Welk, Lawrence LeRoy

(b. 11 March 1903 in Strasburg, North Dakota; d. 17 May 1992 in Santa Monica, California), orchestra leader, accordionist, and television program host whose “champagne music” epitomized middle-American taste from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Welk was born and brought up on a farm near Strasburg, North Dakota. His Alsace-born parents, Ludwig Welk (a blacksmith) and Christina Schwahn, had immigrated to the United States in 1892. The seventh of eight surviving children, Welk grew up speaking German and attended a local Catholic school run by German Ursuline nuns. As an adult Welk spoke English with a heavy German accent and it was often assumed he had been born outside the United States. His formal education ended at age eleven when a prolonged hospitalization and recuperation from a ruptured appendix put him so far behind his peers that his parents decided not to return him to school. During his recuperation Welk learned to play his father’s accordion, and he later convinced his father to lend him $400 (to be repaid by work on the farm) to buy a new, first-rate instrument. As a teenager Welk honed his musical skills by entertaining at local social events.

In 1924, at age twenty-one, Welk left the farm to begin a career as a professional musician. He joined the Lincoln Boulds Chicago Band, but displeased by meager and often nonexistent paychecks from Boulds, he left and briefly managed his own band. He then joined George T. Kelly’s Peerless Entertainers as an accordionist. In 1927, after the dissolution of the group, Welk again formed his own band, first called The Hotsy Totsy Boys and later known as Lawrence Welk and his Novelty Orchestra. The Welk orchestra soon began making regular appearances on WNAX, a Yankton, South Dakota, radio station. The radio exposure earned Welk a wider following and, while based in Yankton, he obtained frequent bookings at ballrooms in the Midwest and West including the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the El Mirador in Phoenix, Arizona. While living in Yankton, Welk met Fern Renner, a nurse, who like Welk was a Catholic of German extraction. The couple married on 19 April 1931 and had three children.

In 1936 the Welks moved to Omaha, Nebraska. Deemphasizing the polkas, waltzes, and other ethnic specialties that had been his musical focus, Welk developed a softer and more genteel sound aimed at middle-class audiences. He eschewed the flashy swing style exemplified by bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. A stint at the Saint Paul Hotel in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1938 led to a lengthy engagement at Pittsburgh’s William Penn Hotel and regular broadcasts over the Pittsburgh radio station WCAE. While performing in Pittsburgh, Welk’s bubbly musical style was likened to sipping champagne. The comment inspired Welk to rename his group Lawrence Welk and His Champagne Music Makers and to take as their signature song “Bubbles in the Wine.” The female singer who appeared with the orchestra became known as the “Champagne Lady.”

In 1939 Welk again moved his base of operation, this time to Chicago, where he spent the next decade as a mainstay at the Trianon Ballroom. Now enjoying a comfortable income, he settled his family into a large house in suburban River Forest, Illinois. Typically Welk would spend a few months of the year on the road; he sometimes substituted for Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, a higher-profile orchestra with a similarly smooth style, at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt.

Welk oriented his music towards ballroom dancers rather than record buyers. Although he made a few recordings in the 1940s he was never dependent upon record sales and was thus less affected than other orchestras by the waning popularity of big bands. From 1949 to 1951 many of Welk’s national tour dates were broadcast over the radio by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and sponsored by the Miller Brewing Company, producer of Miller High Life, the “Champagne of Bottled Beers.” An astutepromoter of his orchestra, Welk had engineered the Miller sponsorship himself.

Welk’s strongest support had always come from his home territory in the Midwest, but by the early 1950s he was finding that his most lucrative bookings were now on the West Coast. In 1951, an extremely successful engagement at the Aragon Ballroom on the pier at Santa Monica, California, led to his being offered a regular television program on the Los Angeles station KTLA. Welk accepted the offer and moved his family from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Television cameras were brought into the Aragon to broadcast performances of Welk’s ballroom show, which included both vocal and instrumental numbers, to local Southern California home audiences. In 1955 the Welk program was picked up by ABC television, then a struggling “third network,” as a nationwide summer-replacement offering. The nationally televised show moved Welk and his performers out of the ballroom and into a television studio but retained essentially the same format. The summer program was so popular that ABC put Welk on its regular schedule in the autumn of 1955. It quickly became one of the network’s leading programs.

For the next sixteen years the Lawrence Well Show was a fixture in ABC’s Saturday-night television lineup. Welk offered an eclectic mix of Tin Pan Alley standards, ragtime, romantic ballads, folk songs, hymns, patriotic songs, show tunes, and contemporary hits, all performed in the cheerful yet decorous manner that was Welk’s trademark style. In addition to musical numbers the Welk show featured tap and ballroom dancers. He also encouraged his studio audience members to get up and dance. “You have to play what people understand. Our music is always handled crisply. It’s rhythmic and has a light beat all the time. Our notes are cut up so they sparkle. And, against the sparkle, we have an undercurrent of smoothness in violin, organ, and accordion,” Welk told Time magazine.

