Polka Mania!

"The Haitian people are great," Wally says when the man leaves. (Actually the first thing he says after showing the man the door is: "Money talks, B.S. walks.") "They work very hard, and they are superbeautiful people. They were poor when they came here, just like my mother and father were poor. We used to live on the street, with all the furniture on the ground, because we had no place to live. So I can relate."

Wally's father and mother emigrated from rural villages in Poland. After arriving in America, the family traveled a circuit well-worn by Polish immigrants -- from Pennsylvania, where Wally's father was a coal miner, to Wisconsin, down to Chicago. Wally was born in Chicago in 1930, the last of so many kids he doesn't remember them all. When pressed, though, he can account for three brothers and two sisters. A train killed one sister. The other died of influenza.

"I was singing from the day I was born," Wally boasts. "By the time I was five years old it was the depression, and I was already working as a junk man. I walked down the alley picking up junk. I used to talk to all the women, I used to sing, and I used to whistle. I says to the women, 'If you've got something you want to throw away, don't throw it away until I see it.' One woman she says, 'You sing some more and whistle some more and you got everything I want to get rid of.'"

Every weekend during the summer, immigrants from several dozen different Eastern European villages held picnics at Caldwell Woods, a forest preserve just outside Chicago. On Sundays Wally's mother and father used to grab the family, load up a couple of shopping bags with hamburgers and hot dogs, and take the streetcar to Caldwell. While his parents mingled with friends from the old country, Wally would run off and listen to the polkas being played on various stages.

The polka is indigenous to Eastern Europe, though the precise location of the musical style's origin is not known. According to ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, polka literally means "Polish woman," and the song and dance originated in Czechoslovakia in the 1830s to mock Polish female stereotypes. The fast tempo and catchy rhythm caught on and eventually were exported by traveling entertainers. In 1844 the music and its dance debuted in Paris and immediately became all the rage, in no small part owing to the scandalous way a man was allowed to rest his hand on a woman's hip while dancing. After its Parisian incubation, the polka exploded around the globe. It crossed the channel to England. In Paraguay it became the national dance. It swept across Argentina and Brazil and the United States.

"There is no evidence that before or after 1844 the polka was ever popular in Poland," Keil writes in Polka Happiness. "As the fashion spread from Paris and London, the Polish aristocracy may have resented the stereotype, and Polish peasants probably had no time to be amused by any possible resemblance to their own regional dance traditions. Polish Americans returning to Poland are often frustrated to find that the music and dance they know and love as 'Polish' does not really exist there in the cities or in the villages or even in the folkloric ensembles unless a special effort is being made to please Polish-American tourists."

The international polka craze ended as abruptly as any fad, though its influence can still be heard in Tex-Mex, samba, even merengue, Keil says. In the United States, the polka retained popularity among Polish immigrants who hungered for music sung in their native language. In the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago, Buffalo, and elsewhere, the polka mutated over time into several strains of a uniquely American musical style. Li'l Wally is considered one of its most important innovators.

"I picked it up real fast, because I love music," he says while recounting those Sunday picnics at Caldwell Woods. In particular a concertina player named Eddie Zima caught his ear. "I sat back on a picnic table to watch the dancers and watch [Zima's] band play," he remembers. "When they started to play some songs I already knew, I turned around nonchalantly and started singing loudly. So this guy Zima taps me on the shoulder and says, 'Kid, come over here and sing.'"