You can clap your hands and stomp your feet all you want, but it’s appearing that polka music can indeed be beat.

Witness the impending fate of the Wisconsin Polka Hall of Fame. After nearly a quarter century of promoting the music and honoring the musicians and promoters, the statewide organization appears to be on its death bed, apparently from lack of interest.

“Polka is the Wisconsin state dance,” said Steve Meisner, head of the famous Steve Meisner Band out of Whitewater, a polka virtuoso since age 5, and the son of the even more famous Vern Meisner of the even-more-famous Vern Meisner Orchestra.

“The Polka! Now we don’t even have a Hall of Fame? How can that be?”

Meisner, as an inductee and lifetime member of the hall of fame, actually has a pretty good idea how it can be. The culture is changing, and the real question is, will polka music itself survive? Meisner is one of the people who believe it had better adapt to changes in taste or it could find itself becoming a dinosaur musical form.

The Wisconsin Polka Hall of Fame lost a lot of steam when it moved from Milwaukee to the Fox Valley a few years ago, and it simultaneously began losing a lot of its original organizers to old age, Meisner said. It also began to fall prey to the same kinds of ills that affect a lot of organizations: political infighting, lack of volunteers, lack of organizational skills and lack of promotional energy.

"They complain no young people are involved, but when they are, they don't listen to them anyway because they don't like their ideas," Meisner said. "And they're all becoming the age where they're moving to Arizona and Florida for the winter, and there's no time to take care of business.

"It's just hard to see it disappear, knowing how much work it was to make it happen."

The group started in Milwaukee in 1995 simply as an effort to help out a polka radio station, WTKM, according to its Facebook page. From there, it grew into an organization that would recognize and honor individuals who had influenced the polka industry throughout the state.

Its birth came Dec. 3, 1995, with a kickoff polka dance at the Blue Canary in Milwaukee. Since then it gave out dozens of awards through the years, but it reportedly started having trouble getting members to nominate anybody. It last inducted someone into the hall of fame three years ago.

A few straggling members of the Wisconsin Polka Hall of Fame met earlier this month in Appleton to try to figure out how to officially disband, and what to do with the leftover cash the club has from failing to dish out Hall of Fame awards for the last few years.

But the group is so far gone that it lacks the power to put itself out if its own misery, according to Greg Laabs, a former board member, tuba player and polka aficionado, from Appleton.

The organization isn’t officially gone, but it doesn’t officially exist either. It has no officers anymore, hasn’t had them for almost a year, so no one has the authority to make decisions or even call a formal meeting. The president quit a little over a year ago and the vice-president wasn't interested in the job.

Laab was on the board until about a year ago, when his term and another board member's term expired. They were the last. There was nobody left to appoint a replacement, and, anyway, no one was willing to step up.

The group still has lifetime members, but no one knows how many or how to reach them all. Nor is there anyone in charge of knowing that or doing that.

The group made one important organizational mistake, according to Laabs. It offered lifetime memberships for $100, so once it had its membership of 160 or so, it had no way to continue to raise money. It started offering a three-year membership, but that never generated much interest, and there are only two people left on the rolls whose temporary membership hasn't already expired.

At that unofficial meeting early in December, a few members expressed some kind of enthusiasm for keeping the organization alive, but there was zero enthusiasm for volunteering to do anything to help, and the meeting sort of broke up without accomplishing anything.

“There’s not enough kids interested, and not enough are replacing the older crowd that is passing away,” Laabs said. “Over the last years, participation has dwindled, not only with the Hall of Fame but with our older crowd of dancers. They’re very simply old, sick and dying.”

The club has plaques and awards that used to be in display cases at the Chandelier Ballroom in Hartford. Now the stuff is packed away in the basement somewhere and the current owners want it out of there. Yesterday’s news, taking up space.

Death throes

It’s not just the hall of fame that's in its death throes. The music itself, at least in its most traditional format, isn’t doing so hot either, nor are some of the popular venues of yesteryear, Laabs claims.

“There’s the Jolly Mixers at Clintonville, the Happy Hoppers at (Luxemburg), the Central Wisconsin dance club in Wausau-Merrill — these dance clubs all have had the same thing happen to them, simply because they’re part of the old-time crowd, which is old, sick and dying, and the kids are not replacing them,” Laabs said.

“We used to play for Central Wisconsin, at Schmidt’s Ballroom, and the place was jammed. You couldn’t add another person with a shoehorn and five gallons of grease. That was years ago. It’s still going, but it’s way lower. It’s the same with all the dance clubs. It’s just the fact of the matter.”

