In a Nordic ethnological context, questionnaire-based surveys constitute a long-standing archival method for collecting distributed qualitative accounts, used collaboratively between academic researchers and culturalhistory archives (Hagström & Marander-Eklund 2005). The web survey that constitutes the main material in the study was conducted by Svenskt visarkiv at the initiative of the research project “Calle Jularbo and the Gammeldans: Music, Networks, Mediatisation.” The ambition was to collect qualitative data based on people’s recollections of Calle Jularbo. The survey was prompted by the understanding that fewer people in today’s society have a clear relationship to Jularbo, the accordion, and the musical genre with which he is associated (Ronström 2023:107; Lundberg, Malm & Ronström 2003:196). In addition to providing some basic information about their relationship to gammeldans and the accordion, respondents were therefore asked to share their memories of Jularbo.⁵

The survey could be completed by following a link to an external survey tool provided by Svenskt visarkiv. It was distributed through digital channels within music and dance communities and remained open between November 2022 and July 2023. In total, 89 responses were received, ranging from short comments to lengthy, highly personal accounts. Most responses were in Swedish, and one in Norwegian. The respondents largely represented individuals with strong ties to musical practice: approximately half described themselves as accordion players or folk dancers, many of whom had long-term experience or were active in organised settings of music and dance. Among those who reported their occupation were music teachers, folk musicians, and other professional musicians, but also people with entirely different professional backgrounds who nevertheless had experience of gammeldans, accordion music, or folk-music environments. As a result, the material is characterised by a high degree of practical experience within the field. This shapes which aspects of the music are emphasised in the responses, particularly details relating to playing style, rhythm, and dance functionality.

The question that received the most detailed responses and that prompted the questions in this article was formulated as follows:

Why do you think Calle Jularbo’s music was so popular? Was there something special about his playing that touched you or made it extra danceable? What do you think of his music? What made his music good or bad? Please try to describe in as much detail as possible. (Svenskt visarkiv 2023b, Appendix)⁶

The responses to this question form the basis of this article and the thematic analysis. The ambition has been to identify and categorise recurring patterns in the questionnaire responses (Braun & Clarke 2006) and discuss them in relation to a wide range of supplementary material, such as statements from newspaper articles and films, author-conducted interviews, previous research, and other contextual material. Some of the responses have been reproduced here in the article.⁷

Analysing such material means tackling a number of methodological problems. The main material analysed is based on survey responses from living people, which means that the perspectives are retrospective and filtered through contemporary experiences, values, and contexts. Only a few of the respondents heard Jularbo live or met him, and a long time has passed since they did. I am, therefore, not analysing the actual reasons for Jularbo’s popularity during his lifetime, but rather the ways in which people today remember, value, and talk about his musical work. Thus, the material does not necessarily reflect the values of Jularbo’s own time, but rather his significance as perceived in the present. To maintain analytical clarity, contemporary retrospective accounts in the survey are kept distinct from earlier written and media sources, which are used only as contextual complements.

There is also a selectivity in terms of who has participated – those who received the questionnaire and were motivated to answer it are probably people with a positive relationship to and keen interest in Jularbo and/or gammeldans, which means that critical perspectives or alternative voices are missing. In this material, two main interpretative orientations are discernible: one in which Jularbo is perceived to be a specific, exceptional individual among accordionists, and another in which he is understood more generally as a representative of accordion music and its associated social and emotional meanings. The distinction likely reflects the respondents’ varying degrees of personal or musical investment and is considered throughout the analysis. This distinction further illustrates that notions of musical value are relational and context-dependent, a point emphasised by Frith (1996:18), who argues that musical value is always created in an ongoing social and historical process rather than something fixed or objective. Thus, these survey responses should be evaluated in relation to Jularbo’s musical and artistic work and legacy.

