Lawrence Welk And His Champagne Music

In 1938 the orchestra garnered performance exposure for a concert at the St. Paul Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the group's music earned the descriptive "Champagne Music" from a listener who pronounced that the orchestra's music was "effervescent, like champagne." From that time forward, the band was billed as The Champagne Music of Lawrence Welk. During the 1940s, Welk and his band performed as the house orchestra at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois. After a successful decade in Chicago, Welk moved what he called his "musical family" to Southern California, where a 1951 late-night appearance on television station KTLA became the springboard for his later national fame