The art of the accordion

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When Betty Bridges was in second grade, she told her mom that she wanted to take piano lessons. 

“[My mom] just said that will be fine, but first, I would have to take accordion lessons,” Bridges said, “and she was very strict about that.”

That was the start, Bridges said, to a 45-year relationship with teaching the instrument she would come to love better than all the rest: the accordion. Today, as a musician, she continues to teach both children and adults in her Hoover studio, a place where she keeps three of her large accordions, as well as several smaller 12-vase accordions for student use. 

The accordion, which can be acoustic or digital, is a portable musical instrument with metal reeds blown by bellows and is played through pressing keys and buttons. To this day, Bridges still spends at least an hour a day practicing the accordion, which she said can sound different depending on the kind that is being played.

The old saying for an acoustic accordion, she said, is that it is a “squeeze box” and sounds out of tune, especially to those who also play piano. But the newer, digital models, which Bridges also plays, can mimic the sounds of other instruments in the perfect pitch “all in one place.”

Bridges said she loves the versatility of the instrument and how she can interact with the audience more than she can with a piano. 

Bridges studied the instrument in a studio in downtown Birmingham for 11 years while she was growing up and also played trombone in high school and college. She learned to play piano, too, which she still teaches. 

The accordion was very popular in the ’50s and ’60s, she said, but in the ’70s, students learning and playing the accordion went down in the state of Alabama, and it was hard for her to find students to teach.

“I don’t mean it was not popular in spots of the United States because it very much was, especially if you had a population of German people or Polish people who had settled in different parts in the United States,” she said. “But that was the situation in Alabama.”

In the last few years though, she’s seen a turnaround in interest, and she wants it to stay that way.

“I think a lot of it is thanks to the efforts of our Alabama Accordion Association, the state organization. They’ve done a great deal to promote the accordion,” she said. Additionally, they have brought concert accordionists to Birmingham for decades. In the last two concerts they put on, she said they also offered a station where people could sign up for lessons. Several people signed up to take lessons from her, with the youngest being 17 years old and the oldest 80 years old.

“They still want to learn how to play [the accordion]. They want me to teach them how to pull the bellows and the coordination and what’s going on in the left hand because it’s so foreign,” Bridges said.

Bridges, who is a certified music teacher, said she is one of the few accordion teachers left in Birmingham and even in the state. She teaches students to play a variety of music, including polka, waltzes, religious, tango, ragtime and occasionally classical.

Although most students who sign up for lessons can read music and have had some sort of musical lessons before, she’s still able to teach people a base level of knowledge if needed.

“Every time my door opens, it’s a new personality that walks in. There’s no two people alike. They don’t practice alike. They don’t study alike. They don’t play alike, and it’s a challenge for me to deal with each personality and to try to get their potential out of them,” Bridges said.

Bridges belongs to several national and regional music and accordion groups, which means she is able to coordinate recitals, specifically for students ages 18 and younger. She said it’s been a few years since she’s had a student young enough, but she would love to find some in the next year.

“I would love to have some students do that or to play in a band,” she said. “That’s what my big emphasis is on this year, to get elementary up to seventh and eighth grade back into the accordion.”

She has been contacting school systems about offering classes and hopes to partner with a school if they agree. 

She would also like to play around town again as she did when she was younger, at restaurants or events like Oktoberfest, and get people thinking about the art of the accordion.

“I would like to renew this to the students. This has been the hardest part to crack into,” Bridges said.

For solo lessons, she takes students to her well-equipped studio, where she offers additional methods of learning to go along with her lessons. She has a computer lab with games that teach music theory for those that might not know it, which she tries to incorporate into the lessons. Bridges also has a sight reading lab and can show students digital accordions and how to hook them up to the computer to record music.

“One thing that makes the accordion so special is the uniqueness of it. … Another thing that people like is the versatility. You can take that instrument anywhere you want,” she said. 

During an Easter Sunday several years ago, on the day before her mother died, Bridges said she remembers her mother coming over to her house and picking up her accordion to play, despite the fact that her mother learned the basics of playing the accordion during the Depression and her parents could only afford to let her take lessons for a few short months. 

To the day she died, Bridges said, her mother could read music and remembered how to play several songs on the accordion, which she did that day.

It’s moments like that, she said, that made the accordion such a special instrument to her, one she wants to share, both through performance and through teaching children and adults the instrument. 

In 2020, Samford University will start offering classes for college students, which Bridges is helping to coordinate.

To sign up for lessons, call her at 733-1524.