Wunnerful...the King (World)...What You Hear is Not a Test
I recently wrote this:
So perhaps I should discuss adult material - you know, 401k funding, arthritis, and an appreciation of Lawrence Welk.
Mary responded:
Lawrence Welk?! That's not "adult", that's Grandparently! Come on, now! ;)
So I did a Google search for the words "lawrence welk innovative," and I found some wunnerful links. Here's some material from Mature Focus (for mature adults only, but not a lot of pictures of wild sex orgies) relating to a 100th birthday celebration for Welk in the Quad Cities (Illinois/Iowa) area:
...Lawrence Welk has continued to be "wunnerful, wunnerful" in our hearts and on our televisions, still counting "ah one and ah-two" all the way to March 11, 2003. This date would have been Welk's 100th birthday, and in celebration, the big-band sounds and family atmosphere of Welk's hottest stars are coming to Davenport on March 23, to the Adler Theatre.
In attendance will be the much-loved diva Ralna English, one of Welk's original "pretty girls"....
"He was so innovative as well," remembers English. "He had the first black variety performer, Arthur Duncan, the first Hispanic, an Irish tenor, country singers...he covered a lot of territory musically with all of us, to satisfy all kinds of families."...
Nothing will erase Ralna English's memory of their biggest shows. "We had 22,000 people at Madison Square Garden. It was quite overwhelming to sing for that many people. Lawrence had to have security because ladies were trying to tear his clothes off! I was frightened several times when people would come at us, and they had to bring in the troops and push the fans back!"
The other memory English won't ever forget is that of Welk's funeral, a small affair at the Holy Cross Cemetery, in Los Angeles. "No media attended, just about 150 of us. We gathered in this chapel, with Lawrence's favorite music playing, a Dixieland band. I sang, and then sat down with the Lennon sisters. It was such a spiritual experience, and we all came together as a family at that service. When he died he left something that will always live. We all have to come to that point, but when you have accomplished what he did, to live and fulfill the American dream in such a powerful way for all these millions of people, even after his death...it's just a phenomenon."
From the St. Petersburg Times:
Does Lawrence Welk rock?...
Does the polka music of Lawrence Welk rock?....
I say both the man and his music rocked, and I've got proof.
It comes in the form of Upstairs at Larry's: Lawrence Welk Uncorked, a CD available Aug. 10 from the Vanguard label. The disc features such innovative contemporary DJs as Q-Burns Abstract Message, Greens Keepers, Magic Elephant Orchestra, Smitty and Physics remixing the old standards our grandparents dug performed by Welk's orchestra....
Now everyone can enjoy a new mash-up of You Are My Sunshine by Joy & the Spider Club that includes robotic vocals (kind of like Cher's Believe). Or the great Mancini's snazzy and sublime Baby Elephant Walk, all done up with danceable beats by Monkey Bar.
Rithma's take on Champagne Time is as fizzy and fine as Welk's.
The disc's executive producer is Welk's grandson, Kevin Welk....
Generations gathered in American living rooms from July 1955 to September 1971 to watch ABC's Lawrence Welk Show, on which a smiling Welk played his signature accordion....
Sure, plenty of kids thought Welk was square. He had that "weird" accent (German; though he was born in North Dakota, Welk grew up in a Russian-German immigrant community and did not learn English until he was 21) during a time when many American kids were unaccustomed to differences among people.
Also, the guy played polka.
And dumb novelty songs.
Add to that, Welk was always saying goofy things that people relished quoting. Like, "You know, it's a long world."
And, "There are good days and there are bad days, and this is one of them."...
But, it turns out Welk was a VISIONARY with the accordion and the novelty tunes. Look at some of today's biggest stars, working the whole accordion-novelty tune market. Stars such as Weird Al Yankovic. They Might Be Giants. And, uh, some others.
Also, Welk's personal cavalcade included big names. For real. Welk had the Lennon Sisters as featured performers for years. The four ladies grew up before America's eyes on the show.
Welk's musical family included important players such as the intriguingly named Aladdin on violin, pianist Jerry Burke, guitarist Buddy Merrill and clarinetist Pete Fountain.
Fountain was considered one of the world's best jazz musicians during the 1950s. Of course, Fountain quit Welk's band because Mr. Conservative would not let Fountain spice up a Christmas carol.
Did I mention dancer Bobby Burgess? Burgess, part of Welk's family from 1961 to 1967, was a former Mouseketeer.
A Mouseketeer. Just like several of today's hottest pop stars, including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera....
Here are some excerpts from a biography of Welk:
At twenty-one he left home to make a name for himself in the world of showbiz, joining several bands throughout the midwest thanks to his magic fingers playing the accordian. However, after a while, he found that being a bandleader was more fun than being just a mere member, so with a lot of vigor, and hardly any word of English spoken, he formed his first band, Lawrence and His Hotsy Totsy Boys. That was later followed by Lawrence Welk and His Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra followed by a procession of other bands, which regularly performed one-nighters across the midwest, and at WNAX radio in Yankton, South Dakota....
