Dale Simons and His Blue Denim Boys
I arrived home tonight to find an exciting package in the mail today – it contained the below advertising card for “Dale Simons and His Blue Denim Boys”. Why was this so exciting? Dale Simons was my grandfather!
I’ve been haunting ebay for months, hoping to find some sort of memorabilia from my grandpa’s band. He had a dance band in the late 30’s to the early 50’s in the midwest (though interrupted by the war, which took the family to Washington state where my dad was born). They toured through many midwestern states, playing polkas and other dance tunes. My grandpa played cornet and sang. I think this postcard is probably post-WWII, because the family lived in Winona, Minnesota and operated a dance hall there until dance clubs became unprofitable in the mid-50’s.
In this picture the band is wearing their signature overalls with a tie hanging out. There’s a better quality version of this image hanging in my parents’ hallway, and I remember looking at the row of funny smoking men on the bandstands a lot when I grew up.
Howdy!
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This is great! I was just asking my mom earlier today if she had any digitized versions of pictures of the band because I wanted to post an audio tune on youtube accompanied by a picture.
ooh, neat! There's that other funny band publicity picture, I could scan that for you too, and I'm sure our parents have other things. I was listening to the old recordings just now, and wondering how to break up the long file into the songs. Let me know when your link is up!
Oh my gosh! That guy with the tuba totally looks like Matt did when I met him! HAHAHA!
This is so unbelievably awesome. You need something with that pipe smoking hillbilly on it. Maybe some Farmerettes?
Congratulations! What an awesome piece of family history. The card says "recording artists." Have you heard any recordings? I wish more bands would incorporate polkas into their repertoire. My grandparents were both from Ohio and polkas were always played/danced. Thanks for sharing this – AWESOME!!!!
ooh, wow, that's really very very special!
Hi — I have an old "Brother Edurd's Preechun Prise List" from Dale Simon and his Minnesota Hillbillies; I'd be happy to send you a picture. It has his 1209 W. Howard, Winona, address on it. My mother grew up in Winona, graduating in 1955 or so.