2019-09-11: Pirates Never Played the Accordion

Just when you thought you'd seen your final Creaking Planks video...
Circa 2009, "Accordion" Bruce Triggs was finally getting into the thick of his research, and understanding that the form it would ultimately need to take would be in the book medium. Hosting the Accordion Noir radio program every week had opened the door, but poking his head in he could tell that what lay within was both vast and almost entirely unexplored. If he didn't write this book, no one else would. But first, he had to exorcise some stories he came across, accounts of anecdotes and incidents that were both highly memorable and not entirely bookworthy. And he would exorcise them in song form. There was the Curse of the Andrea Doria, the ship that sank with a hold full of accordions; there was the song about the windjammer musician at the Mississippi crossroads, burning his instrument because it would not accommodate the scales required to perform blues music. (... and also there was "Never Play Your Accordion Naked".)
They were inspired fragments in search of a band! If only Bruce was acquainted with a crack band in search of some original tunes! Waitasec...
Anyhow, ten years later, two full incarnations of the band had risen and fallen, and Bruce had completed his book, "Accordion Revolution". The situation called for a book launch, which called for a small side show of supporting activities. A little musical entertainment! Does anyone have any songs about accordion history? Hang on... I just remembered something!

Here's the page of his book pertaining to this false history. While there was a natural connection between sailors and accordions, it is a simple matter of chronology that could not, despite influential early film adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, have put the instruments in pirates' hands -- unless, as Bruce put it, they were time-traveling pirates. (Time Bandits?) Most likely pirates would have played tunes on fiddles, he reckons, and so we caught Wyoming Johnny during a chance visit into town to lay down the law (of the sea!) on his instrument. (And of course there is the caveat that today Somali piracy has resumed around the Horn of Africa, and there is a Somali accordion tradition, so while it's not impossible that there is such a thing as legitimate pirate accordion music, it is guaranteed that it sounds nothing remotely like anything you might expect.) Our sole constant Blackbox Squeezebeard is taking it all in stride. The first original arrangement in the Creaking Planks songbook was around the lyrics to Derelict, aka the "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" song. He was recruited into the Planks initially explicitly to facilitate their deliberately heading in a more piratical direction. Have all these years amounted to living a lie? (If so, it was a fun lie!)

As an accordionist in a pirate metal band, this is my new favourite song. https://t.co/10tiH9irWm

— Owen Evans (@owen_seawolf) September 11, 2019

Anyhow, after exhuming this incomplete song and polishing it off (this is great, it writes itself! Why didn't we play this years ago? Oh wait, the next verse has a different rhyme scheme and a totally changed meter! Wait, I think I remember now!), we debuted it at Bruce's book launch, and fittingly opened our Wooden Boat Festival sets with it. Where will we be dropping this science next? It's really anyone's guess. Many thanks to Lee Shoal for baking so many tasty little jokes into the lyrics video!