During the "Dirty Thirties," his band began to take shape, especially on one faithful night in 1938 when the band was performing at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA. When a dance patron commented that his music was "light and bubbly as champagne," he was from then on referred to as Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers....Throughout World War II and in postwar America, Lawrence added a stable of bright young music makers to his core such as trombonist Barney Liddell, Orie Amadeo on woodwinds, trumpet players Norman Bailey and Rocky Rockwell, Johnny Klein on drums, Jerry Burke at the keys, vocalist Dick Dale and accordianist and right hand man Myron Floren. In 1951, Lawrence and his band set out for an engagement in Southern California, and liked it so much he stayed...performing at the Aragon Ballroom in Santa Monica, where local TV station KTLA began broadcasting his performances.
Then in 1955...the ABC network came calling, and with the efforts of super agent Sam Lutz, producer Don Fedderson and sponsorship from Dodge, Lawrence Welk and His Musical Family of Champagne Music Makers made their national TV debut that summer....
The Sixties became a fertile period for change and innovation on the Lawrence Welk Show, with Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boylan joining in 1961 as a dance team along with Arthur Duncan, who joined in 1964 as the show's very first African-American Musicial Family memeber with his skills as a tap dancer. The show also made the transistion from black & white to color as viewers got to see how colorful the show got, and it wasn't just the outfits! Cissy King came on as Bobby's new dancing partner in 1967 when Barbara left to get married and start a family....and Tanya Falan would join later that same year, eventually becoming Larry Jr's wife....
By 1971, ABC dropped a bombshell when...in pursuit of younger demographics....cancelled the Lawrence Welk Show after sixteen years while it still was a network ratings winner. Angry fans flooded the network with phone calls and letters of protest, while Lawrence got letters of encouragement. That prompted him to syndicate his show coast-to-coast, and by that fall with more than 200 affilaties on board (larger than when they were with ABC) the Lawrence Welk Network presented the syndicated Lawrence Welk Show....and with talent such as Ken Delo and Mary Lou Metzger on board...became a super duper ratings smash!
For what it's worth, Welk's embrace of syndication effectively addressed a segment of the population that the networks were ignoring (remember, this was the same time that CBS cancelled any show that had a tree in it, including some very popular shows). More about syndication, written from the perspective of the mid-1970s (before Fox became the first successful fourth television network):
Until recently the business of distributing television programs on a station by station basis has been the poor country cousin of network television, accepting its cast off programs when they were threadbare from use and selling them to individual stations to run during the fringe time periods when the networks switch off their cables....
[O]riginal ("first-run") syndicated programming tends to be directed at the older and rural audiences that the network demographic experts disdain (Heehaw and The Lawrence Welk Show are the two top-rated syndicated programs) or the younger audience that is considered too seasonal ("children," one network executive told me recently, "are a fourth quarter business"). They also tend to be cheap, with the two most successful genres being game shows, which can be turned out five a day on a relatively low budget, and animal shows, where the talent is about as good and the residuals much lower.
The fortunes of syndicated television began to change in the early '70s, when talk shows hosts like Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore became staples of late-afternoon programming (Douglas and Griffin, both network castoffs, are now among television's highest paid performers.) Then a few years ago, Space 1999 and Monty Python's Flying Circus, both British imports rejected by the networks, began to find a healthy following in syndication. And then came another network reject, a slack-jawed, pigtailed waif named Mary Hartmann, who promptly became the surprise hit of the television season on channels one needed a safecracker's touch to tune in. Just a few weeks ago Norman Lear introduced America 2Night, a syndicated talk show spoof already sold in over 40 television markets, including all of the top ten. And a group called Operation Primetime has produced a film version of John Jakes' historical novel, The Bastard, designed to compete with the networks' evening schedules. The group, a loose coalition of nearly 100 TV stations under the aegis of Universal Television, is in effect a one-shot television network....
The show must be sold to each station individually and at rates that fluctuate wildly according to the size of each television market. Since the networks provide most of the programming for their affiliates, the main customers for syndicated shows are independent stations, many of them marginal UHF stations in outlying areas. Nor does a syndicator have the enormous publicity machinery available to the networks to promote a new show. And to add insult to injury, he must make dozens of prints of each episode and distribute-or "bicycle" -them to each station by non-electronic means.
Time passed, and cable emerged, but syndication remained strong:
What happens sometimes in the press is, cable gets a lot of play because it somehow seems to get a lot of buzz. But the things that are getting buzz are one show that does a 0.7 rating and everybody is talking about it as opposed to shows that do double-digits, five days a week on a regular basis. But they’ve been on the air for 20 years, in the case of Entertainment Tonight 24 years and, in the case of some of the King World properties approximately 20 years.