The article draws on discourse analysis in a pragmatic sense. While not following a single codified method, the approach is informed by broader discourse-theoretical perspectives (Laclau & Mouffe 1985; Glynos & Howarth 2007), which guide the analysis toward how meanings and evaluations are constructed and circulated. The thematic coding of responses serves as an entry point, and these themes are then interpreted with sensitivity to how recurring formulations draw on wider discursive patterns surrounding Jularbo’s music. In this way, the study combines inductive thematic analysis with a discourse-analytic orientation to how notions of musical value are articulated and reproduced across contexts. The analysis combined manual coding and the exploratory use of large language models (ChatGPT and CoPilot) to assist in the categorisation of the anonymised data. Although the tools enabled faster initial sorting, it also generated false responses (“hallucinations”)⁸, which had to be carefully identified and manually removed. As Braun & Clarke (2006:7) emphasise, themes do not simply “emerge” from the material, and the analysis must always involve subjectivity. Thus, even if the process was AI-assisted, it mainly comprised iterative validation, manual correction and categorisation, which allowed me to engage with the material in ways I found analytically productive. While a full discussion lies beyond the scope of this article, working with AI in this process raised an interesting consideration. This way of working shows that prompting can be an analytical act in the same way that transcription is an important step in analysing interview material (Klein 1990) and that fieldnotes are crucial for understanding one’s experience of fieldwork (Barz & Cooley 2008:217).

That there is no single answer to why Jularbo was so popular is reflected in the survey responses. The vast majority emphasise danceability, rhythm, and tempo as the main reasons for Calle Jularbo’s popularity, describing his music as swinging, energetic, and irresistible to dance to. Another prominent category is that of nostalgia, sentimentality, and authenticity, his music evoking strong emotions and memories of a bygone era, perhaps of growing up, family, or special moments. Many responses also emphasise his compositions and the fact that he composed so many songs that have become immortal evergreens as a key factor. For some, his importance is more a matter of genre and innovation, where he not only preserved a tradition but also developed accordion music through his playing and arranging. Innovation and mediatisation also play a role in some responses. Some suggest that his popularity resulted from the distribution of his music through records and radio. Overall, the responses show a broad picture of why Jularbo became so popular, but it is clear that danceability and rhythm are by far the most emphasised factors.

Based on these categorisations, the analysis proceeds through several interconnected themes. It begins with nostalgia, sentimentality, and authenticity, followed by an examination of mediatisation and innovation. I then turn to compositions before addressing respondents’ descriptions of danceability, rhythmic articulation, and what is often referred to as the “Jularbo swing.” A subsequent section on mediated discourse considers how recurring formulations circulate across interviews, media representations, and listener narratives. The article concludes with a synthesising discussion that returns to Bohman’s framework and explores additional ways of understanding narratives surrounding Jularbo’s fame.

Imagine a cool summer evening in the countryside. You take in the scents, sense the room. You hear the tones of an accordion – Calle Jularbo’s. That’s where I want to go, where I want to be part of it, where I have a part of my musical heart. ^{9, 10}

Three clear and related categories that emerge in the material concern sentimentality, nostalgia, and authenticity. The music “speaks to your heart directly”¹¹ with “a feeling that goes straight into your body”¹² as two of the statements read. In contemporary discourse, Jularbo’s music is often described as sentimental by both admirers and critics. This applies not only to Jularbo, but also to gammeldans and the accordion in general, where both representatives of educated art music scene and the emerging folk music movement described the accordion as simple and unsophisticated. Among accordionists, Jularbo seemed to have been seen as less refined and more clearly rooted in the popular sentiment: in Bo Gäfvert’s book on Swedish accordionists, he is described as “the people’s accordionist” (“folkets dragspelare”) in contrast to Ragnar Sundqvist, who is more clearly described as a virtuoso: “the accordionist’s accordionist” (“dragspelarnas dragspelare”, Gäfvert 2006:125).

Toivo Burlin has examined sentimentality in a few Jularbo tunes that have been set to lyrics (Burlin 2025). Sentimentality is described by Solomon (1990:310) as the display of overly ”tender” emotions, as emotional excess or weakness, as a form of self-indulgent emotionality, or as the expression of emotions judged to be ”false” or ”fake”. This can be heard in the vocal performance of the male crooners such as Sven-Olof Sandberg (1905–1974), in the lyrics by Anna Myrberg (pseud. Svarta Masken, 1878–1931) and Peter Himmelstrand (1936–1999), and in how certain melodies shift between major and minor. But Solomon also links sentimentality intimately with feelings of nostalgia (Solomon 1990:321). Nostalgic longing recurs in some of the survey material, and there are several voices that emphasise Jularbo’s connection to the past as an important factor. However, place also seems to be a prominent aspect. The respondent whose statement opens the chapter continues:

I think that in the melodic language, which for [me] is Nordic, there is an inbuilt recognition factor, a nostalgia that cannot, of course, be touched, but it is there.¹³

As Johannisson notes, longing for place, in the form of clinical homesickness, was what the term nostalgia originally connoted. Only later was this meaning expanded to include a temporal dimension as well (2001:28). The music is perceived as sounding Nordic, and for the survey respondent, that creates a nostalgic feeling, which is described here as positive. It should be mentioned that in the statements that make up our material here, there is otherwise no mention of swedishness or any other type of connection to nationalistic ideas linked to Jularbo. At the same time, it is noteworthy that Jularbo’s background in a family of resande does not appear in the material. This silence does not in itself allow for conclusions about respondents’ attitudes, but it highlights the uneven circulation of Jularbo’s biographical elements. In contrast to the emphasis on musical qualities, sentimentality and place, his minority background does not feature as a meaningful interpretative resource in the respondents’ accounts.

