Lawrence Wilt

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Lawrence Welk in the Down Beat's New York office (ca.1947). Photography by William P. Gottlieb

Lawrence Welk (* 11. March 1903 in Strasburg , North Dakota ; † 17th May 1992 in Santa Monica ) was an American big band - leader , who was known in the US through his TV show.

Life

Welk was born in North Dakota as the son of a farmer with German ( Alsatian ) roots. In 1892 the Odessa family emigrated to the United States. German was spoken at home; He didn't learn English until he was 21 when he left the farm to play in dance bands. Welk later stated that he had never learned English flawlessly; he has z. B. once invited a singer to sing "at the microscope". He never lost his strong German accent. Shortly after leaving the farm, he had his own band playing in the North and South Dakota area. He also took music lessons at the McPhail School of Music in Minneapolis . They played “sweet music” and dance music (in the early 1920s also occasionally more Dixieland-jazz-oriented music); In 1925 the first radio broadcasts of her appearances were made. The phrase “Champagne Music” stuck to his band after a performance in Pittsburgh (visualized by soap bubbles in his later shows).

Wilted grave in Holy Cross Cemetery

In the 1940s they played very successfully at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and regularly at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City . The band also had their own radio show and often produced " Soundies ", a kind of forerunner of music videos, before Welk - after a successful tour of the west coast in 1945 - settled with his band in Los Angeles , where he moved from 1951 to the Aragon Ballroom in Venice Beach produced the "Lawrence Welk" show on KTLA radio. From 1956 to 1971 he had his own TV show on ABC . His show continued on many channels until 1982. He achieved his greatest success in 1961 with the instrumental Calcutta , a reworking of the Tivoli melody composed by the German songwriter Heino Gaze . Lawrence's Calcutta made it to number 1 on the pop charts in 1961 . With the album Calcutta he also rose to the top of the charts. Lawrence Welk had a total of 42 albums in the charts between 1956 and 1973, 10 of them in the top 10, and several single hits.

As a good businessman (music publishers, real estate), Welk was considered the wealthiest entertainer in Hollywood after Bob Hope .

literature

  • Leo Walker: The Big Band Almanac . Ward Ritchie Press, Pasadena 1978.
  • Simon, George T .: The Big Bands . With a foreword by Frank Sinatra. 3rd revised edition. New York City, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974, pp. 449-451.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ When Alsace fell to Germany after the 1870s war, the family emigrated, initially to Odessa .
  2. ↑ Reading Eagle - Google News archive search. Retrieved January 9, 2020 .
  3. ^ Germans from Russia Heritage Collection. Retrieved January 9, 2020 .
  4. ↑ At that time there were many small towns in the American Upper Midwest founded by northern European immigrants in which people did not speak in English every day, but in German, Swedish, Dutch, etc., depending on the origin of the first European settlers.
  5. ↑ Lawrence Welk, Bernice McGeehan: Wunnerful, Wunnerful: The Autobiography of Lawrence Welk . Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1971.
  6. ↑ Fred Bronson: The Billboard Book of Number One Hits . 3rd revised and expanded edition, Billboard Publications, New York City 1992, p. 84.
  7. ↑ Chart overview at allmusic
personal data
SURNAME Wilted, Lawrence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American big band leader
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasburg , North Dakota
DATE OF DEATH 17th May 1992
Place of death Santa Monica