Accordions popular again in all of USA since 1950.

[AccordionUprising]

The list of 52 countries where the instrument is most popular is interesting, with most English speaking countries being well down that list. The US is listed at 46 out of 52, yet its being inferred there is an upturn in interest there. Would that mean the US might rise up to number 45?

I like to ponder statistics and the stories they tell. I didnt see this list of 50 counties though? Is that on the google page? My search there shows Ireland, Canada, the US, etc. Im curious to see more lists. Can you tell me where youre seeing yours? Maybe the page is different for me?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=accordion

If I change the view on the map lower on the google page to by city it definitely shows the non-piano influence, Dublin, Austin, San Antonio (then San Francisco and Seattle.)

A weird thing to consider with online statistics (actually a plus for getting our accordion emoji approved) is that searches for Accordion include metaphorical uses, Accordion Door, Accordion Folder, etc. A huge bump in the numbers comes from computer folks searching for Accordion Menu, which are the little drop-down click me menus on websites. So Seattle and San Francisco (and Dublin) may not have as many squeezebox fans as the numbers indicate.

 

[Alan Sharkis]

It would be interesting to know how sales of electronic accordions are doing. I’m primarily a pianist, and am very familiar with the drop in sales of real pianos through the tales of my piano store friends. Electronic keyboards, however, are selling very well. Price, fad, ascent of computers in music making, all account for this.
My love of the accordion has nothing to do with nostalgia. Like most rockers, I thought the thing was terminally corny. In fact, it was African, Mexican, Zydeco, Cajun, and Baltic Music that drew me in. Now, after listening a lot, I love all iterations and variations of accordion music, and think it can be a strong voice in music of the future.

As far as I can tell, Roland's sales are doing quite well.  The Bugari EVO, which uses Roland FR-8x electronics in a wooden shell with a wood keyboard and real pallets and key rods on the treble side was rumored to sell better and pick up more features once sales of Roland FR-8x dropped off, but that hasn't happened; not that there are sales problems with the EVO.  Bugari's electronic division is also marketing smaller electronic accordions in China, but I haven't heard how well that's going.  Back to Roland, the FR-4x seems to be selling quite well.  It's 120-bass, 37 treble keys (and the equivalent in CBA) and comes in at a swift 19 pounds of weight.  I have one.  

 Of course, there are others.  Music Tech and Master Productions both make reedless models based on their midi modules.  Cavagnolo makes an electronic accordion.  Concerto is another brand.  I can't tell you how well these are selling but they do have their fans. 

Alan Sharkis

 

[Eddy Yates]

The accordion is definitely more delicate than a guitar, and you can fix a messed up guitar a lot easier than you can fix up one of the thousands of old accordions that are emerging from attics and closets where they were thrown upon the arrival of rock and roll. For someone who likes machines and music, accordion repair seems like a pretty good possibility. The repairmen here in the states are backed up for weeks, sometimes months.
I would think that it’s pretty discouraging to buy one of those old boxes because you love the accordion and then have it gradually disintegrate because you can’t afford the repairs.
And Lawrence Welk, fer the luv a Mike....National Public Television in the states STILL plays that crud. Myron Floren is a great player, but spare us! Tom, you’re right. That show probably embarrassed half the young accordionists into jettisoning their instruments.

 

[Alan Sharkis]

Bruce,

I promised myself I wouldn't post any more on this thread, and I think you just about covered it. Your post is probably the most interesting in the thread.

I think we often get distorted views on the forum, as membership obviously comprises those of us who are interested in the accordion, regardless of any perceived global or local popularity. The list of 52 countries where the instrument is most popular is interesting, with most English speaking countries being well down that list. The US is listed at 46 out of 52, yet it's being inferred there is an upturn in interest there. Would that mean the US might rise up to number 45?

It has been mentioned elsewhere that Tex-Mex probably accounts for most renewed interest in popularity in the US, and You Tube is currently full of tuition videos on three row diatonics. I like that sort of music, as well as some other "American" styles, but most of them feature a different type of accordion to what I play myself. There isn't a list of popularity of accordions by type? Only joking!

Similarly, Ireland is well up there at number 4, but again the typical Irish "accordion" these days is the two row melodeon, and a lot of people don't want to listen to anything else.

The old Transatlantic difference creeps in yet again with the mention of Lawrence Welk. Very few people on this side of the flood plain will know who Lawrence Welk was, but having seen clips of his show I can understand the situation.

