“That was the biggest applause I ever had,” he said. Welk recalled in a 1978 interview with The Times how he once was spotted at a coffee shop in Macksville, Kan., and asked to make an unscheduled appearance at the town’s combined elementary and high school. If Welk played to the older generation, he was perhaps most pleased by the reception he received from younger listeners. He was ever gracious to his fans and was 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 developed a love affair with his audiences. Welk was an unlikely candidate for national fame, but parlayed the German accent he picked up from his immigrant parents, 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 personal appearances. “For one thing, there was no other place where a musician could get such a steady job,” said one cast member.
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. Still others left the show over money disputes with Welk, who paid the minimum union scale to his cast. He listened to his audience,” Lennon said. “He came to us with those letters and said, ‘I told you!’ And he told the wardrobe people never to put us in bathing suits again.” “That’s what kept Lawrence Welk on television for so many years. Welk got more letters than you could believe afterwards from people asking him how he could have allowed our legs to be shown on television,” Lennon said. Kathy Lennon recalled the time the sisters insisted on wearing bathing suits-albeit modest, one-piece suits-for a pool scene taped at Welk’s resort near Escondido. The Lennons left Welk in 1968, to the bandleader’s dismay.Īs with Lon, costumes also were a point of contention with the Lennons. 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. The singing Lennon Sisters-Janet, Kathy, Peggy and Dianne-said later that they felt working for Welk put them in a time warp. and that got to be a problem when he started working with a younger generation of people in the music business.”
#Lawrence welk good night code#
“There was a dress code that everyone had to live up to,” said Sam Lutz, Welk’s long-time manager, ". But she left the show in 1959 after a lingering feud over her desire for more variety on her musical menu and-more sensationally at the time-after a dispute over the length of her hemlines, which were rising, along with Welk’s chagrin. Lon was one of the television Champagne Ladies, the showcased singers intended to symbolize the essence of femininity. Many quit.Īlice Lon and the Lennon Sisters were two examples. Some ultimately grew frustrated by his methods, which included control over music and even costume selection.
His reward came from his audiences, who could not wait to hear a succession of “Champagne Ladies,” accordionists and talented instrumentalists often forced to submerge their abilities in the routine Welk arrangements.
#Lawrence welk good night tv#
It was safe-and-sane TV entertainment, predictable and stable and wholesome.įor that, he went virtually without praise from within the television industry. His criterion 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. Welk to this day can be heard cuing 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, whose bubbling music makers were a television staple for 40 years, made his 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 Nielsen ratings.
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