Greg Drust

National Cleveland Style Polka Hall of Fame and Museum

605 East 222nd Street
Euclid, OH 44123

USA

E-mail: Polkashop@aol.com

Phone: 216-261-3263

Toll Free: 1-800-66POLKA

Fax: 216-261-4134

Greg Drust, deejay and music historian has a personal collection of 240,000 records meticulously organized and stored in his south side home. His basement is lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and each shelf is stacked with 45s and 78s. There's a section for Cajun zydeco and western swing, for Irish folk, rockabilly and hymns. Polka has its own subsections: for the oompah, Slovenian and Polish styles, and for accordion music. Greg is a musicologist of the highest order with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of many different styles. He's one of the world's foremost authorities on American roots music. Greg Drust is blind, so the albums have Braille labels. They're cross-referenced by artist, chronologically, by record number, and by genre. And the stuff in the basement is just part of his collection. More albums, all of a uniform height and skinny as pencils, are crammed onto shelves in his living room, dining room, bedroom and hallways, and the overflow is kept in the garage. When Drust was 19, he was in a near-fatal car accident in California. He survived, but lost his eyesight. Music gave him a reason to live. He studies all forms of indigenous ethnic music, but his favorite is polka.

Inducted in 2009