Additions to the third edition of The Anglo Concertina: A Social History
In the new edition, there are numerous new illustrations and stories. The most prominent ones are included in a pdf file that
can be downloaded by clicking here.
Please note that the page numbers will no longer match your older version of the books. I've attached below a bit of
description of what is contained in the pdf.
Thank you for your support of the books!
Dan Worrall, 8/28/2010
Volume 1
Page x, second column, paragraph starting "The degree of acceptance...." Andy Turner noted in his review at Musical
Traditions that I should have mentioned why the concertina was not used everywhere. Good point. In this paragraph I try
to explain why it was not used, for example, in then British-controlled Egypt and India, when it was popular in other regions
(Africa, Polynesia, etc.). Elsewhere I had already mentioned that further developments of the concertina (Chemnitzers and
bandoneons) were what caught on in Germany and the continent, as well as in South America and in the American Midwest.
P. 81. A fascinating additional illustration of the concertina in blackface minstrelsy, added to Chapter 2. I am pretty sure this
was an English setting, but couldn't document that and hence left that part unsaid. The only person who could confirm that
has passed on. Text accounts and other photographs and drawings make it abundantly clear that the concertina was nearly
as popular as the banjo in minstrelsy, at least in England and its colonies.
p. 82. Nice photo of performing duo. Location unknown. Chapter 2.
p. 92-94. I've added a long account to Chapter 2 of the "Battle of Torquay", an 1888 six month long bit of Salvation Army
civil disobedience and class struggle in Devon. It marked the last major challenge by officialdom to the Salvation Army in
Britain on the Army's habit of proselytizing in the street with noisy musical bands. Somehow I missed this story, even
though I mentioned several lesser, earlier such legal struggles.
p. 95. Nice illustration. Salvationists.
p. 98-99. Three of these concertina band photos have been added to this latest edition. They show that early Salvation Army
bands (say, 1880s to WWI) were Anglo concertina bands. The later English system concertina bands (post WWI, mostly)
are pretty much all that is popularly remembered today, so these photos are significant.
p. 106. Nice illustration, only. Underscores the popularity of the German concertina with English every-day people.
p. 205. The earliest-known image of the concertina in Ireland---a street musician in Drogheda, 1880. Street use of the
concertina in Dublin in busking and in begging was common, as it was in London. Chapter 3.
p. 208. A very significant figure of a ballroom-style dance in a police barracks in the west Ireland, 1886. This picture
documents in image what many old accounts do in text: "foreign" ballroom-style house dances were all the rage in the west
of Ireland, with the German concertina as the instrument being typically played--solo. The Gaelic League bitterly decried
these foreign dances (what became set dancing), as they were so popular that they were displacing the older Irish
step-dancing (jigs and reels). The League also lashed out at the concertina, for its role in these dances as well as in bringing
music hall "abominations" into Gaelic Ireland. Chapter 3.
p. 211. Against all odds, a reader wrote to me that his 91 year old godmother knew the people in the photo, so I picked up
some specifics for the caption, to go with what had been an unlabelled photo from an Irish folk archive. Chapter 3.
Volume 2
p. 74. The oldest known image of a German concertina (ca 1852-1855); somewhat surprising that it is from Australia
(Chapter 7). It is identical in subject to an 1856 painting of a Scottish blind woman with a similar German concertina,
mentioned in Chapter 1.
p. 173. A photo of a Maori musical group with a Salvation Army major and his wife. There are many written accounts of
Maoris who have taken up the concertina (as did Fijians and other Pacific Islanders), so it is good to now have a photo.
Chapter 8.