Accordions

In 1861, in his first inaugural speech, Abraham Lincoln invoked the “mystic chords of memory” as a way of connecting the past and the present to unite people.

Paul Ramunni sees this phenomenon at work every day in his New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company where an iconic instrument works little miracles of memory for his patrons. “These instruments carry such memories,” he said as he sat in the museum portion of his business. “They are sweet memories for the most part. I started collecting them because I wanted to preserve their back stories.”

Ramunni, a retired CPA, started his collection spontaneously, a surprise to all because he had only grudgingly taken accordion lessons when a child on Long Island. “When my mother told me that she wanted me to take lessons, I thought, ‘Don’t do that to me,’” he recalled with a smile. He played until he went to college when he set aside his “decidedly uncool” instrument for the next 40 years.

But when on vacation in northern Vermont in 2007, he awoke one morning with a never-before-experienced desire to play an accordion. “I told my wife, I was going to buy an accordion that day,” he related, “and she asked me if I felt all right. We were in the middle of nowhere—where was I going to find an accordion?”

In a sequence of events he still finds inexplicable, he called a clockmaker and asked if he had any accordions. The man responded that he was a clockmaker not a music shop but referred Ramunni to someone who did have accordions in the next town. That man turned out to be a collector of many things but had more than 100 instruments in his collection.

Ramunni spent hours before selecting an instrument and in the process stepped many times around a pile of battered concertinas lying on the shop floor. Asking about them, he learned that the collector had received them only the day before and that they had belonged to a local Army veteran who had been assigned to clean out Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II.

“His commander knew he played the accordion and asked him if he wanted them,” Ramunni reported. “He sent them home and the family had kept them all those years.” Ramunni bought all 15 and brought them home to Canaan where a number, cleaned and polished, now sit in his museum.

Word spread that Ramunni was collecting accordions and he began to receive phone calls from people who wanted to sell theirs. In 2011 he moved his growing collection to the Canaan Depot and opened his store. Many of his friends had the same reaction his wife had had but the little store proved an instant success and the collection continues to grow. With it grew his collection of the memories shared by visitors to the museum, memories he captured in Accordion Stories from the Heart, a book he self-published in 2017.

“One time I had a very elderly lady come in alone,” he said. “She must have been in her late 80’s. She was just walking around looking at the instruments and she went into the back room. I had an accordion case open there. Accordion cases have a little blanket that you put over the instrument. All of a sudden I heard this sniffling and I thought, ‘Oh, no! Has she fallen?’”

But entering the room he found her standing over the accordion case with tears on her cheeks. She told him that when she was a small child she would go with her grandfather when he went out to play for others. While he played she would crawl into the case and pull the blanket over as she listened to his music. “It gives you an idea of the power of music to bring back memories,” he said.

In another example, he was visited by an elderly couple who were walking around looking at instruments while he played Moonlight Serenade. All of a sudden, the man laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and attempted to turn her around.

“She was squawking, making a real scene and saying, ‘Take your hands off me,’” Ramunni recalled. “But he turned her around and took her in his arms and danced with her around the store—that happens all the time when I am playing. Then he became embarrassed and went outside. She had tears in her eyes and said it was the first time they had danced in 30 years. Music even has the power to melt a crusty relationship.”

He often sees visitors from around the world. He tells of one Australian visitor who said accordions are played in the outback, where kangaroos often come close to listen to the sound. “Rarely, a week goes by that I don’t have visitors from abroad,” he said.

Accordions and their smaller cousins such as the concertina have been exerting their magic for a couple of hundred years. “Two hundred years ago, it was really quiet,” Ramunni said. “Wealthy people had their harps and their harpsichords but ordinary people didn’t hear music very often and they wanted it. If someone was playing something as small as a harmonica, people would stop and gather to listen.”

The first version of the modern accordion was the Flutina, a small, one-sided instrument with treble side buttons. “The only music people heard was made with singular sounds,” Ramunni said. “Then this thing came along in the 1800s with multiple reeds making multiple sounds. It really took off and they began to get bigger and better with more reeds.”

He said the early instruments’ designs date from an era when manufacturers were still trying to identify their market. “Would it be wealthy people? No, they already had their harpsichords,” Ramunni said. “They decided it would be for the average person. But then they were mostly played in taverns and saloons which were rowdy places in those days. They pitched them a little higher than other instruments so they could be heard over the noise.”

The accordion has always been a European instrument, popular in Ireland, France, Italy, Poland and Germany. While its American presence fell off in the latter half of the 20th century when rock ‘n roll took over the music scene, it is still popular in the South, where Mexican, Tex-Mex and Zydeco predominates and in pockets of the upper Midwest where Germans and Poles settled.

“In New England, eh, not so much,” Ramunni said, but added that the instrument is finding new popularity among younger people. “They have all their music in their phones but when you put on an accordion you make your own music—that is new to them. They have digital accordions now that can make a million sounds.”

Ramunni has a room full of accordions for sale but his greatest pleasure is still in the museum. “This room is special because of the memories,” he said. “I have Lawrence Welk’s first accordion over there and an accordion that was played for Al Capone. That one was played in the hideout of the Purple Gang which was involved in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I have early ones that were played by Civil War Soldiers. These instruments are not for sale—they are my babies.”

The New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company is open every day except Monday, 9AM to 4PM; 860-833-1374; Email: ramunni@comcast.net