Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was a musician, accordion player, bandleader, and television impresario, hosting "The Lawrence Welk Show" from 1951 to 1982. His style came to be known to his large number of radio, television, and live-performance fans as "champagne music." He is a 1961 inductee of North Dakota's Roughrider Award. Contents [hide]
Lawrence was born in Strasburg, North Dakota, as one of nine children to Catholic, German-speaking immigrants from the French portion of Alsace-Lorraine, via Odessa, Ukraine.
The family lived on a homestead outside of town, which today still stands as a tourist attraction. The first year they lived there, they spent the cold South Dakota winter underneath an upturned wagon covered in sod.[citation needed] Never intent on being a farmer, Welk became interested in a career in music, convincing his father to purchase a mail-order accordion for $400. He made a promise to his father that he would continue to work on the farm until he turned twenty-one; in exchange, he would work on the farm and any money he made working elsewhere, whether doing formwork or putting on a show, would go to his family.
Welk didn't learn English until he was 21 because he always spoke German at home. To the day he died, he spoke with a noticeable German accent. When he was asked about his ancestry, he replied always with "Alsace-Lorraine, Germany"; this is explained in his autobiography, entitled "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!"
On his twenty-first birthday, Welk, having fulfilled his promise to his father, left the family farm to pursue a career in music. During the 1920s, he first performed with the Lincoln Boulds and George T. Kelly bands, before starting his own orchestra. He led big band engagements in North Dakota and eastern South Dakota. These bands included the Hotsy Totsy Boys and later the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra.[citation needed] His band was also the station band for popular radio station, WNAX, in Yankton, South Dakota. In 1927, he graduated from the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
During the 1930s, Welk led a traveling big band, specializing in dance tunes and "sweet" music. The term "Champagne Music" was derived from an engagement at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, when a dancer referred to his band's sound as "light and bubbly as champagne." The band performed in many places across the country, particularly in the Chicago area. In the early 1940s, the band began a regular 10-year stint at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, regularly drawing crowds of nearly 7,000.
His orchestra also performed frequently at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City during the late 1940s. From 1944 to 1945, Welk led his orchestra in many motion picture "Soundies," considered to be the early pioneers of music videos [citation needed], and the band had its own syndicated radio program, sponsored by Miller High Life Beer.
In 1951, Welk settled in Los Angeles, California. That same year, he began producing "The Lawrence Welk Show" on KTLA in Los Angeles where it was broadcast from the Aragon Ballroom in Venice Beach. After being a local hit, the show was picked up by ABC in the spring of 1955. Welk's television program had a policy to play well-known songs and tunes from previous years, so that the target audience would only hear numbers that they were already familiar with. Very occasionally, in the TV show's early days, the band would play a tune from the current charts, but strictly as a novelty number ("Nuttin' for Christmas" became a vehicle for comic singer Rocky Rockwell, dressed in a child's outfit; Elvis Presley's "Don't Be Cruel" was sung by violinist Bob Lido, wearing fake Elvis Presley sideburns).
Welk never lost his affection for the hot jazz he'd played in the 1920s, and when a Dixieland tune was scheduled, he would enthusiastically lead the band.
The type of music on "The Lawrence Welk Show" was almost always conservative, concentrating mostly on popular music standards, polkas, and novelty songs, delivered in a smooth, calming, good-humored easy listening style and "family-oriented" manner. Although described by one critic as "the squarest music this side of Euclid,"[citation needed] this strategy proved commercially successful, and helped it stay on the air for 28 years.
Much of the show's appeal was Welk himself. His unusual accent appealed to the audience. (On one 1955 show, he mentioned Danny Thomas's series, "Mek Room fur Deddy.") While Welk's English was passable, he never did grasp the English "idiom" completely, and was thus famous for his "Welk-isms," such as "George, I want to see you when you have a minute, right now." His TV show was recorded as if it was a live performance, and was sometimes quite freewheeling. Another famous "Welk-ism" was his trademark count-off, "A one and a two.." which was immortalized on his California automobile license plate that read "A1ANA2".[citation needed] This plate is visible on the front of a Model A