In Italy particularly, the electric bass has indeed made a lot of left hands redundant, and most pro players don't even bother to pretend that they are playing the basses. In fact, if you watch some of them playing it would appear that the bass reeds have been taken out, or dare I even suggest it, were never actually there at all.

After all that I have an idea. I'm just going to see what gauge strings suits my Cavagnolo best, and I'm nearly good to go! It just hasn't got any sex appeal at all the way it is.

Thanks for the extremely enlightening post, although I think you'd better prepare for those who are inclined to disbelieve statistics. Anybody interested in an accordion commune in Sri Lanka?

EDIT:- Ireland has just slipped to 5th place and the US to 47, although another country has muscled in to make a total of 53, possibly Morocco, which has replaced Ireland at number 4, and is now the undisputed accordion leader in Africa. France down from 10 to 18, and UK down from 27 to 30 (devastated!). Must be due to Brexit?

Even if the stats are variable your thoughts are spot on.

 My teacher is a jazz accordionist.  He works in groups that have basses, whether upright or electric and he knows how to use his left hand to work  with those basses.  I guess his arranging skills contribute to that ability.  

Bruce left a couple of items off his rather extensive list of factors that contributed to the decline of accordion music in the United States.  I don't know how you'd react to my stating them here, but I wish you would: 

     1. Faithe Deffner, the late owner of a company that imported, sold and serviced Titano and Pancordion accordions, blamed the accordion teachers of the day, saying that many of them considered rock-and-roll a fad that wouldn't last long and refused to expose their students to it.  I take it to mean that the teachers couldn't handle it themselves.

     2. Aside from Lawrence Welk, accordionists were featured often on many TV programs (e.g. Dick Contino on Ed Sullivan's show ad nauseum) and this overexposure contributed to the downfall of accordion music.

Alan Sharkis

 

[AccordionUprising]

Oh, I see it! If I set the google page to search now it shows 52 locations, updating as they change. Cool!
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now 1-H&q=accordion

This would shift along with the time-zones around the globe to show whos up late at night feverishly looking for new accordion tunes to play. Or how many people will fit into an Accordion Bus. Huh.
The US is at 17 right this second, with Malta as the top scorer. These kind of internet results arent quite meaningless, but its mostly entertaining, with too much interference to tell much. If I change it to Accordion (musical instrument), then Slovenia, Croation and Bosnia jump to the top. Balkan party going on!

I hadnt done much with that Interest by Region map. Fun.

Another amusing online search thing is one that searches for references over the decades in books and print sources. You can see that here (long link!):
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=accordion&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1;,accordion;,c0

This ones fun because you can see the word Accordion appear in the print record in 1829 or so. Neat! (Theres a couple of earlier appearances (?) but you can look deeper and see that theyre errors where somebody meant according to or whatever.

The numbers match the accordions rise and fall over the last 180 years. Theres a big drop after World War II, and then a steady rise until the 2000s. I think this probably says more about the economy and the amount of print sources available as anything, but its fun to look at that rise as a hopeful sign. (The fall after the 2000s recession is less inspiring though.)

More significantly, I got some actual musical instrument sales data from old issues of Music USA, (industry journal). They stopped counting accordions as a sepperatte category in the 1970s. Sales had dropped from almost 200,000 accordions per year in the 1950s to about 13,000 in 1976. Ouch. 1953 seems to have been the peak, but as late as 1960 they were still selling 100,000 instruments per year.

Sander Neijnens in his lovely little book the Giuliette Sound first brought the issue of market saturation to my attention. The industry sold a million quality accordions, and that was enough to last most of the need for the next half century. Were still playing the instruments made in that Golden Age. Those instrument sales supported everything else—the schools, the shops, the whole accordion world. By the 1970s there were still a million accordion players in the USA, but they werent buying new accordions. And young people were picking up and playing other instruments. That stuff was interesting to dig into.

 

[donn]

That show probably embarrassed half the young accordionists into jettisoning their instruments.

Right, that's what I'm talking about - the music. Lawrence Welk was only representative of what was - and wasn't - being done with the accordion, at the time of its demise. The French accordion scene, I suspect has similarly tried to do itself in with excess helpings of cheese - glitzy background-heavy productions with armloads of virtuoso playing but that fail to capture any appealing character of the instrument - but didn't entirely succeed in its suicide attempt the way the US scene did, because there's more cultural history to fall back on (and in the US there was a severe generational conflict at the time, to put a real spin on it.)

