For nearly 25 years they’ve met in Euclid, Ohio, the self-proclaimed “Polka Capitol of the U.S.,” home of the Polka Hall of Fame: accordion and button box players and other polka musicians, fans, collectors and aficionados. They congregate here every Spring for the Super Button Box Bash—filling the air with the melodies of polkas while others dance and sing along, many in the mother tongues of their Eastern European homelands. They’ve come to carry on the proud tradition of polka music, to ensure that the quick fingers and pop notes flow down through the generations, and to celebrate their common roots and shared ancestry: a true melting pot of Germans, Polish, Slovenians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians and others—but ask most people here who are serious about the music and they’ll say, with a clever grin, that naturally, the Slovenians were the ones who invented polka.
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