He eventually formed his own quartet, the Lawrence Welk Novelty Orchestra, and in 1927 decided to head south to New Orleans in search of work.
Upon turning 21, Welk took up music full-time, playing in various polka and vaudeville-style bands around the area. Four years later, he convinced his father to buy him his own accordion in exchange, he promised to work on the farm until he was 21, and to give all his musical earnings to the family up to that point. He learned to play polka music on his father's accordion, and at age 13, he began performing professionally at local dances and social events. One of eight children, Welk dropped out of school in the fourth grade to work on the farm, and spoke almost nothing but German up until his teen years. His parents had fled the unrest in Alsace-Lorraine, the disputed border region between Germany and France, and settled on a small farm on the outskirts of town. Welk was born on March 11, 1903, in the small, heavily German town of Strasburg, ND. Yet that essential conservatism helped give The Lawrence Welk Show an amazingly lasting appeal after it lost its network slot, it spent more than a decade in syndication with greater success than ever, and found new life when its reruns became the chief source of revenue for many public television stations across the country.
He also drew criticism for the extreme scarcity of minority performers on the show, seemingly another symptom of its kowtowing to white-bread Middle America.
He and his acts were often dismissed as hopelessly square, by turns fluffy or sentimental, and reflecting an idealized purity that didn't really exist anywhere. For people who considered themselves remotely hip, that tone made Welk's name synonymous with sanitized entertainment, and an easy target for derision. Demanding and particular, Welk put them through rigorous rehearsals, and aggressively enforced the inoffensive, nonthreatening tone that made the show so palatable for viewers of all ages. In the process, he created a stable of familiar performers whose regular appearances were eagerly anticipated by his viewers. Yet Welk was beloved in spite of - or, perhaps, because of - those limitations, mainly because he knew his audience and paid close attention to what it wanted. He was an unlikely television star - his thick German accent and on-camera stiffness would have been crippling liabilities for many other hosts. And while Welk recorded prolifically, his true musical legacy was built through the doggedly innocuous, wholesome aesthetic of his show. Welk's long-running TV variety show was a huge success in its time, and remains an enduring favorite in reruns. It may or may not be true that Lawrence Welk is the most popular easy listening artist of all time, but it's difficult to think of anyone who is more prominently associated with the genre.
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