Welk was born in his parents' sod house on the family's homestead in North Dakota. The sixth of eight children of German immigrants, Mr. That was his sign that things weren't right." You knew he was upset because he'd just beat his leg with his baton. Norma Zimmer, who became his last Champagne Lady in 1960, said that Mr. But then he talked to three guys in the band - a Jew, a Methodist and a Presbyterian - and they said, 'Why don't you let him run his life and you just run his trombone.' So he called me back on my wedding day and said I had my job back." "He said I'd be living in sin and that's not right. Lidell from the band after he announced his intention to remarry. Welk's reaction when he divorced his wife and later remarried. Long-time band member Barney Liddell, a Roman Catholic, recalled Mr. Still, he was ever gracious to his fans and the proud patriarch of his so-called Musical Family of studio musicians, dancers, singers, entertainers and support crew members, serving as a gentle but firm disciplinarian and preacher of conservative values. At first uneasy as a television personality, fearful that his fourth-grade education would betray him, he soon enough became smitten by zTC the love affair he developed with his audiences. Welk was an unlikely candidate for national fame, but parlayed his German accent, charisma and a keen discernment of Middle America's musical taste into a business empire founded on television, records and music publishing. For one thing, they all had to be at the studio for the Saturday night show - the biggest night of the week for personal appearances. Not many, however, found extensive work outside of the Welk show. Welk did set up a generous profit-sharing plan for his performers while giving them freedom to appear on other television shows and to make outside personal appearances. When we told him we'd stay if he'd pay us double scale, he told us, 'No act is worth a penny over scale to me.' " "After that he agreed to pay us solo scale, $210 a week. "We worked at group scale, which was $110 a week, for 10 years," Kathy Lennon recalled. Welk, who paid the minimum union scale to his cast. Still others left the show over money disputes with Mr. "He didn't want to let go of his little girls, but by then we all were married and between us had eight children of our own," Kathy Lennon said. Welk in 1968, to the bandleader's dismay. "We'd be skipping around toadstools singing "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" while our friends at school were listening to the Beatles," Ms. He wanted to give people music he thought they could understand, and he didn't think they could understand Beatles songs or Stevie Wonder songs. "As we got older - into our teen-age years and then into our 20s - we wanted to do more sophisticated, more popular music," said Kathy Lennon, who was 12 when she and her sisters joined the show in 1955. His reward came from his audiences, those who could not wait for their weekly taste of "uh-one and uh-two" accompanied by a succession of Champagne Ladies, accordionists and talented instrumentalists.
#When was lawrence welk on tv tv
It was safe-and-sane TV entertainment, painfully predictable and stable and wholesome.įor that, he went virtually without praise from within the TV industry itself. Welk's criteria for success was to keep it sweet and simple: play the proven standards the people want to hear, in the simplest of arrangements, and in less than three minutes just in case someone did not like a particular song. As recently as 1988 Welk could be heard cueing his band with his "uh-one and uh-two" signature countdown on weekly rebroadcasts of his television shows on PBS outlets throughout the country. Welk and his bubbling music-makers were a television staple for 36 years, making their debut in an era when Arthur Godfrey, Groucho Marx, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners were at the top of the Nielsens.
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