Instead, it is the places that are highlighted in the material, not least the dance floor, and also other geographical places that had come to be associated with Jularbo’s fame. One of the responses describes how the village Jularbo (with which his family was closely associated) and especially the river Avestaforsen and the community hall have been imbued with a special atmosphere or feeling:

It is impossible to grow up in Avesta and Skogsbo without being confronted with Jularbo. Singing “Avestaforsens brus” was a given every day (twice) that I cycled across Avestaforsen. Having a dance rehearsal in the community hall in Jularbo had a special atmosphere – even when not a single Jularbo song was played.¹⁴

Sverker Hyltén-Cavallius (2014) has used the concept musical wormholes to describe a sensory time shift, where the listener travels between now and then through the places of the music. In his text, he mentions a dance floor as an example of such a place. In our material, the respondents’ memories of Jularbo’s music are likewise strongly anchored in place, linking it to cottages, kitchens, and dance floors as lived cultural settings: Jularbo was “warmly received in the cottages and on the dance floors.”¹⁵ Jularbo himself describes in his autobiography how his first encounter with dancing to accordion music was not on a dance floor but in the kitchen of the small rural home where he grew up, in Jularbo outside Avesta. The concept of musical wormholes helps clarify how such places operate in the respondents’ recollections. Just as Jularbo’s own memories are tied to the kitchen of his childhood home, listeners today imagine his music through the spaces where it was once lived and experienced.

Our spacious kitchen was a very popular meeting place for the dancing youth of the neighbourhood. Yes, even the elderly occasionally dropped in for a swing, because dancing was one of the few pleasures available in those days. /…/ Those who love to dance say that their legs tingle when the music plays, but in my case, it was my fingers that performed a funny dance on an invisible keyboard. Imagine being able to play like my father. It was a wish that completely filled my childhood heart. (Jularbo 1946)¹⁶

Jularbo’s own retrospection is characteristic of the autobiographical medium itself. In his case, however, the retrospective is clearly linked to the love of the accordion and dance, rather than a general longing for a time gone by. It is the traditional practice of accordion playing and dancing that interests him. This can also be seen in the respondents’ contemporary accounts as a kind of claim to authenticity:

He held on to the old accordion tradition from which he came. I think maybe it gave a sense of “authenticity” or naturalness that spoke to people. /…/ People usually talk about how he didn’t play with his thumb, but that’s how many diatonic accordion players play.¹⁷

Being the ‘accordion king’ that he was, Jularbo followed the technical development of the instrument: he started playing the diatonic accordion and adopted newer models as they came along. Yet it is true, as the accounts say, that despite adopting the chromatic accordion and composing melodies that could only be played on it, Jularbo seems to have retained aspects of older playing techniques (Burlin et al. 2024). As one respondent mentions, he did not play with his thumb on the treble side. This is a practice that probably comes from the diatonic accordion tradition, where the thumb is often held in a leather loop on the back of the treble side, to facilitate the handling of the bellows. Another aspect of what constitutes his claim to authenticity concerns his practice as a performer. Just as Jularbo retained older ways of playing newer instruments, he did not change his stage personality or body language as a performer. He sat straight up and down on a chair as he played. One respondent describes this as him having a “poker face”¹⁸ when he played, and another describes his “confident style sitting backwards leaning with one leg over the other.”¹⁹ His way of playing seems to have projected a sense of authenticity for some listeners:

It’s genuine. It’s true. It’s music that was first heard inside Calle’s head, and then he played it.²⁰

One way to understand Jularbo’s music is as part of a chronotope, a certain configuration of a specific time and place (Ronström 2019:18). Ronström draws on Bakhtin (1981) when he identifies chronotopes as central to the construction of Nordic folk music. In our material, the chronotope emerges through respondents’ perceptions of Jularbo’s stage persona and playing style, which for some are imbued with a sentimental charge. Some survey answers emphasise this chronotope as a collective and shared experience, highlighting the function of the music for dancing. Other answers focus on the individual experience, where music functions as an emotional link to a past time and place. Johanisson claims that nostalgia is always related to personal history, a longing rooted in lived experience rather than in an imagined past, even if the two can intertwine.

