TLDR: Myron Floren was the lead accordionist and assistant conductor on The Lawrence Welk Show from 1950 to 1982, becoming one of the most recognized faces on American television.
Born in South Dakota in 1919 to Norwegian immigrant parents, he first picked up the accordion on a doctor’s advice after childhood rheumatic fever damaged his heart. He passed away on July 23, 2005, at age 85, and his personal instrument collection is now archived at the National Music Museum in South Dakota.
Lawrence Welk was a good accordion player. He knew it. But when Myron Floren stepped onto the stage at the Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis in 1950 and played “Lady of Spain,” Welk crawled under the grand piano and waved a white handkerchief.
Mock surrender. Floren was better, and Welk knew that too.
By intermission, Welk had offered him a job. That handkerchief moment launched a 32-year partnership that made Myron Floren the most recognized accordionist in American television history, and kept him on screen for millions of viewers every Saturday night until 1982.
He Grew Up on a Norwegian Farm in South Dakota
Myron Floren was born on November 5, 1919, near Roslyn in Day County, South Dakota, the eldest of seven children born to Ole and Tillie Floren. His parents were first-generation Norwegian immigrants, and the household was a genuine outpost of Scandinavian culture on the American plains.
Entertainment in rural South Dakota in the 1920s was homemade. Neighboring families would gather on Saturday nights, roll back the rugs, and dance. The music was waltzes, polkas, and schottisches, played on portable instruments that didn’t need electricity or amplification.
The accordion was the instrument of the Northern Plains immigrant community, and a young Myron Floren was completely captivated by it the first time he saw a neighbor play one at a house party.
A Doctor’s Advice and a Ten-Dollar Mail-Order Accordion
When Floren was seven, he contracted rheumatic fever. In the pre-antibiotic era that was a serious diagnosis, and it left him with permanent damage to his heart valves. The standard prescription was rest. The Floren family had a different idea.
His father Ole ordered a button accordion from the Sears, Roebuck catalog for ten dollars. The reasoning was that the physical exertion of working the bellows would strengthen the boy’s damaged heart.
Myron taught himself to play, practicing for hours every day, and became convinced over time that the accordion had literally saved his life by building his cardiovascular system back up from the damage the fever had caused.
He also credited his finger dexterity to something considerably less glamorous: milking cows twice a day on the family farm. The grip strength developed by years of farm labor gave him the manual precision that would later become his professional trademark.
He Paid for Piano Lessons With Chicken Eggs
Floren knew early that he wanted more than self-taught button accordion. He sought out a local piano teacher named Dorothy Swenson, who happened to have survived rheumatic fever herself. She understood what he was dealing with.
He couldn’t pay in cash. He paid in eggs from the family’s chickens. Those lessons allowed him to transition from the simple button accordion to the more versatile piano accordion, which became his instrument for the rest of his career.
By eight he was performing at school events, church programs, and county fairs. When he enrolled at Augustana College in Sioux Falls in 1939, the orchestra director told him the accordion wasn’t a legitimate orchestral instrument and turned him away.
Floren majored in English, minored in music, and supported himself by hosting four daily radio programs on KSOO under the name “The Melody Man,” playing the Scandinavian polkas and waltzes that the region’s farmers wanted to hear at dawn.
He Performed on Battlefields in World War Two
When the United States entered World War II, Floren tried to enlist in the Army Air Force. The heart damage from his childhood illness made him 4-F, ineligible for active duty. He joined the USO instead.
Between 1944 and 1945 he performed in the European Theater of Operations, playing shows on troop trains, in field hospitals, and on battlefields, sometimes within half a mile of the active front lines. He performed alongside Marlene Dietrich and Lily Pons and received a citation from the U.S. War Department for his service.
After the war he married Berdyne Koerner, a former student from his accordion studio, in 1945 and relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where he joined a group called the Buckeye Four and built a regional reputation performing on radio and the early local television circuit.
The Night Lawrence Welk Waved the White Handkerchief
In 1950, Floren and his wife attended a Lawrence Welk performance at the Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis. It was Berdyne’s birthday. Welk recognized Floren from a brief earlier meeting in Sioux Falls and invited him up to play a number with the band.
Floren chose “Lady of Spain,” a piece that would become his lifelong signature. What followed was a performance of such technical force, featuring the rapid bellows-shaking and intricate triplets that were his trademark, that the audience response was electric. Welk’s theatrical response was to crawl under the grand piano and wave a white handkerchief in mock surrender.
