When we speak of Tamburashi music in America, we are referring to the musical tradition of Croatian and Serbian-Americans, going back to the late 19th century. The community that it serves numbers some two million persons in such diverse places as Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Southern California, the New York City area, Galveston, Texas, Chicago Gary and Detroit. The popuation concentrations are either at seaports, near docks and fishing industries, or close to steel mills and coal mines, and, in the past, in the lumber and railroad-building camps of the West.

The term Tamburashi itself derives from the name of the instrument played--the ...