Fotsch teaches media and communication at New York University and the College of Staten Island. Accordion player extraordinaire and bandleader who specialized in the Sweet Jazz music which was better to dance to when you were trying to hold your best girl a little closer. Former Lawrence Welk Show dancer Bobby Burgess will be featured in several dance routines Saturday in Tribute to the Big Bands, at 8 p.m., and On Tour with Lawrence Welk, at 9. It was on the air for 31 years.įor people who liked listening to Glenn Miller in the 1940s, it was exhilarating throwback music, but for kids forced to watch the show with parents and grandparents, Welk and his cast of crooners and dancers seemed painfully square.Īnd that’s exactly how Paul Fotsch felt about the show as a kid. His show was famous for what he called “champagne music” - sweet, melodic music, as “light and bubbly as champagne,” like waltzes, polkas and show tunes. Accordion player extraordinaire and bandleader who specialized in the Sweet Jazz music which was better to dance to when you were trying to hold your best. He had this curious Eastern European accent - he’d been born and raised in rural North Dakota, but in a German-speaking community.
He performed in and led big bands from the 1920s but it wasnt until he started The Lawrence Welk Show in 1951 that he achieved wider fame. Lawrence Welk was an accordion-playing bandleader who had a variety show on television from the early ‘50s to the early ‘80s. American musician, band leader, accordionist and television host. Many people today might only know Lawrence Welk from "Saturday Night Live" sketches, where Fred Armisen played him and repeated one of Welk’s favorite compliments, “Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful!” As the second of Bobby Burgess three dance partners on the Lawrence Welk Show, Cissy has established herself as one of the worlds finest dancers, her athletic skill, personality and flair for entertaining has won her millions of loyal fans and inspired many more to take up dancing themselves.