I don't find that Google trends chart very convincing, with France, Russia, Italy down at the bottom along with Saudi Arabia. You might be right, it's about uses of the word that don't refer directly to the instrument, but I think it's also about who goes to Google when they're interested in something. I don't have any real knowledge about this, but I have the distinct impression that Italians for example don't really live online as much as Americans.

 

[AccordionUprising]

My teacher is a jazz accordionist. He works in groups that have basses, whether upright or electric and he knows how to use his left hand to work with those basses. I guess his arranging skills contribute to that ability.

Bruce left a couple of items off his rather extensive list of factors that contributed to the decline of accordion music in the United States. I dont know how youd react to my stating them here, but I wish you would:

1. Faithe Deffner, the late owner of a company that imported, sold and serviced Titano and Pancordion accordions, blamed the accordion teachers of the day, saying that many of them considered rock-and-roll a fad that wouldnt last long and refused to expose their students to it. I take it to mean that the teachers couldnt handle it themselves.

2. Aside from Lawrence Welk, accordionists were featured often on many TV programs (e.g. Dick Contino on Ed Sullivans show ad nauseum) and this overexposure contributed to the downfall of accordion music.

Alan Sharkis

The use (or not) of the accordions left hand comes up regularly, especially in loud bands, or when playing smaller accordions with limited basses. Often the easiest choice is to let another instrument take that space. The electric bass obliterated whole orchestras, the accordions band in a box was no exception.

Welk and Contino were definitely part of the oversaturation of the accordion in the media, specifically the media that targeted older or family audiences. The kids wanted their own sounds, and rejected all that square stuff. Theres an amazing article Just Before Rock: Pop Music 1950-1953 Reconsidered by a Hugh Mooney that talks about the demographic shifts that led to the change from maybe waltzing will take over from polka this year? to nope, rock and roll. If youre interested, Ill put a copy up here. Written in 1974, this piece still gets cited for its insight. I wish anything Id write had that much credence years in the future.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/38soqmy1jjmqpjp/Just Before Rock, by Hugh Mooney, Popular Music & Society Vol 3, n 2, 1974a.pdf?dl=0

Faithe Deffner and her cool Tiger Combo Cordion pilot project were one of the few examples of the accordion industry trying to adapt. The Tiger never took off, and the industry definitely didnt embrace the new music. The other was the Cordovox-style organ accordions, but they seem to have mostly been popular with people who already owned accordions, so they didnt increase the pool of players. Without new kids buying in, the industry collapsed.

I was thrilled to find this fantastic Cordovox advertisement to include in my book.

Its from Fabio G. Giottas remarkable history of the Cordovox. If we had details like this on all the Italian accordion brands it would fill bookcases. http://caffetrieste.com/Abrief.pdf

The 200 pages of online footnotes Im going to make available when my book comes out are almost as exciting as the main text for general reading. So much fun stuff to share and discuss.

---

That show probably embarrassed half the young accordionists into jettisoning their instruments.

Right, thats what Im talking about - the music. Lawrence Welk was only representative of what was - and wasnt - being done with the accordion, at the time of its demise. The French accordion scene, I suspect has similarly tried to do itself in with excess helpings of cheese - glitzy background-heavy productions with armloads of virtuoso playing but that fail to capture any appealing character of the instrument - but didnt entirely succeed in its suicide attempt the way the US scene did, because theres more cultural history to fall back on (and in the US there was a severe generational conflict at the time, to put a real spin on it.)

Jimmy Shand in Scotland fills sort of the unhip niche that Welk did in the US. In Russia a punk accordion band took the name Play Bayan! from a very square Russian TV show that offered traditional accordion. I imagine a ironic band called The Lawrence Welk Show! wouldnt make it through the court system over here.

A thing I encountered was that Welks show wasnt only associated with accordions. He also promoted the Fender Stratocaster when he hired young Bobby Merrill in 1955 to play it and bring in the kids. So, along with Buddy Holly, the Ventures and Jimi Hendrix, Lawrence Welk provided massive exposure to the instrument that replaced his accordion. For me this shows that just being associated with Welk didnt drive accordions from fashion. There was other reasons the instrument had trouble adapting. This left Welk as the last accordionists standing in the nostalgia market for years, and that was indeed fatal to its coolness.

 

[Tom]

Actually, as far as the last accordionist standing from that era, Dick Contino played his last Festa Italiana show in 2015 or so. I saw the show and the nostalgia crowd was out in force but he actually played a lot of fine, uptempo jazz numbers and was very impressive for being 85 years old and still able to hoist that million pound Petosa.