I can relate to Jularbo in the sense that my grandfather also played the accordion, so it’s a feeling of nostalgia for past times when one used to hear more people play musical instruments, especially the accordion, live – and not like now, when everyone listens to Spotify on their phones.²¹

Thus, we see both perspectives in the survey. Some respondents situate Jularbo simultaneously within their own personal history and within a more general sense of “the past”, connecting his music to loved ones as well as to a longing for simpler times. These are contemporary recollections of an earlier musical world. At the same time, however, the figure of “Jularbo” – the public persona and cultural brand associated with him – was, in his own time, an unmistakably modern phenomenon (Ronström 2021), as will be discussed in the next chapter.

Jularbo is synonymous with the gramophone!

(Nils Fläcke, personal communication, 19 September 2025)

While Jularbo and his playing style is often associated with nostalgia and bygone times, he was very involved with technological innovations of his time, most notably the gramophone. This is highlighted in the quote from an interview with accordionist Nils Fläcke (conducted by myself and my colleague Totte Mattsson). Jularbo himself showed a keen interest in new technologies, as evidenced in his autobiography.

Escaping the darkness and seeking the light is a perfectly natural and healthy reaction. It is still dark and gloomy in our days in the countryside, but imagine how much worse it was before electricity, film and radio. (Jularbo 1946:80)²²

Similarly, many of our respondents articulate a seemingly paradoxical understanding when compared with nostalgia-oriented perspectives: that Jularbo’s greatness derived not from his connection to “the past” but from his capacity for innovation. Several respondents explain Jularbo’s greatness as resulting from his being at the right place at the right time, especially in relation to the technological advances of the time. He is described in several statements as the first accordionist to make full use of the new forms of media established in the first part of the 20th century: the gramophone and radio.

[Jularbo] came just at the right time, when radio, the gramophone, and the community life were flourishing.²³

New media – 78 rpm records and radio – allowed him, more than anyone else, to step into the public spotlight.²⁴

Jularbo is arguably the most recorded musician in Sweden.²⁵ His extensive output, comprising 1577 unique recordings between 1913 and 1966 – although several melodies were recorded several times – is probably unrivalled in the history of the Swedish music industry in the 20th century (Burlin et al. 2024). One explanation for this productivity is, as the responses suggest, that his career took off in parallel with the commercial gramophone industry, and that, being the entrepreneur that he was, he saw fit to utilise this new form to disseminate his music (Burlin et al. 2024). In addition to this entrepreneurial ethos, several respondents highlight that a significant part of his achievement was that he contributed in large part to shaping the genre of music commonly known as gammeldans.

Jularbo had his own way of playing that is genre-forming.²⁶

He created his own genre and style of accordion music. You can still hear which accordionists know their Jularbo.²⁷

Jularbo’s heyday coincides with the gammeldans finding its form.²⁸

If we follow popular music scholar Franco Fabbri in viewing the creation of new genres as “transgressions to the rules of other genres” (1981:6), it becomes relevant to consider how the use of accordion music for dance contributed to new musical and social conventions. As Ronström (2023) has shown, Jularbo was in many respects a modernist figure. His recordings from the 1910s and 1920s were technically innovative and stylistically contemporary, even including one of the first Swedish jazz recordings, “American Rag”. At the same time, what is today referred to as gammeldans or old-time dance music first began to be labelled as such in contrast to the emerging modern dance styles based on jazz. During the 1920s, the distinction between dance music as “modern” and “old” became institutionalised, for example, in the genre lists of Radiotjänst (the Swedish national broadcasting service). Jularbo himself later positioned his music in relation to this divide, expressing a reluctance to play modern dance music and instead identifying with gammeldans, or as it was simultaneously called: cultural dancing. The naming of gammeldans as cultural (or kultis) might be seen as an ambition to position the genre hierarchically and to signal proximity to more sophisticated cultural contexts (cf. Arvidsson 2002).