Janine Adamczyk has noticed it, too. Adamczyk is the entertainment chair for Polish Fest in Milwaukee, and she knows polka music is one of the reasons the annual festival continues to grow every year.

Even so, outside of the festival, she has seen the popularity of the music diminish greatly over the decades in the neighborhood dance halls and taverns.

“When I was growing up, we had weekly dances, and they’d be packed,” she said. “There’d be hundreds of people there, listening to polka music. Now, that’s not the case. There are places with polkas, but it tends to be in the afternoons and catering to an older clientele. It’s wonderful, but it is challenging to get the younger people involved.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s it was doing pretty well, maybe even into the ‘90s, but it’s just slowly started to decline, with those every-week dances on weekends.”

Even polka festivals, long considered immune because of the variety of bands and attractions they offer, are showing the strains.

“I’ve been booking bands for the last 10 to 12 years at the Altrusa Polkafest, at Romy’s Nightingale in Black Creek,” Laabs said. “That was always a three-day event. Years back, it would be inside the ballroom at Romy’s, and we had a huge tent outside, with 11 bands booked for the weekend. We’re down to five now.

“We’ll stay at five until that boat don’t float anymore, and then we’ll decide what to do.”

The Ellsworth Polka Festival in Price County closed two years ago after going strong for 40 years, he said.

“Lots of Minnesota festivals went down — Pine City, Gibbon — to say they’re not disappearing would not be true,” he said.

True, Milwaukee Polish Fest is stronger than ever. Some of that may be due to diversity of attractions, Adamczyk said.

There’s more to Polish music than just polka — everything from the folk “Goralska” highlander music to Polish rock to Chopin — and PolishFest features all of that and more.

“We have market places, 30 different restaurants that provide a variety of food,” Adamczyk said. “We have the cultural village that showcases Polish traditions, artisans, dance troupes …. There’s just a lot of variety.”

But, as always, the 39th annual event, which takes place on the Milwaukee SummerFest grounds in mid-June, was heavy, heavy, heavy into polkas.

“We have one stage dedicated to polka music,” Adamczyk said. “It’s called the ‘Nonstop Polka Stage.’ From noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday, and noon to 8 on Sunday, the bands are alternating throughout the time, and there’s no downtime.”

And any of the other four stages operating at the same time, when they’re not featuring a Chopin piano contest or a country-western band, is likely to feature a polka band, too.

People whose only experience with polka music is from weddings may be surprised to find it more likable than they thought, Adamczyk said.

“I think people think of it as their grandparents’ music, or maybe their parents’, depending on the age group, and they think it’s behind the times, but they should give it a shot,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun and it’s pretty current.”

The faster the better

Pulaski’s annual Polka Days is more polka-centric than even Milwaukee’s Polish Fest, and that event keeps growing every year, as long as it gets decent weather, founder and president Harold Otto says.

That might be in part because the whole village gets involved, and there’s lots to do and see, but Otto thinks the festival’s focus on Polish-style polka is a factor, too.

“The Polish style has got a different beat, a little faster beat, that gets ‘em going,” Otto said. “That’s your answer. It brings the younger generation out to support it and keep it going.”

He agrees with Laabs that the oompah style of polka music, popularized in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s by the likes of the Six Fat Dutchmen and Frankie Yankovic, is rapidly losing its base.

“Those people are now in their mid-70s, 80s, even 90s,” Otto said. “It’s not here no more. Those people are gone. It’s hard to get that style going.”

But even those older polka fans are attracted to the up-tempo Polish style polkas that are the musical kielbasa and kopytka of Pulaski Polka Days. That style is so appealing to young and old, it makes the festival strong enough that Otto can still sneak in some of the older styles.

“I don’t want to see the Dutchmen or Slovenian styles die either,” Otto said. “I like them all.”

He also pushes those older styles as much as he dares on his radio program, broadcast five times a week on the Internet at 247polkaheaven.com

The secret to keeping it alive, Otto believes, is to keep hustling. Elbow grease. The impending demise of the Polka Hall of Fame might not be due so much to the demise of polka music itself as poor organization and lack of energy, Otto and others suggest.

“I don’t want to knock anybody down, but you’ve got to work at it, you’ve got to promote it, with posters and fliers,” Otto said. “You’ve got to pass them out all over. We’ve got them in Texas.”

More energy

That’s what Donna Gudex-Kamrath of Mayville says, too. She organizes 19 polka dances a year, held at the Mayville Park Pavilion and in Marghael’s and the Knights of Columbus Hall in Fond du Lac.

