Accordionist Extraordinaire Follows Her Bliss

By Heather R. Henderson

"Gadja Popullore" folk tune from Kosovo Albania by EDT Folk Orch.

"Squeezer Dee" is taking a break. Under the leafy arbor built by her husband Daryl Smith, the air is cool. A statue of Buddha sits in a place of honor in the yard, lending this corner of Northeast Minneapolis an aura of tranquility.

But Dee Langley doesn't sit still for long. These few minutes of rest are part of a schedule that's a whirlwind of activity.

As orchestra director of the Ethnic Dance Theatre, Langley has been working for weeks on their new production, Mountain Echoes, an ambitious project that includes music from countries as diverse as Norway and Afghanistan. As half of Just Du-et, the duo she belongs to with friend and fellow accordionist Greg Dagoumas, she's practicing for a June concert. She's planning the annual meeting of the American Accordionists Association, which will take place in Minneapolis in July. She's teaching several students, from small children to middle-aged women who have never taken music lessons before. In addition to all this, nearly every Saturday night, she plays accordion at Kramarczuk's Deli.

She's a busy woman, but Langley's sunny smile and happy demeanor indicate that she wouldn't have it any other way.

It's difficult to guess her age. She looks like she's in her thirties, though her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, is pure white. "My hair turned salt and pepper at 16 and white by the time I was 27," she says cheerfully, "so it's never been an age definer for me. I've always enjoyed the fact that people never really quite know how old I am." In fact, she is 48.

When she describes her love affair with the accordion, she grins and glows with childlike enthusiasm. "For everyone who's ever sat down and played an accordion and experimented with it, there's something about the vibration, the tone, the bellows – the air, the breath – that's totally addicting," she says.

Barbara Sibley, host of KFAI's Friday morning show "Fubar Omniverse", agrees. "The accordion is a much-maligned instrument that in the right hands can be an instrument of great power and passion," Sibley says. "Thank goodness there are folks out there like Dee to show us what a wonderful instrument it really is."

Sibley has had Langley as an on-air guest several times. "She always blows me away when she is on the show, especially when I hear her warming up in another room on a lightning-fast Bulgarian number -- I never knew fingers could move that quickly!" laughs Sibley. "She is right up there with the best musicians who have been on my show. She has a good balance of classical training with the living tradition of folk music. That is, you can tell she is classically trained, but that training doesn't rein her in -- it just adds to what she can do when she is playing any kind of music."

Langley has performed with the Minnesota Orchestra and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra and has premiered works by many contemporary composers. Her repertoire with Just Du-et ranges from Brahms and Mozart to the old favorite "Accordion Boogie". But what is closest to her heart is folk music, which she champions through directing and performing with the EDT Folk Orchestra and other folk ensembles.

The accordion connection began before Langley was born. Her brothers, "Skeets" and Rick, were 8 and 12 years old when she was born. They had already been playing accordion for years. In the Langley house in Golden Valley, there wasn't room for a piano, so the accordion was the logical choice.

Like her brothers, she showed musical talent at an early age, but her parents were reluctant to encourage her in the accordion. She says, "I always felt it was my destiny. Even as a little kid, I remember thinking, 'I have to play accordion.' They would keep saying, "No, play something else. Don't do what your brothers are doing. They're a lot older - you'll be in competition with them your entire life.'" A precocious five-year-old, Langley argued passionately that it had nothing to do with her brothers – it was something she wanted for herself. They relented. "I made them get me an accordion," she says. "And I never took it off."

When she was nine years old, her parents finally allowed her to take formal lessons. "Within a year I could play concertos," she recalls.

In that way, her career began. She participated in competitions and eventually studied music in college. Upon graduating, she found powerful mentors within the American accordion community. Due in part to their influence, Langley's involvement in accordion moved away from performance and toward teaching and instrument sales. She opened a studio in Minneapolis and began selling accordions and teaching students.

Although the business did well, her personal life became increasingly more difficult. "There's a wonderful saying: if you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was," Langley says. "Something started changing in me, and I realized where I was in life really wasn't me - it was my idea of what I needed to be.My 'Ego' was very tied up in it."

In 1985 she was returning home from a business trip to Castelfidardo, Italy, and other European accordion capitals, when the aircraft had a malfunction with the landing gear.

"They told us ten minutes outside of Chicago O'Hare Airport that they didn't know if they could land the plane," she remembers, her voice soft. "We were preparing for a crash landing. We saw the ground starting to come up, all the fire vehicles and everything. In those ten minutes I had a chance to make my peace with who I was before and who I might never be able to become."

The plane landed poorly, but it landed, and Langley got out. Her life would be different from then on.

"I realized I had to change everything about my world," she says. After much thought and therapy, she ended her marriage, closed her studio and let go of the expectations that had bound her. Then good things began to happen. She met Daryl, a set builder in the film and advertising business. He was turning his life around through a 12-step recovery program. "We both had just started transforming," Langley recalls. "It was the common link between us when we met and continues to be the source of growth in our relationship."

Soon after that, she met a member of a Polish folk-dance troupe called Dolina. They were in need of an accordionist. "I took refuge in the Polish folk dancers. That was the only performing that I did for seven years. And I was richly rewarded. I realized I actually liked performing better than teaching. I'm a musician and I need to be playing. That was the bottom line. I knew that when I was five!"

Eventually, someone asked her if she would give accordion lessons. She agreed. "I decided at that time to see if I had grown up enough so that my musical involvement wasn't born out of something 'Ego'-driven, something I needed to be," she says. "I wanted to see if it could just be, and blossom."

"Polish Folk Song Medley" From Squeezergrabbit

That started the sequence of events that led to her returning to teaching, putting out her first CD, SKWEEZERGRABBIT, and becoming affiliated with the Ethnic Dance Theatre. She also developed her talent for composing. Many of her pieces are inspired by folk music.

"I believe that any art, whether it's Michelangelo's David, or a child's scribbling, comes from somewhere other than ourselves," Langley asserts. Her sweetly melancholy composition "Starshine Bright" is an example. "It's a love song," she says. "I think in everybody's life they have loves that are no longer with them, but even if the person isn't there anymore, that love always stays in our hearts and in our minds and our memories – it never goes away."

The song came to her in a dream in 1998. "I woke up and I had the first six measures or so, and I went immediately to my desk with my accordion and wrote them down. Everything followed easily after that and after the music was done, a poem came out. The song and lyrics were done in a matter of hours. Later I realized that it had been written on the anniversary of my mother's death."

The song often moves listeners to tears. "I think music resonates with the things you can't see about yourself," Langley says. "It interacts with your emotions. I like to give that to people in my music."

Her newest project is a labor of love: a website (www.airaccordion.com) that will showcase her favorite instrument. At present, it's a web home for Just Du-et, but Langley has bigger plans for it. She says, "Air Accordion is a dream in progress with a purpose of bringing the unknown facets of accordion styles, personalities, and techniques to the general public. It's in a fledgling state with an open heart toward the future."

As the accordion enters the new millennium, it has a powerful and compelling advocate in Squeezer Dee. - Heather Henderson

This article appeared in the Minnesota Women's Press in June, 2002