It’s as though people have stopped talking about it, and therefore the buzz is gone. If you’re an advertiser looking for a different audience to reach your prospective customers, I think you’re smart enough to continue to spend money there.
The big player in this market is King World Productions:
King World Productions, Inc. is the preeminent company in television syndication, distributing six of the Top Ten daily syndicated series, including the two highest-rated talk shows and two highest-rated game shows. Among its stable of quality, critically-acclaimed programming are America’s favorite game show, Wheel of Fortune, which has ranked #1 among all syndicated strips since its debut 22 years ago, and Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show, which has ranked #2 among all syndicated strips for the past 21 seasons. In addition, King World distributes The Oprah Winfrey Show, which has been the #1-rated talk series for the past 19 seasons, and Dr. Phil, which has ranked as the #2-rated talk series since its debut in Fall 2002. Additionally, for the past 17 seasons, King World has produced and distributed Inside Edition, the longest-running and highest-rated newsmagazine in syndication. King World syndicates the CBS network primetime hits, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY and family favorite Everybody Loves Raymond. The King World slate also includes MarketWatch Weekend, Bob Vila and Mr. Food.
Well, maybe Lawrence Welk wasn't Oprah Winfrey, but when ABC cast him out, he managed to do OK:
Lawrence Welk’s musical career grew into an entertainment empire.
A corporate publication states that Welk businesses showed revenues exceeding $100 million in 1990, with more than 1,000 employees in California, Hawaii and New York.
The Welk Group (formerly Teleklew Productions; the “klew” is Welk backwards), wholly owned by three generations of Welks, has become a sizable collection of diversified ventures, particularly in real estate and the entertainment industry....
The group’s holdings include The Lawrence Welk Foundation; Welk Syndication, which with the Oklahoma Television Authority packages Welk TV show reruns shown on public television; a television production company; plus some resort complexes and record labels.
The record labels include:
- Ranwood, which offers recordings by Welk and stars from his program, such as Myron Floren, the Lennon Sisters and Jo Ann Castle.
- Vanguard Records, which offers recording by folk, jazz, and blues artists, such as Joan Baez, Ian & Sylvia, The Weavers and Mississippi John [H]urt.
- Hindsight, a collection of authentic Big Band recordings made for radio--but not for commercial distribution--in the 1930s and ‘40s by such musicians as Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller and Guy Lombardo.
- Heartland Music, a joint venture in TV mail-order marketing and one of The Welk Group’s most successful. Compilations from artists such as Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Nat King Cole, Roger Whittaker and Zamfir, “Master of the Pan Flute,” have been marketed on TV.
Vanguard Records predated Welk's involvement:
50 years ago Seymour Solomon and his younger brother Maynard founded Vanguard Records in New York City. The two brothers started with a $10,000 loan from their father and rented a tiny one-room office in a rabbit warren at 80 East 11th Street (also known as 799 Broadway). Two years later, as the company was expanding, they were loaned an additional $13,000. This was the total capitalization for a company that within a few years was to become one of America's leading independent labels....
In the 1950s, Seymour and Maynard had the courage to break with the entertainment industry and record blacklisted performers, including Paul Robeson and the Weavers. The 1955 Christmas concert by the Weavers at Carnegie Hall was so successful, that although they continued to expand the classical catalog, there was an ever increasing emphasis on folk and popular music....
In the fall of 1986, Maynard and Seymour sold the company to the Welk Music Group, and in 1990 Seymour re-acquired the classical catalog. Today Vanguard's releases are of three types: current acts, CD compilations of vintage and unreleased material and various artist compilations....
Heartland Music, however, is no longer part of the Welk empire:
In September 2003 Heartland Music was acquired by a subsidiary of Infinity Resources, Inc....
Infinity Resources, Inc. is a privately held company consisting of proprietary catalog and internet-based retailing and third-party catalog and e-commerce fulfillment operations.
Our offices are located at 900 N. Rohlwing Road, Itasca, IL 60143.
Here's the status of the Welk Group today:
The company, founded in 1955 by the late famous bandleader, Lawrence Welk, comprises Welk Music Group (WMG), Welk Music Publishing, and Welk Music Distribution. The music business, WMG, includes labels Sugar Hill Records (Nickel Creek and Dolly Parton), Vanguard Records (Doc Watson and Joan Baez), Ranwood Records (Lawrence Welk and Jim Nabors), and marketing division Klew Media (Klew is Welk spelled backwards). The company is still owned by the Welk family....
Financial Highlights
Fiscal Year End: December
Revenue (2005): 45.40 M
Employees (2005): 1,350
By the way, the listed Sugar Hill Records is not to be confused with another entity with a similar name.
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