Westphalia Waltz

The melody is Polish and it is older than the Texas title. It carried a bawdy drinking song called "Pytała się pani", and a second set of words called "Wszystkie rybki", which somebody later turned into English as the Dreamy Fish Waltz. Polish American bands were playing it in the north in the 1920s and 1930s: the Walter Fronc Orchestra recorded it as "Pytala Sie Pani" for RCA Victor in 1930 and the violinist Ignacy Podgórski cut it for Columbia seven years later. Both of those Polish titles are the ones thesession.org files the tune under, and the backlog's guess that it came from "Pod Krakowem czarna rola" does not hold up: that is a different Polish song.

How it got to Texas is told two ways and nobody has settled it. Cotton Collins, a fiddler from Waco who played with the Lone Star Playboys, either learned it while he was stationed in Germany during the war or picked it up in Bremond, a Polish settlement in central Texas. Either way the band was playing it as an untitled waltz in 1946 when a dance at Westphalia Hall went so well that the manager, B. J. Lignau, told them what a crowd pleaser the no-name waltz was. It has been the Westphalia Waltz ever since, named for a German Texan town after a Polish tune. Hank Thompson recorded it in 1955 and made it a country standard.

Collins copyrighted his arrangement and it is not what this page carries. The folk melody underneath it is old and free, and that is what a jam plays: two sixteen bar strains in G, the first walking up from the low D and the second opening on the high G and coming down. Learn the strain endings before you play this with anybody. Every source writes the last three bars two ways, staying up on B the first time and walking down to G the second. This page carries the landing both times, which is what the tune does when a room plays it once through.

On a mandolin the left hand has an easy night. The G course never sounds, the lowest note is the open D, and the highest is the G at the third fret of the E course. The right hand is another matter. A waltz is where a mandolin has to earn its place, because most of the bars are one note held for two or three beats. Pick the note and tremolo it, then stop cleanly for the two eighth notes that lead into the next bar. The second strain is the tremolo lesson: bars of held g, f sharp, c and e, one after another, with nothing to hide behind.