Well, I'M still here. I myself can't believe the progress of time, because I'm the only one who looks exactly the same. All my classmates from grammar school are either dead or have grey hair. It's the wine, I'me sure of it. Then again, I never did any drugs, and I never married. Instead I moved to eastern Europe when the wall fell down and started my own supermarket and later a bank. Learned 4 foreign languages along the way, but I'm still that guy from the 60s who hung out in the backyard in his underwear listening to (back then) modern records and drinking homemade wine. That guy EVERYBODY knew. I'm still that guy. And you can still come by my place here in Germany. Just slightly bigger than what I had in Elmwood Park.
Love the song. My daughter sang this in a competition when she was 7 years old and and won 1st prize in it. This was at the American Baton competition at the States. What a great time we had. Joan Smith. God bless everyone ❤❤❤
Another Disney connection: the male dancer in the clip is Bobby Burgess, who was one of the original Mouseketeers, which started the same year Welk started his TV show - 1955. Burgess was always an outstanding dancer & still makes appearances on behalf of the Welk musical family.
I really enjoyed that! Thank you, Kevin. Myron was a beauty, always smiling and having the greatest time! My favorite Myron was him playing with the orchestra on "Calcutta" on the Lawrence Welk Show.
Nice song. If you notice, Lawrence Welk's left hand is concealed when playing, since he never learned how to play the bass clef of the accordion. Daddy always made reference to this defect.
Take every dish your grandmother made that were the least flavorful and blandest. Tuna casserole, jello something or other, chipped beef and gravy (SOS), soggiest meatloaf, strained prunes or prune juice, mash potatoes with no salt or seasonings, etc. Throw it all into a giant blender and push PUREE for 30 seconds until it becomes a nice creamy, pour ready mess. Pour into onto your soup bowl. That's what Lawrence Welk music was. A pureed blend of slop for easy digestion and no chewing required. Goes down with no offending salt or spices, tasteless, and comes out the other end with no irritating burning sensation. He took the most inoffensive music, least complex, minimum imagination of composition, and flattened it even more so there was nothing left to chew on. Nothing intellectually stimulating, nothing to cause any any digestion or heartburn, nothing to satisfy the hunger for new taste sensation, and poured it into every viewer's soup bowl. Don't need any musical taste or training. Don't need to know a pizzicato from a pizzaria, an allegro non tropo from a volce moderato, just spoon it down and swallow. Don't even need to put your dentures in. No straining your bowels when it comes out the other end. Welk knew his audience. He understood they weren't the most educated or worldly, understood they lived through WWI, thr Great Depression, WWII, and Korea, and don't want challenging music or modern compositions that pulls them into uncomfortable arenas. No John Gage and his 4'33" of silence at the piano. Welk fans just want soothing easily digestible tunes that might remind them of grandma's house with her slightly unpalatable cooking with no seasonings or imagination because Gramps couldn't eat salt or pepper. For that he was a genius at. He gave auditory comfort to those who wanted to feel the good old days when things were familiar and everyone knew their place in society. Whites knew what was expected and blacks knew not to be uppity. He reminded them when blacks couldn't move into a good white neighborhood and a man was a man who smoked 2 packs of Msrlboro a day and a woman who knew her place was chained to the kitchen with just enough slack to go into the bedroom. Days when it was expected that if the wife mouthed off or wasn't ready with a fabulous meal when he came home, a little back handed slap was all it took to cure any thoughts of trying to live to her potential. Oh the good old days. LAWRENCE welk Provided a trip down memory lane for those folks.
The negative comments about this are really stupid. This may not be your cup of tea, but try to be civil, and not give the rest of us that "hipper than thou" nonsense. Many of us who have listened to Welk, listened to many other kinds of music as well. I gues they never thought of that. There's an lot more to music than 3 guitars, synthesizer, and drums. Try listening you're sure to learn something.
F***k that "it's not my kind of music comments" you bunch of hypocrites!!! A lot of you guys are closeted Lawrence Welk fans like me listening to his beautiful version of Jesusita En Chihuahua in private with your headphones. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ooops sorry, it's Myron Floren's Chihuahua Polka. They sound the same. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha again. I love you Lawrence Welk. Be happy !!!!!!
Does anyone else see Robin Williams when looking at this guy? The one in the beginning also the one in the middle of the three amigos. besides just myself? Maybe I just miss the guy but I can see him in him.
You know what "perfect pitch" is? It's the ability to throw the accordion into the dumpster and have it land on the banjo! Really, though, this is fun music, I like it a lot!
LOL!!! Quantum Leap, that is damn funny!!!!!!! At first, when I first started reading it, I was thinking "oh here we go with the snarky comments".. but, then, once I thought about it a minute, I got one hell of a good chuckle from it!
Hunter S. Thompson wrote, "The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war." Ironically this aired Saturday Night across most of this country.
Unless you know something I don't, as far as I'm aware, he learned accordion from his father at a reasonably young age. It's possible he developed arthritis or something, but there is no way he went his entire life without knowing the bass side of the instrument. The bass buttons are laid out intuitively enough that even a novice could at least comp with basic chords and alternating bass. If he was having trouble with the bass side of the instrument, something else had to have been going on.
@@ryano.5149 Hate to break this to you Ryan, but, Frank is correct! L.W. never learned how to play the accordion buttons properly, so, whenever you see him playing the accordion on his show, he PURPOSELY stands so the camera doesn't catch his left hand NOT playing the buttons part of his accordion. That's one of the big reasons he hired Myron Floren as the main accordionist back in 1950!
Now that I know that, if you watch carefully, you can see Lawrence Welk’s left hand just kind of hanging out a couple of times. It’s brief but it’s there.
who cares if he's looking down at the damn thing? If LW says Joey Schmidt is one of the best, then he's one of the best! I don't give a damn if he's taking a SHIT and playing at the same time, if he can make that squeeze box sound that damn good, then so be it!
What's that old saying "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Is there a musical equivalent? "If all you have is an accordion, everything sounds like a polka."