 

[maugein96]

Between 1961 and 1967 Cavagnolo made around 4000 accordions, or approximately 666.666 accordions per year. Im not superstitious (honest).

By 1986 production was less than 200 per year.

In the 7 months between March and October 2003 they made about 42.

Ive no idea how many they made last year, as the French source of information stopped recording the serial numbers in 2010, when it seems as though they may have produced about 140. Better than 2003 but no real danger of a comeback!

I was never really looking for any particular reason(s) why the accordion became unpopular, just stating what I considered to be valid points.

The Google regional graph seems to vary according how many times in a given period the word accordion is used in the Google search field. Morocco was at number 4 earlier today but is now off the grid. If we all keep entering accordion into Google search repeatedly we can do our bit to keep our country on the accordion map (or so it seems).

Lawrence Welk also promoted electric guitar soloing by Buddy Merrill on Fenders Jazzmaster guitar. Designed for jazz players, played by we surf types (I also had a Fender Jaguar), and consequently failed to appeal to the market it was designed for. Never stopped him telling us all it was the worlds best jazz guitar.

Jimmy Shand had a very strong following in Scotland amongst those who appreciated Scottish accordion music. Problem is about 95% of the Scottish public at large have never really been into that kind of music since about 1960, and he did exceptionally well considering that fact. Im led to believe that a considerable percentage of his recordings were purchased by ex-pat Scots. Yes, he probably represented a decidedly unhip niche, and Im glad somebody outside of Scotland has picked up on that. Few youngsters of my own age (Im 66) were inspired by what we saw and heard to play the accordion. In our part of Scotland it was unceremoniously referred to as teuchter (Highland yokel) music, and any potential player in our area had to first overcome that stigma. In other parts of Scotland it was more natural for youngsters to take an interest, but the rest of us who were musically inclined (and had seen clips of the Lawrence Welk show) followed the trend and headed for the guitar outlets. By the time I started playing the accordion I had lived in England and Norway for a time and had other ideas about what sort of music I wanted to play.

Considerable efforts have been made in France with the intention of promoting the accordion, but they sort of overdid it, and Pascal Sevran became the French equivalent of Lawrence Welk. Accordionists miming tunes badly out of synch on TV, playing boxes with the brand names taped over was hardly going to appeal to the uber fashion conscious French youth, although dinosaurs like me sat glued to video transcriptions of the programmes.

I cringe now when I realise I had learned a good few of those Buddy Merrill solos note for note! I mean that music was never going to die out was it, as it was hip electric guitar, and I had mortgaged my soul to buy a Fender Jazzmaster? By the time I became aware of Welks show I never realised it had once featured accordions at all! Saw a photo of Hendrix playing an accordion. Somebody reckoned he knocked out two of his front teeth on it!

Apologies, accordions were there right enough, even although the guys werent playing the basses then either. Big wound G string on that Jazzmaster. Those were the days!

 

[Alan Sharkis]

My teacher is a jazz accordionist. He works in groups that have basses, whether upright or electric and he knows how to use his left hand to work with those basses. I guess his arranging skills contribute to that ability.

Bruce left a couple of items off his rather extensive list of factors that contributed to the decline of accordion music in the United States. I dont know how youd react to my stating them here, but I wish you would:

1. Faithe Deffner, the late owner of a company that imported, sold and serviced Titano and Pancordion accordions, blamed the accordion teachers of the day, saying that many of them considered rock-and-roll a fad that wouldnt last long and refused to expose their students to it. I take it to mean that the teachers couldnt handle it themselves.

2. Aside from Lawrence Welk, accordionists were featured often on many TV programs (e.g. Dick Contino on Ed Sullivans show ad nauseum) and this overexposure contributed to the downfall of accordion music.

Alan Sharkis

The use (or not) of the accordions left hand comes up regularly, especially in loud bands, or when playing smaller accordions with limited basses. Often the easiest choice is to let another instrument take that space. The electric bass obliterated whole orchestras, the accordions band in a box was no exception.

