The Story, a comedy: The tramps Szcepko and Tonko perform Christmas puppet show for change and share their single Christmas Eve fish with Krysia and her father. Krysia, is orphaned but refuses to go live with her supposedly snobby, upper-crust grandmother. Instead she shares attic lodging with Tonko and Szczepko. Evenually Krysia ends up at her grandmothers house, but soon returns to the attic, where she is on the lam with Tonko and Szczepko. The tramps send Krysia to boarding school and finance this through a faked kidnapping scheme. Krysia finds love with an architect (who has the forgettable song here). In spite of cooperation of the boarding school butler, the whole thing unravels, but with a happy ending.
Polish folk music was collected in the 19th century by Oskar Kolberg, as part of a wave of Polish national revival. With the coming of the world wars and then the Communist state, folk traditions were oppressed or subsumed into state-approved folk ensembles. The most famous of the state ensembles are Mazowsze and Śląsk, both of which still perform. Though these bands had a regional touch to their output, the overall sound was a homogenized mixture of Polish styles. There were more authentic state-supported groups, such as Słowianki, but the Communist sanitized image of folk music made the whole field seem unhip to young audiences, and many traditions dwindled rapidly.
Polish dance music, especially the mazurka and polonaise, were popularized by Frederick Chopin, and they soon spread across Europe and elsewhere. These are triple time dances, while five-beat forms are more common in the northeast and duple-time dances like the krakowiak come from the south. The polonaise comes from the French word for Polish to identify its origin among the Polish aristocracy, who had adapted the dance from a slower walking dance called chodzony. The polonaise then re-entered the scene and became an integral part of Polish music.