Polonaise through the White House receiving line. Sousa wrote it in 1886 at the request of President Chester A. Arthur who died before it was performed. Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin", an adaption of Alexander Pushkin's novel in poetry verse, includes a famous polonaise. The polonaise is a Polish dance and is one of the five historic national dances of Poland. The others are the Mazurka (Mazur), Kujawiak, Krakowiak and Oberek, last three being old folk dances. Polonaise originated as a peasant dance known under various names – "chodzony" ("pacer"), "chmielowy" ("hops"), "pieszy" ("walker") or "wielki" ("great"), recorded as early as the
Polka in America, having won 18 out of the 24 Grammy Awards given for Grammy Award for Best Polka Album. "Polka Varieties" was an hour-long television program of polka music originating from Cleveland, Ohio. The show aired in several U.S. cities, and ran from 1956 until 1983. At that time, it was the only television program for this type of music in the US. (There were a number of polka shows originating from the Buffalo Niagara Region in the 1960s, including WKBW-TV's "Polka Time", which was hosted for its first half-year on air by Frankie Yankovic, and cross-border station CHCH-TV's "Polka