Welk and Contino were definitely part of the oversaturation of the accordion in the media, specifically the media that targeted older or family audiences. The kids wanted their own sounds, and rejected all that square stuff. Theres an amazing article Just Before Rock: Pop Music 1950-1953 Reconsidered by a Hugh Mooney that talks about the demographic shifts that led to the change from maybe waltzing will take over from polka this year? to nope, rock and roll. If youre interested, Ill put a copy up here. Written in 1974, this piece still gets cited for its insight. I wish anything Id write had that much credence years in the future.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/38soqmy1jjmqpjp/Just Before Rock, by Hugh Mooney, Popular Music & Society Vol 3, n 2, 1974a.pdf?dl=0

Faithe Deffner and her cool Tiger Combo Cordion pilot project were one of the few examples of the accordion industry trying to adapt. The Tiger never took off, and the industry definitely didnt embrace the new music. The other was the Cordovox-style organ accordions, but they seem to have mostly been popular with people who already owned accordions, so they didnt increase the pool of players. Without new kids buying in, the industry collapsed.

I was thrilled to find this fantastic Cordovox advertisement to include in my book.

Its from Fabio G. Giottas remarkable history of the Cordovox. If we had details like this on all the Italian accordion brands it would fill bookcases. http://caffetrieste.com/Abrief.pdf

The 200 pages of online footnotes Im going to make available when my book comes out are almost as exciting as the main text for general reading. So much fun stuff to share and discuss.

---

That show probably embarrassed half the young accordionists into jettisoning their instruments.

Right, thats what Im talking about - the music. Lawrence Welk was only representative of what was - and wasnt - being done with the accordion, at the time of its demise. The French accordion scene, I suspect has similarly tried to do itself in with excess helpings of cheese - glitzy background-heavy productions with armloads of virtuoso playing but that fail to capture any appealing character of the instrument - but didnt entirely succeed in its suicide attempt the way the US scene did, because theres more cultural history to fall back on (and in the US there was a severe generational conflict at the time, to put a real spin on it.)

Jimmy Shand in Scotland fills sort of the unhip niche that Welk did in the US. In Russia a punk accordion band took the name Play Bayan! from a very square Russian TV show that offered traditional accordion. I imagine a ironic band called The Lawrence Welk Show! wouldnt make it through the court system over here.

A thing I encountered was that Welks show wasnt only associated with accordions. He also promoted the Fender Stratocaster when he hired young Bobby Merrill in 1955 to play it and bring in the kids. So, along with Buddy Holly, the Ventures and Jimi Hendrix, Lawrence Welk provided massive exposure to the instrument that replaced his accordion. For me this shows that just being associated with Welk didnt drive accordions from fashion. There was other reasons the instrument had trouble adapting. This left Welk as the last accordionists standing in the nostalgia market for years, and that was indeed fatal to its coolness.

---

I remember pop music of the fifties pre-rock. Joanie James, the Four Aces. the Ames Brothers, Frankie Laine,etc., all made recordings from which sheet music was published that my then teacher was trying to get me to play. Some of the sheets were even accordion arrangements, but even the piano sheets had chord symbols an accordion student could use. I did download that piece you left on Dropbox. but I havent had a chance to read it yet. It looks interesting. Many thanks.


Alan

 

[Tom]

Thanks for that very interesting Caffe Trieste article Alan! Looks like my Cordovox is a "CG-2" style from the very early 60s. I don't have the generator but the reeds sound very good, possibly handmade or tipo a mano?

 

[maugein96]

If accordions could even do some basic, but nevertheless uplifting stuff like this wed all be thanking Lawrence Welk for promoting them. Thats entertainment, regardless. Galloping Accordion just wouldnt be the same. Was Welks German accent perhaps part of his problem in post WW2 days?

 

[donn]

Was Welk's German accent perhaps part of his problem in post WW2 days?

I doubt it. He really was immensely successful - and much more with the crowd who lived through WW2, than with those who were born after. He didn't really have a problem at all, he was just part of one.

He came from a German speaking community in the midwestern US, which wasn't all that unusual at the time.

 

[Eddy Yates]

Welk was totally unhip, but his show was and is extremely popular, accent or not. My country is strange, and very divided, y’all. Then again, I thought Don Messer’s Jubilee out of Canada (Living close to the border in Montana, we got all the CBC shows) was equally corny. Now I realize that a lot of the Cape Breton stuff he played is solid.

 

[maugein96]

Welk was totally unhip, but his show was and is extremely popular, accent or not. My country is strange, and very divided, y’all. Then again, I thought Don Messer’s Jubilee out of Canada (Living close to the border in Montana, we got all the CBC shows) was equally corny. Now I realize that a lot of the Cape Breton stuff he played is solid.

