Tandem Bike: Those Darn Accordions Provide Tandem Enthusiasts With A NEW Musical Standard

This is a Weekend Flashback posting from something I published at the TandemGeek’s Blog back on January 24, 2010.  I’m going to try and make a point of sifting through the archives  at my blog each weekend and bring forward something of a “best of” for readers here at the TCA Blog; hopefully you won’t mind. I figure with nearly 900 articles on my blog, there are a lot that I’ve even forgotten… like this one!

Let me be the first to admit that I have never been all that enamored with Harry Dacre’s 1892 Daisy Bell’s lyrics, although the music still lends itself to some very nice renditions like Will Fly’s solo guitar piece. It’s just that, as a tandem enthusiast, it never captured the spirit or ‘fun’ of tandeming. So, you can only imagine how excited I was when a fellow Hobbesian (i.e., a Tandem @Hobbes list subscriber) shared a link to a contemporary, upbeat and fun song about tandem cycling by a San Francisco-based accordion quartet called Those Darn Accordions hosted on YouTube. In fact, I was so taken by the song that I contacted the band leader for Those Darn Accordions, Paul Rogers, to learn more about the song’s inspiration and how it came to be. It’s a great story and I’ve now posted all of the information about the song’s origin, links to the YouTube video, the group’s website and the lyrics to a Web page at TheTandemLink.com. In the interest of equal time I also included a link to an authentic 1920’s – 1930’s audio recording of Harry Dacre’s ‘Daisy Bell‘ and the lyrics for anyone who may have never heard it or who have forgotten it.

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