I've been hither and yon and flat out busy, the blog has suffered accordingly. Etc.

At the end of February I was happily down in Texas in participate in a festival and symposium on Texas polka music, put on jointly by Texas Folklife and Texas Dancehall Preservation, Inc, at the restored and truly lovely Senglemann Hall in Schulenburg, Texas. This is a grand old dance hall which was just perfect for the array of bands all day.

This was a great event filled with music of all kinds, alternativing with a series of really worthwhile presentations on dance halls, food, and music. I was there to talk about sustainability theory and vernacular music, in a session along with the great Czech musician Mark Halata and Texas Polish musician Frank Motley. The audio for each of the sessions can be heard here (mine is the last) along with a bunch of pictures of the festival overall. A great event overall which is intended to start running on an annual basis. I already look forward to it.

I'll be in Korea next week talking about the same issues, only focused specially on conjunto music. More on the Korea trip and those topics later. I am very excited about going, as you'd imagine.

Here is a picture of me playing some tunes in the evening with Lala Garza, one of the very rare female conjunto accordionists.  Even rarerr--she had her own conjunto back in the 1960s. You can hear a full story about her here.  I was fortunate to get to meet Lala on a previous trip to Texa,s and was pleased to get to play some more with on this trip. Here we are sitting in an 1835 house between Schulenburg and LaGrange that was once considered as a spot for the capitol.

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