In 1927, he graduated from the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The radio show led to many well-paying engagements for the band throughout the midwestern states. The Lawrence Welk Orchestra scored an immediate success and began a daily radio show, which lasted from 1927 to 1936. His band was also the station band for the popular radio programming WNAX in Yankton, South Dakota. He led big bands in North Dakota and eastern South Dakota, including the Hotsy Totsy Boys and the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra. During the 1920s, he performed with various bands before forming an orchestra.

On his 21st birthday, having fulfilled his promise to his father, Welk left the family farm to pursue a career in music. Welk became an iconic figure in the German-Russian community of the northern Great Plains-his success story personified the American dream.

Welk did not learn to speak English until he was twenty-one and never felt comfortable speaking it in public. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family. Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $5,167 in 2020) He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Welk left school during fourth grade to work full-time on the family farm. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year inside an upturned wagon covered in sod. The family lived on a homestead that is now a tourist attraction. Welk's paternal great-great-grandparents, Moritz and Magdalena Welk, emigrated in 1808 from Germanophone Alsace-Lorraine to Ukraine. Welk was a first cousin, once removed, of former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (Welk's mother and Schweitzer's paternal grandmother were siblings). He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (née Schwahn) Welk, Roman Catholic ethnic Germans who emigrated in 1892 from Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine).

Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota.

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