Unless they were on a group tour to Italy or something, my grandparents watched the Lawrence Welk show every Saturday night. When I was trying to score the second installment of The Souvenir Series, the one based on my grandfather’s old dry cleaners, I really wanted to find a way to use Lawrence Welk music, and a young composer and I wracked our brains for a way in. But it was just unassailable, impervious to any kind of deconstruction or irony.
But maybe it was just too much and too soon. Watching Bobby Burgess and Cissy King dance to a 1977 big band arrangement of the Captain & Tenille classic, “Love Will Keep Us Together,” I realize that Lawrence Welk is what it is, a wholly realized artform all its own. Somehow only 353 other people have realized it, too. [via archival clothing]
Turns out yesterday was Mr. Burgess’s birthday!
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the making of, by greg allen