The Big Corn Crop

The best-known products of North Dakota are wheat, livestock, and Lawrence Welk. More than 30 million people tune their TV sets in each week on Welk, 53, and his "Champagne Music" (Sat. 9 p.m. E.D.T., ABC). In less than a year, listeners have boosted his Nielsen rating from a puny 7.1 to an astonishing 32.5. Welk and his 24-piece band are consistently beating the four NBC and CBS shows opposite him (People Are Funny, Jimmy Durante, Two for the Money, It's Always Jan). His delighted sponsor, the Dodge Division of Chrysler Corp.. has renewed his contract and arranged for him to have another hour-long TV show on Monday nights beginning in September.

"A-One, a-Two . . ." What has Welk got? According to the critics, nothing. They think his Champagne Music sounds more like melodic 7-Up. His oleaginous manner and grin have won him some envious labels, including "Liberace of the accordion" and "Cornbelt Guy Lombardo." Replies Welk: "In order to be successful on TV. you have to play what people understand. Our music is always handled crisply. It's rhythmic and has a light beat all the time. Our notes are cut up so they sparkle. And, against the sparkle, we have an undercurrent of smoothness in violin, organ and accordion."

On the air. Welk starts each number by chanting the old-hat beat, "And a-one, and a-two and a-three . . ." He jigs in time to the music and, at least once each show, waltzes carefully around the stage with his singer, Alice Lon, looking like a man who has just successfully completed a course at Arthur Murray's. Welk twinkles a good deal and the big event of each show is when Welk harnesses himself to his $5,000 Pancordion and plays a number against the program's backdrop of champagne bubbles.

"Real Loud." When Welk and his accordion first came out of Strasburg. N. Dak. (pop. 800), his music was brash and noisy. A farm boy of Alsatian descent (he still has a faint Germanic accent absorbed from his parents), he learned to play "real loud" at barn dances. One of his fellow musicians used to protect himself from the Welk blare by putting cotton in his ears. Welk toured with small combos around Yankton, S. Dak.

After burning up the prairie country for five or six years, Welk--who had now taken charge of the band and toned down his music--got a playing date in Pittsburgh's William Penn Hotel, where the band wore white tie and tails that "hid the farm a little but didn't hide all of it." Welk went on network radio in Pittsburgh and began to be known nationally, was good enough by 1947 to fill in for Guy Lombardo in Manhattan. Since 1951 Welk has been playing regularly at the Aragon, an ancient ballroom in Venice, Calif., where he draws about 12,000 people a week. But whether he is playing in New York or California, on radio or TV, he aims his music directly at the Middle West, observes: "There seem to be a lot of Midwesterners everywhere."

Welk, who neither smokes nor drinks, lives in Brentwood, Calif, in an eleven-room Spanish-style house (no swimming pool), with his wife--a former nurse--and three children. From TV, Coral Records, the Aragon ballroom and personal appearances he grosses close to $2,000,000 a year at a time when most bands are having trouble. He is happy to pass on his formula to other orchestra leaders: "Just as soon as bands are willing to play for the public instead of themselves, they will have plenty of people ready to dance and listen to them."

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