When Jularbo began his career, dancing to an accordion was in no way regarded as a retrospective practice. It was the popular dance of its time, rooted in 19th-century dance music and emerging within the burgeoning music industry through phonogram recordings and tours of the people’s parks. As the genre developed, the ensemble configuration also evolved – primarily from solo accordion playing, via simple accompaniment by violin or another accordion, to a full ensemble with guitar, double bass, and other instruments. In a previous text (Burlin et al. 2024), we discussed how an important part of the popularisation of gammeldans was precisely its wide distribution on phonograms, a point also made by Alf Björnberg (2019:136–137). An initial aspect to consider here, however, is the purely technical design and function of the accordion itself, not least its loudness, which made it an excellent mediator of sound both in live performance and on record. This is also mentioned in the survey material by a respondent who clearly had some knowledge about the accordion as an instrument:

This was in an era before microphones and sound systems, and in order to make the beat stand out clearly on a gramophone recording or in dance music, his style of playing was most effective and became very popular. Diatonic accordions at the time were not good enough to create such compression in the bellows, but this became possible with the advent of chromatic accordions. Jularbo was the first to exploit this.²⁹

The manufacture of bellows-based instruments similar to the accordion began in central Europe in the first half of the 19th century, and from there spread north. In the latter part of the 19th century, the accordion became increasingly widespread and popular as a “pastime” in bourgeois parlours in Sweden, while already being associated with the countryside (Kjellström 1976:16). In parallel, the accordion can be seen as one of the earliest industrial rationalisations of music and was marketed as a symbol of modernity: a harbinger of the future that carried the allure of the new (Kjellström 1976:27, 33).³⁰ This way of looking at the accordion and accordion music as being linked simultaneously to the past and to the future is probably at the centre of Jularbo’s fame: he was a virtuoso on this instrument rooted both in the past and in the present, city and country. Ronström (2021) makes this same point as he describes Jularbo being on a progressive trajectory of becoming someone in Swedish society that was becoming increasingly modern. But to understand such aspects of cultural history, as Ronström points out, one also needs to sit down and listen to the music that it is all about (Ronström 2021: 111).

You can experience Jularbo’s music in two ways, as dance music or as music you listen to. I do the latter, and the best characterisation that has been made of it is, in my opinion, “Abba-Benny” Andersson’s words from 1989: “gammeldans-music sounds tired, but Calle Jularbo sounded as if he wanted something with his music”.³¹

While the accuracy of the quote attributed to Benny Andersson remains uncertain, it is well established that the ABBA songwriter holds Calle Jularbo in high regard.³² A recurring theme in the survey responses is the appreciation of Jularbo’s melodic talent – his music is frequently described as beautiful, with melodies that are “enticing”, “melodious”, and “refined”.

What makes songs popular and well known is not obvious. In musicology, this is investigated in the field of “hit song science”. Most often, melody is seen as a central factor, with a short but memorable hook (Burgoyne et al. 2013). A balance between repetition and variety is seen as important – too much repetition becomes boring or annoying, whereas too much new information makes the song difficult to grasp (Huron 2006). In the survey responses, Jularbo’s music is described as beautiful, melodious and ‘enticing’, as well as clear and simple:

I think a lot of his music is good. As an ear player, I find it very easy to follow his songs because they are so clear.³³

His own compositions are elegantly simple – they stick in your memory immediately.³⁴

Not only was the quality of the melodies mentioned, but also their quantity and popularity. Jularbo’s large repertoire, both as a composer and as a traditional musician, is likewise cited as a reason for his popularity. Freitas et al. (2018) have shown that familiar melodies are perceived as appealing to a listener, and several of Jularbo’s melodies became widely known evergreens, as discussed in earlier research (Burlin et al. 2024:143). It is difficult to say what comes first – are Jularbo’s compositions appreciated and well known because of their melodic content, or is it the way he played them, combined with his great celebrity, that has made the melodies “immortal”?

It was the rhythm, in the old-time dance music, that no one can imitate.³⁵

(Gunnar Persson, accordionist. From the documentary Dragspelskungen, Sima 1993)

The vast majority of responses refer to Jularbo’s particular way of playing that is perceived as swinging, mentioning beat, rhythm, and tempo. Other answers also emphasise that Jularbo’s music worked for dancing in a way that no other accordionist’s playing could match. It is described as a positive and immediate reaction, what groove-researchers call a “pleasurable urge to move” (Spiech et al. 2025:1):

You get the urge to dance straight away. The music is so alive.³⁶

It makes us up for dancing. I can’t describe it any other way.³⁷

A delight when dancing.³⁸

The majority of responses also link dancing to his intricate rhythm. In the first statement reproduced here, with the concept of “the beat straight down into the floor”, there is also an apparent kinship with the way rock swing is often described as “four on the floor”.