Of medium height and weight with blue eyes, a large nose, and light brown hair he wore slicked back, Welk was a shy man who had never been comfortable addressing his audiences because of his heavy accent and natural reserve. He presided over his television program in an awkward, deadpan manner that many viewers found a refreshing change from the slick, highly professional style of most other television hosts. Welk’s usual response to a vocal or dance performance was a calmly stated “Wunnerful, wunnerful,” and this became a popular catchphrase, as did his way of starting up the orchestra’s tempo with “Ah one, ah two.”

Welk considered his musicians, singers, and dancers his “musical family” and ran his program in a paternalistic fashion. He expected those who worked for him to uphold the program’s wholesome values in their private lives. Hostile to the significant changes in popular music and fashion that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, Welk opposed efforts by his performers to make the show sound and look more up to date. Miniskirts, Nehru jackets, and psychedelic colors were never seen on the Welk show. Although carefully selected contemporary songs made it into the Welk repertoire, they were always sung in the Welk house style.

Some performers chafed under Welk’s restrictions and left his employ, but most remained with him for years. Welk’s long-standing performers included accordionist Myron Floren, singer Jimmy Roberts, saxophonist and vocalist Dick Dale, pianist and bass vocalist Larry Hooper, Irish tenor Joe Feeney, tap dancer Jack Imel, ballroom dancer Bobby Burgess, and “Champagne Lady” singer Norma Zimmer. Since the program’s original format never changed, Welk kept the show fresh by frequently adding new young performers to the cast. Later additions included Guy Hovis and Ralna English, a husband-and-wife vocal duo, Tom Netherton, a balladeer, and Anacani, a female vocalist specializing in Latin numbers.

From the beginning the Welk show was generally disliked by critics, who dismissed the musical arrangements as vapid and the singers and dancers as talented but colorless automatons. Welk ignored critics and sought the approval only of the public. He was highly influenced by letters sent in by viewers, and he showcased performers who received the greatest amount of favorable mail. Probably the best-known Welk performers were the Lennon Sisters, a Los Angeles quartet who began appearing on the program as children in the mid-1950s and remained with him until 1968 when, tiring of Welk’s domination, they struck out on their own without much success.

In the social upheavals of the late 1960s, The Lawrence Well Show came to be seen by some as a bulwark against the increasing power of untamed youth and degenerate rock-and-roll music; others saw it as a laughable anachronism; and still others considered it the favorite program of reactionaries wishing to turn back the clock. Despite the symbolism heaped upon the show, its contents never became political or didactic. The “champagne music,” non-revealing costumes, and restrained vocal performances spoke for themselves.

In 1971 ABC canceled Welk’s show primarily because its audience share, while large, was too old and rural to draw the top advertising prices that the network desired. Ever resourceful, Welk began producing the show on his own and offering it directly to television stations. Under this arrangement the show stayed on the air for another eleven years. The program finally ended in 1982 when Welk, approaching eighty years of age, decided to retire. The Public Broadcasting System later showed reruns of the Welk program repackaged as Memories with Lawrence Well and hosted by former cast members.

Early in his television career Welk placed his finances in the hands of Ted Lennon, uncle of the Lennon Sisters. Over the years Lennon’s investments in real estate, including Lawrence Welk Village, a retirement community in Escondido, California, made Welk one of the richest people in show business (a Lawrence Welk Museum operates nearby). Welk also owned a thriving music-publishing business run by his son, Lawrence Jr., which held the rights to many old standards (including the works of the composer Jerome Kern, which the Welk organization bought for $3.2 million in 1970) and contemporary country-and-western hits. In his later years Welk wrote his autobiography and several other books extolling the virtues of hard work, clean living, and patriotism. Welk died of pneumonia at his Santa Monica, California, home. He is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Welk and his “champagne music” pleased audiences in ballrooms and on radio and television for more than forty years. In terms of public acceptance he is among the leading figures in American popular music of the twentieth century.

With the exception of his first book, Guidelines for Successful Living (1968), all of Welk’s books were written with Bernice McGeehan, including his autobiography, Wunnerful, Wunnerful. (1971), Ah-One, Ah-Two: Life with My Musical Family (1974), My America, Your America (1977), This 1 Believe (1979), and You’re Never Too Young (1981). Pete Martin, “I Call on Lawrence Welk,” Saturday Evening Post (21 June 1958), offers a lengthy interview with Welk. Sedulus, “The Enduringly Crummy,” The New Republic (19 Dec. 1970), is a critique ofWelk’s musical style. Roger Neal, “Wunnerful, Wunnerful!,” Forbes (26 Sept. 1983), examines Welk’s business enterprises. Obituaries are in the New York Times (19 May 1992) and Newsweek. (1 June 1992).

Mary Kalfatovic