South Bend Music History: The Sound of the Bend

Music · the sound of the Bend

South Bend's music was made by the same forces that made the city. The immigrant parishes sang first: a Polish choral society was organized at St. Hedwig in 1879, within two years of the parish itself, and Polish, German, Hungarian, and Italian singing societies and bands were the ordinary musical institutions of the west and south sides for two generations. The conservatory road came next — a Cleveland violinist who arrived in 1894 built, out of his own pupils, first a conservatory orchestra and then, in 1918, the city's first professional symphony; when the Depression folded it, one of his successors' students founded the South Bend Symphony Orchestra in 1932, an ensemble of volunteers paying twenty-five cents a week in dues that grew into the city's orchestra and still plays. The factories are in the sound: in the 1950s many of the Symphony's players worked full-time at Studebaker. The city's one indisputable national music story of the rhythm-and-blues era was formed in its clubs and on its television station — Junior Walker learned the honking tenor saxophone here, fronted his first band here as a teenager, and took over Billy "Stix" Nicks's Rhythm Rockers, a band with a weekly show on WNDU, before carrying the group to Battle Creek and Motown. The rock era gave the city one genuine national hit at the exact hinge of music history: five South Bend Central High School students called the Rivieras took "California Sun" to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the last weeks before the British Invasion remade the chart. And underneath all of it, the music the city danced to was polka — the Dyngus Day bands of the west-side halls, a tradition the record still documents in the present tense. What follows is that record at the size the sources support: the documented institutions in full, the thin places printed thin, and the gaps named where the digging found no record to print.