He gained a reputation for being good to dance to, the people need the beat “straight into the floor” so they know when to put their foot down.³⁹

Anyone who couldn’t dance could dance to the tunes of Jularbo.⁴⁰

For example, the waltz, where Calle had a calm tempo with a micro silence between each repeated section and then you could turn in the dance and not have to rush, but just enjoy.⁴¹

Jularbo’s popularity thus rests not only on his technical skill as an accordionist, but above all on the fact that he used that knowledge to make the music fit into the context in which it was performed. Respondents note that when Jularbo arrived, the dancing was guaranteed to be phenomenal – a result of his distinctive sense of beat and rhythm.

It is not only the rhythm and rhythmic subtleties that are mentioned in relation to the danceability of Jularbo’s music. When Ebbe Jularbo talks about his father, he also mentions that Calle had a “special calm tempo” (Sederholm 1980). Some of the answers also emphasise this “Jularbo tempo”:

It’s easy to dance to his playing, always the right tempo.⁴²

I think it’s the steady, calm, but determined tempo that makes dancers like the music.⁴³

We get a kind of “rikslikare”⁴⁴ for rhythm and tempo.⁴⁵

A perception that emerges in our material, as well as in interviews we have conducted (i.e. Fläcke 2025), is that the way Jularbo related to tempo changed over his career. There seems to be a perception that Jularbo had a faster tempo in the early recordings and a slower tempo towards the end of his career. A simple overview of Jularbo’s recordings supports this view and shows that the tempo in the older recordings is generally faster than the tempo in the later ones, which are also more stable over time. There are several possible explanations for this. One is related to the limited recording time on older mechanical recordings on 78 rpm discs, which might encourage performers to play faster to fit as much music as possible on each side. The recording nerves of a young instrumentalist may be another explanation. A final explanation, which has to do with Jularbo’s career and life’s work, is his development into a dance musician. It is possible that the reason why the later recordings are both slower in tempo and generally more stable is that he had transitioned from being an accordionist primarily known as a virtuoso always winning the accordion competitions (Burlin et al. 2024), to being appreciated mainly as an exceptionally skilful dance musician. His playing style, swing, and tempo were simply adapted to the needs of dancing.

Previous researchers have described swing as a combination of steady pulse and subtle, sometimes almost imperceptible, shifts in timing and emphasis (Danielsen et al. 2023, Honing 2001). Many responses in the analysed material that mention terms such as “the Jularbo swing” and “the Jularbo beat” suggest that it was not only a question of tempo or clear pulse but also a particular rhythmic articulation, variation, and phrasing that create the experience. While respondents differ in how they describe these nuances, many appear to have a clear sense of what characterises them. Here are some examples from the survey:

The playing style was unique. Used small variations of triplets in the treble while the bass was rock solid in rhythm and tempo.⁴⁶

It swings more than you think. In the waltzes, there’s often a bit of a triplet feel in the bass.⁴⁷

Because he learnt on a two-row system, the treatment of the bellows became important for the rhythm, with almost microscopic rhythmic shifts supporting the dance steps.⁴⁸

[He played with] a micro silence between replays.⁴⁹

Very steady rhythmically but with greatly extended punctuations and emphases.⁵⁰

The respondents try to explain their experience of the swing through almost music-theoretical descriptions of, for example, triplets in the bass and treble, microscopic shifts, emphases, or extended punctuations. Their descriptions vary considerably, reflecting different forms of practical or experiential knowledge, and it is difficult to identify a single common thread. What recurs in the material, and what is supported by analysing recordings, is that the melody is pushed before the bass:

His well-known technique of pushing the melody in front of the bass created the tension, the power, of the music.⁵¹

The fact that the bass is a little behind the treble also makes it something special.⁵²

When you combine a constant rhythm (the bass) with a rigorous, relaxed, restrained yet distinctive treble rhythm, you get close.⁵³

A similar description appears in a 1980s documentary feature about the accordion on Swedish television. There, Calle’s son, Ebbe Jularbo, describes his father's swing in almost exactly the same way. Whether it was Ebbe who coined this expression about pushing the melody in front of the bass, or whether he joined the discourse on swing that already existed in accordion circles, is unclear. Ebbe even draws a parallel between the swing of Calle Jularbo and that of Errol Garner:

One might compare him to Erroll Garner, the American jazz pianist, who could play with the timing however he liked in the treble, while the bass stayed perfectly in place. Dad, likewise, would sort of push the melody ahead of him a little in the treble. (Ebbe Jularbo in Sederholm 1980)

His comparison with Garner is particularly interesting, because the jazz pianist Garner was well known for his freedom between left and right hand, or bass and treble, as it is expressed here. Goebl (2011:1) has described this as “temporal independence” and uses Baroque music as well as Garner’s music as examples, although here it is a matter of a greater time shift. One of the survey’s more music-theoretically orientated respondents specifically attributed the Jularbo swing to the Baroque use of tempo rubato:

The theory was that in the Baroque period, they would have played with an almost extreme tempo rubato and when you listen to recordings of opera singers who learnt to sing in the 19th century, especially Salomea Kruschelnytska, you are struck by the shifts in tempo. They must have been drawing on an older tradition, and it makes me think: could the strange rhythm of Jularbo’s recordings from the 1910s be reminiscent of when Swedish folk music developed out of the Baroque?⁵⁴

It is wise to be cautious about attributing too much historical significance to the agogics of Jularbo’s playing, as this lies beyond the scope of the present article. The perception of Jularbo’s swing can be understood both as the result of a specific manner of playing and as something closely connected to how music is discussed and experienced in social contexts.

I think his music was so popular because he had his own “beat”. He was always slightly ahead in the bass, for instance, with very clear tones and bass lines.⁵⁵

This response describing the relationship between treble and bass reversed the usual formulation, claiming that Jularbo always played ahead in the bass, rather than the other way around. This might be seen as a contradictory analysis. However, if we understand such statements as part of an ongoing discourse or evolving narrative about Jularbo’s music rather than strict music-theoretical observations, it’s not surprising that the terms get mixed up. This is simply how Jularbo’s music is talked about within the accordion community.

Thus, the respondents’ accounts must be understood not simply as individual statements, but as situated within a broader context of transmission – among accordionists, within the gammeldans scene, and through media representations. Several of the phrases that the respondents use recur almost verbatim across sources: in interviews with accordionists, in newspaper articles and biographies, and in documentaries about Jularbo. For example, the phrase that “Jularbo played so that even those who couldn’t dance, could dance” which appears in our material, was uttered by accordionist Gunnar Persson in Dragspelskungen (Sima 1993), a documentary produced for Jularbo’s centenary. In the same film, Ove Hahn, then Head of Artists and Programming at the amusement park Gröna Lund, describes Jularbo as a rikslikare, a national reference point, for the waltz swing of gammeldans – and this archaic Swedish word is also used with the same sentiment in our material. And, as previously mentioned, Ebbe Jularbo explains in the SVT feature Mellan bondfiol och elgitarr (Sederholm 1980) how Calle “pushes the treble ahead of the bass”, which is echoed manyfold in our material.

It is probably true what our material suggests: that Jularbo’s steady rhythm combined with subtle melodic variations, agogic accents and phrasing is what makes Jularbo’s music so danceable and swinging, with a sense of forward motion and embodied energy. Jularbo seems to have mastered this more than perhaps any other accordionist. However, descriptions of this quality in his playing – often referred to as “the Jularbo-beat” or “the Jularbo swing” – should not only be seen as attempts at musical analysis, but also as part of a culturally transmitted narrative. These emic expressions convey more than just admiration for a distinctive rhythmic style; they articulate a shared understanding of how accordion music and gammeldans can be understood, how it can be danced to, and, in the end – what it means.

The discourse on how Jularbo’s playing style is described may also be viewed from a genre-hierarchical perspective. Just as proponents of gammeldans began to refer to it as a “cultural dance”, the way in which Jularbo’s unique swing is spoken about can perhaps be seen as a kind of search for proximity to more sophisticated cultural contexts, in the same way that jazz sought proximity to art music (Arvidsson 2002). At the same time, beyond the more music-theoretical explanations, there was something in the music’s swing that was extraordinarily unique, that directly appealed to the body, and that created in the listeners an irresistible desire to dance.

