The Al Welsh Orchestra has announced it will change ownership effective July 1, but the big band standards and dance-hall favorites that have pleased audiences for more than 60 years will continue without missing a beat.
Owner-trombonist Denny Anderson of Rockwell City, who bought the orchestra in 2003 from Sherry Welsh, the widow of Allen Welsh, said selling the band was a difficult decision for him, not least because he has been a member himself since the late 1970s.
“My wife and I want a little more time to travel,” Anderson said Sunday between sets at the Lake Robbins Ballroom in rural Woodward. “We also have grandkids in New Mexico that we’d like to see a little more of,” he said.
Founded in the early 1950s by Welsh, a music store owner from Webster City and one of Iowa’s best-known band leaders and performers in his day, the orchestra was led by him until his death in 1989. His wife kept the band going until selling it to Anderson.
The orchestra specializes in playing music of the big band era along with many of the most famous dance tunes of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and later, including big band classics by Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Woody Hermann and Benny Goodman and many popular dance bands standards by Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye and many others.
The band lost its senior member in April when saxophone and clarinetist Ross Leeper of Indianola passed away after 60 years on the horn. Surviving veterans of the Al Welsh Orchestra include saxophone and clarinetist Marlene Radebaugh of Rippey, trumpet and flugelhornist Steve Cook of Perry and trombonist Anderson — together accounting for about 130 years of swinging in the Al Welsh Orchestra.
The rhythm section is composed drummer John Merritt and bassist Brad Bleam, with Steve Lawson playing keyboard and Harold Jansen on Saxophone.
Along with Anderson, Radebaugh has also decided to hang up his horn and retire with the change in ownership. They will play their last sets with the orchestra Thursday, June 13 starting at 6 p.m. at the Boone County Family YMCA, 608 Carroll St. in Boone.
But the show must go on. Although the Al Welsh Orchestra will not play at this year’s Fourth of July festivities in Perry, they will return to Lake Robbins Ballroom Sunday, July 14 starting at 6 p.m.
