Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1951 to 1982. The program was known for its light and family-friendly style, and the easy listening music featured became known as "champagne music" to his radio, television, and live-performance audiences.
Welk, a native of North Dakota who was born to German immigrants from Russia, began his career as a bandleader in the 1920s in the Great Plains. He gradually became more known throughout the country due to recordings and radio performances, and he and his orchestra were based in Chicago in the 1940s, where they had a standing residency at the Trianon Ballroom. By the start of the next decade, Welk relocated to Los Angeles and began hosting his eponymous television show, first on local television, before going national when the show was picked up by ABC in 1955. The show's popularity held through the following years, and with its focus on inoffensive entertainment, it was embraced by conservative audiences as an antidote to the counterculture of the 1960s. Welk vigorously sought to uphold this "clean-cut" reputation, and was deeply involved in managing both the on- and off-camera reputations of his show's performers.
In 1971, ABC cancelled The Lawrence Welk Show as part of a broader trend away from programs aimed at older or more rural audiences. Welk then continued his program in broadcast syndication until retiring in 1982. In the remaining decade of his life, he managed various business interests and packaged reruns of his show for broadcast on PBS, where it has continued to appear into the 21st century.
Early life Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota. He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (née Schwahn) Welk, Roman Catholic ethnic Germans who had emigrated in 1892 from Odessa in the Russian Empire (later Ukraine).
Welk was a first cousin, once removed, of former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (Welk's mother and Schweitzer's paternal grandmother were siblings). Welk's paternal great-great-grandparents, Moritz and Magdalena Welk, emigrated in 1808 from Germanophone Alsace-Lorraine to Ukraine.
The family lived on a homestead that became a tourist attraction. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year inside an upturned wagon covered in sod. Welk left school during fourth grade to work full-time on the family farm.
Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $ in ). He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family.
Welk became an iconic figure in the German-Russian community of the northern Great Plains—his success story personified the American dream.Timothy J. Kloberdanz, "Symbols of German-Russian Ethnic Identity on the Northern Plains." Great Plains Quarterly 8#1 (1988): 3–15 online. Welk did not learn to speak English until he was 21; he never felt comfortable speaking in public.Melissa Vickery-Bareford, "Welk, Lawrence" American National Biography (1999) To the day he died, his English had a marked German accent.
Early career On his 21st birthday, having fulfilled his promise to his father, Welk left the family farm to pursue a career in music. During the 1920s, he performed with various bands before forming an orchestra. He led dance bands in North Dakota and eastern South Dakota, including the Hotsy Totsy Boys and the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra. His band was also the station band for the popular radio programming WNAX in Yankton, South Dakota. The Lawrence Welk Orchestra scored an immediate success and began a daily radio show, which lasted from 1927 to 1936. The radio show led to many well-paying engagements for the band throughout the midwestern states. In 1927, he graduated from the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Although many associate Welk's music with a style quite separate from jazz, he recorded several jazzy sides; in November 1928 for Gennett Records, based in Richmond, Indiana: "Spiked Beer" and "Doin' The New Low Down" and in 1931 in Grafton, Wisconsin for Paramount Records "Smile Darn Ya, Smile".Rust, Brian (2002). Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897–1942): L–Z, index. Mainspring Press. p. 1812. Accessed July 30, 2016.
During the 1930s, Welk led a touring dance band specializing in dance tunes and "sweet" music (during this period, bands performing light-melodic music were referred to as "sweet bands" to distinguish them from the more rhythmic and assertive "hot" bands of artists like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington). Initially, the band traveled around the country by car. They were too poor to rent rooms, so they usually slept and changed clothes in their cars. The term champagne music was derived from an engagement at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, after a dancer referred to his band's sound as "light and bubbly as champagne." The hotel also lays claim to the original "bubble machine," a prop left over from a 1920s movie premiere. Welk described his band's sound, saying, "We still play music with the champagne style, which means light and rhythmic. We place the stress on melody; the chords are played pretty much the way the composer wrote them. We play with a steady beat so dancers can follow it."
Welk's band performed across the country, but particularly in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas. In the early 1940s, the band began a 10-year stint at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, regularly drawing crowds of several thousand. His orchestra also performed frequently at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City during the late 1940s. In 1944 and 1945, Welk led his orchestra in 10 "Soundies", three-minute movie musicals considered to be the early pioneers of music videos.Scott MacGillivray and Ted Okuda, The Soundies Book, iUniverse, 2007, p. 277-278.