In this article, I have examined how Calle Jularbo’s musical popularity is understood through listeners’ retrospective accounts. The analysis reveals that rhythm and danceability are central to these perceptions, alongside associations with nostalgia, place, and social contexts. Respondents describe Jularbo not only as a bearer of tradition but also as an innovator whose melodic idiom and technical skill distinguish him from other accordionists. The findings contribute to ethnomusicological debates on how musical value is discursively produced and sustained over time. They highlight the interplay between tradition and innovation in popular dance music and show how notions of authenticity and modernity coexist within the cultural understanding of Jularbo. By situating listeners’ narratives within historical and medial contexts, the study extends previous work on mediatization and genre by foregrounding the role of memory and discourse in shaping musical significance.

Seen through Stefan Bohman’s three analytical concepts – symbolism, aesthetics, and use – several parallels and contrasts emerge between the accordion as an instrument and Jularbo’s music. Symbolically, Jularbo’s music, like the accordion, is linked to a specific cultural imaginary, functioning as a link to an imagined past associated with summers at dance halls and romanticised images of an earlier time, a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981; Ronström 2019) or a musical wormhole (Hyltén-Cavallius 2014). At the same time, while the accordion is often reduced to a symbol of a broad collective tradition, Jularbo is ascribed a personal musical identity and virtuosity that distinguishes him from this collective framing. He is not only a representative of gammeldans music, but a figure whose individual expression elevates the music beyond a purely functional context. Aesthetically, Jularbo’s music is perceived as both accessible and distinctive. While Bohman’s material describes the accordion as a carrier of joyful and straightforward music, the survey responses emphasise Jularbo’s specific playing style, particularly his rhythmic phrasing, swing, and what is often referred to as the “Jularbo beat.” These qualities are frequently described as producing a strong bodily response in listeners, and as positioning Jularbo as a reference point for how old-time dancing can and should sound. In terms of use, his music is closely associated with dance and social contexts, while also being appreciated through listening beyond the dance floor, allowing his recordings to endure as independent musical works. So, answering the first research question, the material shows that descriptions of Jularbo’s music repeatedly return to rhythm and swing while encompassing melodic expression, nostalgic associations, narrative formulations, and practices of listening and dance.

Conceptions of musical quality are created and maintained in a discursive process. Musical value does not appear as a fixed or objective property in the material, but as something that is formulated and reformulated in listeners' stories, in journalistic texts, in biographies, and in documentaries. The reproduction of descriptions of Jularbo as a “rikslikare”, as someone who “played so that those who couldn’t dance could dance” or who “pushed the treble before the bass” shows how specific ideas of his greatness are transmitted and consolidated over time. These recurring formulations illustrate how the valuation of music does not take place in isolation, but in a narrative tradition in which personal memory, interpersonal encounters, and the role of the media are all central. While the discourse surrounding Jularbo has shifted over time, these changes are themselves part of the ongoing mediation through which his musical significance is constructed, negotiated, and re-articulated. The descriptions we have discussed function not merely as expressions of appreciation, but as emic practices through which musical value is made meaningful, shared, and sustained. Answering the second research question, the material shows that musical value in descriptions of Jularbo’s music is constructed and conveyed through precise recurring formulations that circulate between listeners, media, and memory, gradually stabilising particular ideas of what makes his music significant.

One important reason why the results of this study differ from those reported by Bohman is that the two investigations operate at different levels of generality: whereas Bohman captures broad attitudes toward the accordion among the wider population, the present material reflects the views of listeners who relate specifically to a single, highly profiled musician on that instrument. Such general symbolic associations are therefore not expected to coincide with the perceptions of a more devoted and musically invested audience. At the same time, the responses also suggest that there is something particular about Jularbo himself that invites an unusually detailed and fine-grained form of appreciation – something that, one suspects, few other major entertainers of his era would elicit to the same extent. Jularbo is characterised by a balance between tradition and innovation, between the popular and the individual, between the collective and the unique. His music occupies a position where shared cultural memory, bodily experience, and individual artistic expression intersect. Approached through the stories of those who still listen today, musical appreciation emerges as a continuous dialogue in which meanings are both confirmed and renegotiated over time. Rhythm and swing function here not only as musical features, but as points of convergence where symbolic associations, aesthetic judgements, and practical uses meet. Seen in this light, Jularbo’s continued significance cannot be explained solely by reference to historical importance or technical skill. Rather, it lies in the ways his music continues to be talked about, remembered, and brought into use, allowing it to remain active within contemporary listening practices. The experiences and reflections shared by our survey participants suggest that musical value is sustained not by permanence, but by repetition and renewal. Jularbo’s music endures because it continues to invite engagement: to be listened to, moved by, recalled, and shared. It is within this ongoing movement between sound, memory, and practice that his music continues to find meaning.