He offered Floren a job that same evening during intermission. Floren accepted on the spot. The two men would work together for the next 32 years.
He Was Much More Than Just the Accordion Player
The public knew Myron Floren as the smiling man with the accordion. What they didn’t see was that he was also Welk’s assistant conductor, road manager, and one of the primary organizational forces keeping the entire operation running.
He directed the orchestra during rehearsals and took the podium during live shows whenever Welk was dancing or hosting. As road manager, he handled the logistics of moving a large orchestra and cast across the country for tours, coordinating hotels, transportation, and the financial details of life on the road for an ensemble of that size.
Welk called him his “right-hand man” publicly and consistently. The nickname he gave him for the audience, “The Happy Norwegian,” was branding as much as affection, a signal to viewers that Floren embodied the wholesome, family-oriented values the show was built on.
The smile was real. The management of everything behind it was equally real and considerably less visible.
His Daughter Married the Show’s Star Dancer
Myron and Berdyne raised five daughters: Randee, Robin, Heidi, Holly, and Kristie. The youngest, Kristie, married Bobby Burgess, the show’s featured dancer and a former Disney Mouseketeer, on Valentine’s Day 1971.
The marriage merged two of the show’s most popular families in a way that felt almost scripted for the Musical Family brand. For Welk, it was a public relations gift. For Floren, it meant his son-in-law was a man he had worked alongside for a decade and would continue working alongside for another eleven years.
Bobby and Kristie settled in the Hollywood Hills and raised four children together. As of 2026, Bobby Burgess at 84 is still performing on the annual Live Lawrence Welk Show tours, keeping the Floren family connection to the Musical Family alive more than two decades after Myron’s death.
After the Show He Performed 200 Dates a Year
When The Lawrence Welk Show ended its original production run in 1982, Floren didn’t slow down.
His touring schedule, if anything, intensified. He performed as many as 200 dates per year through the 1980s and 1990s, traveling across North America as a solo artist and in Welk Family reunion shows.
He became a fixture at ethnic festivals celebrating the heritage of the American heartland. He performed at Norsk Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota, the largest Scandinavian festival in North America, for 24 consecutive years.
He headlined German Fest in Milwaukee and Wurstfest in New Braunfels, Texas, where his birthday on November 5 was often celebrated with the crowd. He was among the inaugural inductees into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame in 1984.
In his later years he settled into a residency at the Lawrence Welk Theatre in Branson, Missouri, hosting an annual PolkaFest and continuing to perform for the audience that had followed him since the early days of the show.
What His Legacy Did to the Accordion’s Reputation
Myron Floren was the most visible accordionist of the twentieth century, and his influence on how Americans thought about the instrument cuts both ways.
On one hand, he demonstrated what the accordion could do technically, and he kept traditional polka and waltz music alive for a national audience for three decades. He was inducted into the International Polka Music Hall of Fame in 1990 and received the Merit Award from the Confederation internationale des accordeonistes in 1992.
On the other hand, his absolute identification with Welk’s “square,” family-oriented brand contributed to the accordion becoming a symbol of uncoolness for the Baby Boomer generation. While guitars were expressing rebellion, Floren’s accordion meant polkas and bubbles and parents.
It would take decades for the instrument to recover its credibility in popular music, finding new life in alternative rock, klezmer, and zydeco.
Floren was aware of this reputation and didn’t seem particularly troubled by it. He played what he played, for the people who loved it, for 65 years.
He Kept Playing Until a Few Months Before He Died
In 1998, Floren suffered a stroke from which he made a full recovery. During treatment, doctors discovered colon cancer and he underwent surgery. His heart, the organ that had been damaged by rheumatic fever when he was seven years old and that he had spent his entire life strengthening through the bellows of an accordion, had already required a valve replacement using a pig’s valve.
He kept performing through all of it until a few months before the end. Myron Floren died on July 23, 2005, at his home in Rolling Hills Estates near Los Angeles.
He was 85 years old. He and Berdyne had been married for 60 years.
His personal instruments, stage outfits, and USO uniform are now held in the Myron Floren Archive and Accordion Collection at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, not far from the plains where a seven-year-old boy with a damaged heart first learned to play a ten-dollar mail-order accordion and found out it was going to save his life.
