Ponty Bone plays this Saturday at the Crawfish Festival on Marktplatz. Bone has drawn from rock, Cajun, and Zydeco to create his unique accordion sound, which he will feature with his band, the Squeeze Tones.

Details:
Ponty Bone and the Squeeze Tones headline Saturday night, May 26, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the Fredericksburg Crawfish Festival on Marktplatz. The festival runs Friday evening and all day Saturday, with a full lineup of musical acts. Admission is $6 for adults and $1 for ages 12 and under. Two-day passes are available for $10. Ponty Bone's website is www.pontybone.com. For more information on the event, go to www.tex-fest.com.

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Accordion According to Bone

by Phil Houseal
May 23, 2007

With apologies to Barbara Mandrell, Ponty Bone was "accordion" when the accordion wasn't cool.

In fact, it's fair to say Ponty Bone was the man who made the much-maligned instrument hip. Bone took the accordion from "Lady of Spain" fame to being the central instrument in the whole cajun, zydeco, folk, roots sound that is now wildly popular.

"Yeah, I started out playing the 'Lady of Spain' stuff," Bone admitted when I asked him about his early training. "I played standard sheet music when I took lessons from age 5 to 12. I had to have the lesson prepared or face the consequences. But it was that stuff that gave me technique and theory. I've always been thankful that I know about that.

"But," he laughed, "like most musicians, I don't let it get in the way of playing."

The way Ponty Bone plays is his own creation. And it almost didn't happen.

"At the age of 12 I told my dad I wanted to quit accordion," he said. "I had already determined that the accordion wasn't cool."

But it was the 1950s, and Bone started to discover some great music on the radio - Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry.

"I could figure out how to play it on accordion and this was interesting to me. It didn't seem to be a career option, but it kept my musical interest alive."

At age 18, Bone discovered Louisiana music, and started incorporating Cajun and Zydeco into his sound. He said "adios" to the Lady of Spain for good.

"This new stuff sounded excellent, and I didn't care what anybody thought," he said. "I started playing it at parties, and people encouraged me to keep on doing it."

Bone never cared much about being popular. That freed him up to explore many side trails in the music world. In fact, he seems to use his rebel image as inspiration.

"I've always lived life as if I was the subject of a novel," he said. "It's a novel about a guy with artistic pursuits, not a guy selling shows."

That approach makes it hard to categorize Bone's music: the music industry is not sure where to put him. It tried Americana, but the latest article I read labeled him as folk rock. It seems to me Bone IS a genre.

"I am," he said. "But there is nobody else in it."

That doesn't bother him, either.

"Life might be easier if there were a category for me, and I could say I was routinely played on a radio station that promoted my genre. Whether I planned it or it happened that way, I'm stuck with it and it doesn't hold me back."

Whatever label you stick on his sound, it goes great with crawfish. Wherever Bone plays, his music comes with a helping of that Louisiana treat.

"That all started when I carried crawfish and Texas wine to Canada one time," he explained. "A bunch of us put on a crawfish party every night we played. The Canadians went from 'how do you eat these things' to everybody going through a pound of it. Now, it sort of makes an appearance at a lot of my shows."

Such will be the case this Saturday, when Ponty Bone and his Squeeze Tones take the stage at the Crawfish Festival on Marktplatz. Sixty years after picking up the accordion, Bone still enjoys sharing his style with the world.

"I do it because I can," he said. "I'm still able to really cut loose on that thing. It's good medicine for me and people seem to love it. I've tried lot of different things in life, but when it's all said and done, this is it."

XXX