Dancing with Welk: Music, Memory and Prairie Troubadours. By Christopher Vondracek

Abstract

In 2006, contemporaneous with South Dakotan Christopher Vondracek’s reenactment of Lawrence Welk’s musical journey in the Dakotas and beyond, I returned to Mandan, North Dakota. I came from grueling, but uplifting journeys with Lewis and Clark reenactors from the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Missouri. While rehabbing my shoulder from paddling 2500lb canoes on the Missouri, Clearwater, and Snake Rivers, my personal trainer, from “Welk Country,” talked of doing therapy for older folks down there. What amazed him was that for all their canes and walkers when the accordion started, they hit the floor youthfully, in perfect time with the beat. That’s definitely dancing with Welk! But so is two-stepping at Mandan’s Lonesome Dove, line dancing in Chicago or Texas, or to “Fishin’ in the Dark” (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) at a karaoke joint with “friends in low places” (Garth Brooks). Or dancing to The Drifters (“Under the Boardwalk”) on February 3rd in honor of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. Or moms in skirts and saddle shoes in Iowa, near the setting of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Or dancing on an August evening in the twenty-first century to North Dakotan Chuck Suchy’s “Saturday Night at the Hall,” recreating an early twentieth-century scene at St. Anthony’s Bohemian Hall, a few dozen miles from Welk’s farm, across the wide Missouri.