentioning in this breath such influential acts as Scrubby and The Dynatones from Buffalo or, hailing from Texas, Esteban Jordan, who was described as the "Jimi Hendrix of the accordion."
Years of playing the music and convincing people who embraced polka that they weren't making fun of the genre, that they weren't approaching it as a novelty, resulted in respect for Brave Combo, Finch says.
"We've been dealing with that on one level or another the whole time," he says of this skepticism. But all the same, they've landed in spots to perform, for example, in such places as the biggest Polish festival in Texas-as headliners, no less. They go to shows where they're the only non-Polish band, he says.
And Finch remembers how great it felt to meet the king of Polish polka once in Pennsylvania. It was one of those "oh my God" moments for the band.
"We do those all over the country," Finch said 0f such shows. Czech festivals and Tejano festivals, too. And for Finch, it's truly about the music, listening to something and then learning how it feels to accurately play a certain genre, he says. They want to take in the essence.
"We wanted to feel it," Finch says of their motivation, noting that, ultimately, people on the inside of the polka scene responded to this. At first, people could sense the band's sincere enthusiasm, but later the band seemed to prove they were the real deal with the dedication and craft they bring to the music.
About his bandmates' reaction to the Polka Hall of Fame news, Finch says with a bit of a laugh, "They're all looking at me a little differently." Members have changed over the years, but Finch's original bassist is back and, when they need woodwinds, the original saxophonist returns.
"We've all been through degrees of this journey side by side," Finch says of his fellow Brave Combo musicians.
Local fans here in Texarkana get to see Finch and his bandmates occasionally, mostly for private gigs. They performed at a Texarkana Symphony Orchestra benefit show and another fundraiser around the time of Finch's high school class reunion six years ago.
He recalls seeing Don Henley and Richard Bowden playing with Henley's first band The Four Speeds here in Texarkana, and he recognizes the rich musical history here.
And in polka and other roots-based forms of music. Finch found fertile territory where he can foster his musical dreams. He's seen a resurgence of instruments like the accordion, which at one time was popular but then fell out of favor.
"I can definitely say that when we started it was not just the polka that people in the mainstream hated," Finch said. "It was also the accordion."
But like the phoenix, he says, the accordion rose in stature. It's trendy.
"I think that the world music thing caught on, and I think bands like us were starting out of the punk rock mold with odd instrumentation," he says of the accordion's resurgence. Over time, bands similar to Brave Combo became more accepting of incorporating different and unique instruments into their music. Also, the accordion can actually make a diversity of sounds, he says.
Finch, though, doesn't have room for viewpoints that see polka as square or something funny. It's a prejudice, in his eyes, and he doesn't get the opinionated people who frown upon polka.
"You close your mind and your ears to a huge world of things that could be enhancing your world," Finch said.
(On the Net: BraveCombo.com.)