We’re just home from a Lawrence Welk weekend, and by that I mean, total immersion in all things Welk. Three things came together.
First, the debut screening of the new Welk documentary by Prairie Public: A North Dakota Farm Boy. You’ll have to wait until July to see it by broadcast, but the auditorium at the Heritage Center in Bismarck was packed, Prairie Public CEO John Harris was a marvelous host, and Mr. Germans from Russia, Michael Miller, was beaming.
The film is an homage—don’t look for any critical revisionism here!—but the middle and latter sections do marvelous work in capturing the sweep of Welk’s career from farm boy to territorial bandsman to hotel ballroom empressario to titan of network television. Afterward we got insightful comments from Margaret Heron Letterman, who worked for Welk from age 18 for 48 years, and from Dr. Lance Richey, author of the forthcoming and landmark biography, Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century.
Lance is a theologian and a college president from Indiana who got interested in Welk and turned out to be a darned good historian, biographer, and writer. After the better part of a decade’s work on the subject, his three-volume biography is forthcoming this July. More than 1200 pages total, three clothbound volumes in a boxed set. North Dakota State University Press is taking advance orders of the limited, signed edition. (Paperback to come at a date to be determined.)
You know, when the proposal came for the State Historical Society of North Dakota to acquire the boyhood homestead of Lawrence Welk, there was a fair amount of uninformed and politically motivated trash talk as to the lasting historical significance of Welk. More another day about Champagne Times, but I’ll just say for now, this heavyweight biography will settle that hash.
On Sunday, too, we celebrated the tenth year of the Welk Homestead State Historic Site, in Emmons County. This was the biggest event ever for the state site (perhaps five hundred people milling around), because it incorporated three new elements: an antique tractor competition, which reinforced the salience of agricultural history in the site; a recreation of the Lawrence Welk Show by the local singing group, Joyful Voices; and a dedication of the statue of Lawrence brought over from the Welk resort in Branson, Missouri.
I had the privilege of MCing the dedication program, introducing a baseball line-up of people important in the history of the historic site, joshing the politicians a little bit, and doing my bit to point up the historic significance of the homestead and the life of Welk. The statue is a nifty photo opp, with Lake Baumgartner in the background. The program was a felicitous combination of community and triumph.
Back to the Welk-show recreation by Joyful Voices—what a crowd-pleaser! Lawrence’s nephew Pete Silbernagel took the roll of Welk, and the Joyful Voices, ordinarily an all-female ensemble, brought in a bunch of male ringers to take parts. It was hard to say whether the crowd or accordionist Hunter Heinrich himself got more of a kick out of his portrayal of Myron Floren. Senator Robert Erbele’s basso channeling of Larry Hooper was also much appreciated. But when Carol Neis came out sparkling blue as the sky to sing “In the Garden” in the style of Champagne Lady Norma Zimmer, there were tears in the tent. But not mine, no sir, not me.