Welk collaborated with Western artist Red Foley to record a version of Spade Cooley's "Shame on You" in 1945. The record (Decca 18698) was number 4 to Cooley's number 5 on Billboard'''s September 15 "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records" listing.Billboard, September 15. p. 29. From 1949 through 1951, the band had radio programming on ABC, sponsored by Miller High Life, "The Champagne of Bottled Beer."
In addition to his activities as a performing artist, Welk edited a course of modern music for the piano accordion which included arrangements by John Serry for the U. S. School of Music in New York City in 1953.
Recordings In addition to the above-mentioned "Spiked Beer," Welk's territory band made occasional trips to Richmond, Indiana, and to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record a handful of sessions for the Gennett and Paramount companies. In November 1928 he recorded four sides for Gennett spread over two days (one side was rejected), and in 1931 he recorded eight sides for Paramount (in two sessions) that were issued on the Broadway and Lyric labels. These records are rare and highly valued.
From 1938 to 1940, he recorded frequently in New York and Chicago for Vocalion Records. During this period Welk recorded numerous instrumentals especially for radio stations; these transcription records became a broadcasting staple. Welk signed with Decca Records in 1941, then recorded for Mercury Records and Coral Records for short periods of time before moving to Dot Records in 1959.
In 1967, Welk left Dot Records and joined its former executive Randy Wood in creating Ranwood Records. Welk bought back all his masters from Dot and Coral, and Ranwood became the outlet for all of Welk's many artists. They started with a huge reissue of old Dot albums in 1968 to get them started on the right foot. Wood's interest was sold to Welk in 1979. In 2015, Welk Music Group sold the Vanguard and Sugar Hill labels to Concord Bicycle Music while retaining ownership of the Ranwood catalog. Welk's estate licensed the Ranwood catalogue to Concord Music Group for 10 years.
The Lawrence Welk Show
In 1951, Welk settled in Los Angeles. The 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. The show became a local hit and was picked up by ABC in June 1955. By 1956, Welk also signed with Ben Selvin at RCA Thesaurus for broadcasts of his "New Lawrence Welk Show" on leading national radio networks.The Billboard - "Speed and Quality on RCA Thesaurus" Ben Selvin October 6, 1956, p. 26 & p. 32 RCA Thesaurus Lawrence Welk on Google Books
During its first year on the air, the Welk hour instituted several regular features. To make Welk's "Champagne Music" tagline visual, the production crew engineered a "bubble machine" that spouted streams of large bubbles across the bandstand. While the bubble machine was originally engineered to produce soap bubbles, complaints from the band members about soapy build-ups on their instruments led to the machine being reworked to produce glycerine bubbles instead. During the show's first year, the bubble machine operated continuously, with the bubbles wafting across the musicians' faces and instruments for the entire hour. Within a year, the bubble machine was retired except for the opening and closing "Champagne Music" selections. Whenever the orchestra played a polka or waltz, Welk himself would dance with the band's female vocalist, the "Champagne Lady". This was a long-standing tradition in the Welk band; the first Champagne Lady was Lois Best (1939 to 1941), followed during the war years by Jayne Walton.
Beginning with the Welk show's freshman year, Welk was careful to program current songs in addition to the traditional big-band standards. The Boyd Bennett rock-and-roll hit "My Boy Flat Top" was featured on two different programs (November 26, 1955, and December 10, 1955, the latter featuring Buddy Merrill on electric guitar). The policy was relaxed over the next year, with new songs still being included but now being treated as novelty arrangements. In the December 8, 1956, broadcast, "Nuttin' for Christmas" became a vehicle for Rocky Rockwell dressed in a child's outfit, and Elvis Presley's "Don't Be Cruel" was sung by the violinist Bob Lido, wearing fake Presley-style sideburns. In another episode, the Lennon Sisters and Norma Zimmer performed the Orlons' No. 2 pop hit "The Wah-Watusi" with the bass singer Larry Hooper wearing a beatnik outfit.
These stood in comparison to the contemporary American Bandstand, which catered to a teenager audience and featured the latest acts. In a 1971 episode, Welk infamously billed the Brewer & Shipley single "One Toke Over the Line" (performed as a duet by Gail Farrell and Dick Dale), which referenced the use of marijuana, as a "modern spiritual"; social conservatives of the era saw the song as subversive and it became the first casualty of an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to get radio stations to ban all pro-drug songs. Later in the 1970s, however, Welk's programs often included current adult contemporary songs performed by his singers, including "Feelings" and "Love Will Keep Us Together" (made famous by Morris Albert and Captain & Tennille, respectively), and current songs were included up through 1982, the final year of production of the show.