“I’m scheduled out a year ahead of time,” she said. “It just keeps getting bigger all the time. I just signed off on an ad in Our Wisconsin magazine, that has over 100,000 subscribers. Now I‘m going out all over the country, from Wisconsin, Florida, California — wherever Our Wisconsin magazine goes.”

She says she spends from 70 to 90 hours per week on her promotional efforts.

“I eat and sleep it,” she said. “People think you just put fliers out on a table. You’ve got to talk to people.

“Back in the day, you’d put on an event and you’d get 300, 400 dancers. People would have to look for a table to sit. Now, you can sit anywhere. If we don’t bring in the right bands, do the right advertising, it’s going to go away. You aren’t going to do it in a closet.”

Even so, it’s becoming more and more necessary for bands to provide not just the more popular Polish style polka but a little variety — a little country, a little pop.

“It’s like everything. It’s changing, and you’ve got to change the market up to make the attendance bigger and better,” she said.

Steve Meisner, who has been playing accordion since age 5 in his father’s band and is now in his 40th year with a band of his own, still gets plenty of work as a full-time musician. But he isn’t a full-time polka musician. He calls his band a polka band, but it’s much more than that, because it has to be.

“We play a variety of music,” he said. “I would never be able to claim there is anything that’s just a polka venue. In any venue, if you played polkas all night long, you’d lose interest. It’s only at the polka festivals, like Pulaski Polka Days, were you can pound polkas and waltzes out all day.

“I wasn’t raised that way. I was raised that you were there to make people dance, whether it meant polkas, waltzes, belly-rubbers, rock ‘n’ roll, big-band swing — that’s the way I was raised.”

It might take more variety in musicianship, more energy in promoting than it used to, but polka music is far from dead, Meisner said.

Polka is evolving

Polka music seems to be surviving because it's doing something that the hall of fame was not able to do: Evolve and diversity.

While the hall of fame continued to favor and focus on the older polka formats that were its founders' favorite, the Slovenian and German oompah styles, bands and venues started exploring the higher-energy Polish style, fusing polka music with other art forms and making sure listeners got a break from just polka after polka.

The evolution of the art form is a sign of life. Musicians like Lynn Marie, Brave Combo and Copperbox are all out creating polka-based crossover music that extends into other genres, Meisner said.

“They are all creating new, different forms of the art form itself,” he said. “That is a progression of all music. It goes from one form to another.”

That’s always been the case with polka music, said Evan Maruszewski, a Milwaukee-based accordion-player.

“If you take the style I’m accustomed to, you can go to Poland and it’d be totally different there,” he said. “There’s a geographic divide and a historical divide. The music my parents’ generation grew up dancing to bears a scant resemblance to the music that came from the European cities their families left. And traditional polka from Krakow is different from the polkas in Gdansk.”

In Europe, the music is different from community to community, and when it crossed the ocean to America, it changed even more, with the addition of popular American instruments like the saxophone and banjo, Maruszewski said.

So why shouldn’t it thrive with the addition of drumkits and electric bass and guitars as well?

Maruszewski, who is not yet 40 and loves traditional polka music, is involved in a whole different manifestation of the genre in Milwaukee — a festival called the Milwaukee Polka Riot, held annually at Sabbatic in Milwaukee.

“We’re America’s first — and so far only — entirely alternative polka fest,” he said.

That’s polka music bent as far as it can be without breaking, featuring everything from the Chicago-based Polkaholics, a polka/rock ‘n’ roll band, to Maruszewski’s own November Criminals, which bills itself as “the world’s only non-ironic polka hip-hop band.”

One regular visitor, St. Sauerkraut’s Polka Band, does Beatles covers in polka style. You haven’t really heard Paul McCartney’s tender “Yesterday” ballad until you’ve heard St. Sauerkraut belt it out polka style.

The bands that Polka Riot features would never have been booked at one of the dance halls of the ‘50s or ‘60s, and they might raise a few eyebrows, even today, at the younger, more vibrant Pulaski Polka Days.

But Maruszewski believes pinning polka music down and refusing to let it change is a sure-fire way of changing it into nothing more than a museum artifact — something dead, to be viewed inside a glass case, instead of a thing to dance, drink beer and have fun to.

Polka Riot, which will take place next year in September, has grown every year in the three years it’s been running, Maruszewski said.

Contact Paul Srubas at (920) 265-3087 or psrubas@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PGpaulsrubas.