Welcome to old and new friends who are interested in discussing Cajun and other diatonic accordions, along with some occasional lagniappe....
CAJUN ACCORDION DISCUSSION GROUP
Hello Ganey,
Your'e lucky, being so close to "everything".
It never fails, the "Question, always pops up: Does Mark Savoy "really" builds his own accordions?.
But I have a few pointers to tell, as to what degree his involvement is with the building process.
The best way, visually that is to tell if someone is involved in manual labour is to look at someone's hands closely.
Fabricating accordions, that is "from the ground up" builds up over the years a number of calluses that you couldn't acquire otherwise, and that doesn't come from playing, it comes from griping power tools on a consistent dayly base, in feeding wood-machinery, like a thickness planer , or a table saw with raw material, witch you have to mill down to proper thickness.
Then there is the staining of the wood, varnishing and so on, tasks that will however carefull one is , leave marks on one fingers or face or arms 
, plus the unusual numbers of nicks and splinters to the
fingers that a professional craftsman will acquire weekly.
So the next time you have the chance to meet Mr. Savoy in person,or any of the remaining , unfortunatly so few left accordion buiders in LA, please check hand first with them, out of deference of course, but also as a mean of checking one's references so to speak .
Someone, male or female building accordions , that is going trough all the phases of fabrication, will have some of of the physical characteristics that I've mentionned, plus more.
And also, you can sometimes, if a woodworker is wearing glasses, see some fine wood dust either on their eyebrows or eye glasses.
AND, more importantly these people will have a powerfull handshake,power aquired over many years of using heavy machinery and hand tools, and that you can't fake, it's part of their credentials, so to speak.
Respectfully.
Claude.
Hard to argue with a fan .
Nevertheless I would agree that Mr.Savoy has to give his final approval before an accordion bearing his name leaves his store.
And I'm not disputing the fact that Martin guitars are an Internationaly rated top of the line brand.
And your'e absolutely correct,in saying that it doesn't matter whether Mr. Savoy cuts, assembles or tunes his own accordions
And you did use the word "fraud", witch I didn't or even imply.
And it certainly was not my intention to call Mr. Savoy a "Fraud".
But, like many others I have read Mr. Savoy story as written by himself and for many years I have been under the impression that Mr Savoy builds,and tunes himself the accordions that bear his name.
I mean, you are a journalist living and working in the heart of cajun culture,and reporting on it,and I'm sure that you would rather be accurate in your
assesment(s)of one accordion builder's professional practices, so it would seem important to me to "verify" what "kind" of cutting goes on in the farmhouse. , obviously you do not know, yet, you "assume" that there is wood working activity there, or do you know for a fact that to be the truth?.
Look, on one hand you states that your'e well aware of Marc's practice of assembling accordions from pieces he neither cut.......and then you mention later that what wood he does cut is done at the farmhouse, sorry your'e confusing me, Ganey.
And the reason that the two accordion builders you know do not have callouses on their hands is because they dont practice their craft often enough, or they use parts as supplied by jobbers, and as such have to "simply" put together an accordion, witch doesn't requires that much cutting or hardly, and certainly wont give hand callouses , even if they do the tuning,as opposed to the practice of making the "all" accordion like Mr. Ortego used to do.
Respecfully,
claude.
The April 2011 Dewey Balfa Cajun & Creole Heritage Week