In Scotland we had a TV programme, described verbatim in Wikipedia as follows:- [font=arial, sans-serif]The White Heather Club was a BBC TV Scottish variety show that ran on and off from 7 May 1958 to 1968. [/font]

Here is another quote from the same source:-

The Penguin TV companion in 2006 voted The White Heather Club one of the 20 worst TV shows ever. Jeremy Paxman, who gave the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the 2007 Edinburgh International Television Festival cited The White Heather Club as evidence that there was no Golden Age of British television. Although popular in its day, and in some respects competently made, it put forward a tartanised view of Scotland that was becoming very dated by the late 1960s.

The guy called Jeremy Paxman, a UK TV journalist, is a very self opinionated person, but worse than that, he is English! 

Regardless of that, the last sentence sums the whole thing up, and I couldnt have put it better myself. 

The variety in the show comprised the same cast of minstrels week after week, singing about all the things that once made Scotland great. Accordion music also featured prominently in the programme, and I dont think I need say any more.

1968 is also regarded as the very year that French accordion fell off the top of the Eiffel Tower.

I therefore rest my case (for Europe). 

 

[Eddy Yates]

Ah, yes. The power of the two dimensional screen that makes us think we’re missing something real and important....
Thank god we have Bruce Triggs’ “Accordion Uprising” on Radio and podcast. I just listened to his Lars Hollmer Tribute.
https://archive.org/details/AccNoir20090116LarsHollmer

 

[Tom]

Welk had some darn good accordion music, it was the corny format that was the problem.

 

[maugein96]

Welk had some darn good accordion music, it was the corny format that was the problem.

Tom,

There still is great accordion music in Scotland, although it just isn't anywhere near as popular as it once was. 

"Corny format" was definitely an issue here as well. The older generations loved it, but it somehow failed to keep up with the times. Parts of Scotland have high concentrations of people of Irish descent, like myself, and faced with the choice of listening to one accordion style or the other, most of us preferred the Irish music, even although some of that was pretty corny as well. Where it won out (with us) was by virtue of its more laid back style (and no tartan). 

In Ireland the accordion has had to compete against the two row diatonic melodeon, which I believe is probably still the most popular type of "accordion" in Ireland today. Unfortunately I sort of lost any real interest I had in both accordion styles when I was a teenager, and it never really came back to me. 

I continue to dabble in French musette and one or two other styles, and still get pleasure out of it. My family think I'm a special breed of dinosaur as I also play surf and rockabilly on guitar.

 

[Tom]

Interestingly, John, here rockabilly has had a couple good revivals here in the past 10 years or so, and it must be just about time for a surf revival! As has been mentioned, because of tex mex, zydeco, cajun, old time, etc. here the small button box is more popular than chromatic also.

 

[Thomas N]

---

All I can add is that I have a 16 year old son.  Not one friend of his has ever known what an accordion even is.  I know it sounds remarkable, and to me, shocking, but that's the truth.

The other day he was face-timing a group of friends and I was playing in the music room.  They could hear it and asked what it was.  He said "That's my dad, he's playing the accordion" and he told me that every kid said "what the heck is that?".

I asked him to mention the accordion to some of his other friends at school just to see if they knew what one was and he said out of maybe 10 people that he asked nobody knew what one was.

I grew up in an ethnic community where everybody played accordion.  I've had it in my life from 6 years old until today.  The great accordion teachers of my day are gone now and none of us that I know of have picked up the mantle and taken up teaching. 

I moved away from my community probably 25 years ago but when I go back major parties still have an accordion band.  Older friends of mine will often send me YouTube clips of accordionists, similar to the "hipster" clip in this thread.  While I'm pleased to see people pick up the instrument and incorporate it into their art I've never been much impressed by the playing.  50% of the clips show the player not even using the bass side of the accordion (a MAJOR pet peeve of mine) and the other 50% are people who I would describe at best as beginners with no formal instruction.  

Sometimes I feel it de-values the accordion and "real" accordionists. Sometimes I think that's an elitist attitude that I have. I guess it really depends upon my mood that particular day.

I think that if Adam Levine picks up an accordion and plays it in a Maroon 5 song or at a concert with 80,000 screaming fans that doesn't make the accordion popular - no more so than if he did the same thing with a harp.  

I recently saw a headline of Weird Al billed as "the World's greatest accordionist".  I thought to myself, I think he has a niche and he's obviously been extremely successful with his parody hits (whether you love them or hate them) but I've never really watched his playing.  I would advise you to watch some clips of him playing the accordion. Wow. Just wow.