“Ach Ya!: The Story of German Music in Wisconsin” presents images from the nineteenth through the late twentieth century that evoke the long-standing heritage and rich diversity of Wisconsin’s German musical traditions, especially in German-American communities in Calumet, Dodge, Marathon, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, and Sheboygan counties.
From 1965–1970, fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3,000 “informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., collecting local words, phrases and pronunciations. DARE’s main partners in the effort to digitize, interpret, and make accessible these audio recordings were the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures and the University of Wisconsin Libraries, all at UW–Madison.
The Mills Music Library and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, along with many partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, present a growing collection of unique, historic, regional and endangered sound recordings with related documentation. These include recordings produced for immigrant, ethnic and indigenous audiences by American companies in the first half of the 20th century as well as more than 700 hours of original field and home recordings from the 1950s through the 1990s featuring the Upper Midwest’s culturally diverse traditional musicians.
Contemporary and historic images and selected caption information representing the history and significance of polka music in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest. Content was compiled for the “Polka Music/Polka Culture” photo-text exhibit that toured Wisconsin in 1991.
