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MINNESOTA POLKA: Jolly Lumberjacks / Cottage Waltz / Soma 1016 / c1953

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Clement Brau (1922-2023) and his older brother Harold (1920-2016) started the Clem Brau Orchestra when Clem was 15 years old. By then he’d learned to play trumpet, alto saxophone, piano and clarinet. His brother Harold played trombone. They hailed from Lucan, near the town of Marshall in the central part of southern Minnesota. The orchestra played at wedding anniversaries and social events in nearby Redwood Falls and was booked six nights a week at the Nightingale Club in New Ulm. The WWII draft took Clem to the Pacific theater and Harold to Europe, both as musician-soldiers, playing in Air Force and Army bands respectively.

In 1947, the brothers reorganized the Orchestra (which “played modern music”) and also formed the smaller Jolly Lumberjacks, as a polka and waltz band. Clem wrote the arrangements, adapting twelve-piece band arrangements into eight-piece arrangements. “It was funny because sometimes we’d play one place as the Clem Brau Band and then come back the very next night and play as the Jolly Lumberjacks,” recalled Harold. “People would come up to us and say we should have seen the band the night before.” They played ballrooms and town halls throughout the upper Midwest for 40 years. As Harold’s wife, Eileen, recalled, “It wasn’t just a weekend thing, they played all the time.”

The brothers retired in the late 1980s and were inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame in 1995. Harold passed away December 27, 2016 in Arlington, MN at the age of 96. Clem passed away September 14, 2023 in Rosemount, MN, at the age of 101.

[drawn from each brother’s obituary, and a feature article on Harold (https://www.swnewsmedia.com/the-world-war-ii-music-man/article_98f74122-942f-5d44-9086-e6158d13f6ca.html); many photographs in the video are from https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000468971/#2]

The Soma Recording Company of Minneapolis, MN, was founded by brothers Amos and Dan Heilicher in 1954, and owned by Amos Heilicher until 1967. [The label name is "Amos" spelled backwards.] The brothers acquired the FM Recording Company, of Hollywood, CA, and many of Soma’s early releases were polka matrices from FM, which had been recorded in 1949 and 1950. Soma’s subsequent catalog included polka, country, Dixieland jazz, and pop, with hits by Bobby Vee, the Fendermen, the Trashmen, and Dave Dudley. Soma was absorbed into Pickwick Records in 1967.

[Cottage Waltz (mislabeled as Tell Me), Jolly Lumberjacks, Soma 1016, recorded 1953/4, matrix KBBH-3]
The flip side of this disk is Lena Polka: https://youtu.be/rBquC0Cdc8U
Polka Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj57_HkEA2N2CuWrSxUj4Ca6YXb1_P-ES
Category
COUNTRY HITS
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