TLDR: Pete Fountain was a featured clarinet soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show from 1957 to 1959, becoming one of its biggest stars almost immediately. He left after a live Christmas special in which he jazzed up “Silver Bells” against Welk’s explicit instructions.
His summary of the situation became one of the most quoted lines in jazz history: “Champagne and bourbon don’t mix.” He went on to build a legendary solo career in New Orleans and died on August 6, 2016, at age 86.
Pete Fountain joined The Lawrence Welk Show as a national unknown and left it as a star.
The gap between those two events was about two years, which is roughly how long it took for the fundamental incompatibility between a New Orleans jazz man and a North Dakota bandleader to become impossible to ignore.
The breaking point was a Christmas song. The line that came after it became famous. And the career that followed proved that Fountain had been right all along.
He Started Playing Clarinet Because His Lungs Were Weak
Pierre Dewey LaFontaine Jr. was born on July 3, 1930, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a family with French roots going back to a great-great-grandfather who arrived from Toulon around 1796. His father drove a delivery truck for the Dixie Brewing Company and played drums and fiddle on the side. Music was in the household, but it wasn’t a plan.
The clarinet came from a doctor. Fountain was a frail child with chronic respiratory problems, and when he was nine years old a family physician suggested he take up a wind instrument to strengthen his lungs.
He wanted to play drums. The doctor pointed him toward woodwinds. He picked the clarinet.
For a while he couldn’t get a single sound out of it. He kept trying, partly because he loved the jazz he’d been hearing from outside the Top Hat Dance Hall near his house in the Mid-City neighborhood, where he’d stand at the fence listening to Sharkey Bonano and the Prima brothers play.
Eventually the sounds came. The lungs got stronger. The therapy worked better than anyone expected.
By thirteen he was sitting in with professionals in the French Quarter. By fifteen he was working multiple nights a week. A high school history teacher once asked him why he wasn’t more focused on his studies.
When Fountain told him he was making $150 a week, the teacher told him to forget school and play music. He eventually did, leaving during his senior year. The school later awarded him a diploma and a class ring anyway.
He and Al Hirt Once Worked as Pest Exterminators
The New Orleans jazz scene of the early 1950s was not a reliable source of income. Bebop and rock and roll were pushing traditional Dixieland off the stage, and the clubs that had once sustained a generation of musicians were thinning out. Fountain married Beverly Lang in 1951 and had three children to support.
He took what work he could find. For a period he and his friend, trumpeter Al Hirt, worked as pest exterminators for the Orkin company. Two of the most gifted jazz musicians in New Orleans, spraying insects for a living between gigs. Fountain described his Dixieland group during this era as “the greatest unemployed band in history.”
The situation changed in 1956 when Larry Welk Jr., Lawrence Welk’s son, saw Fountain perform at a New Orleans club called Dan’s Pier 600 and became obsessed with getting him onto his father’s show.
He lobbied persistently until Welk agreed to bring Fountain to California for an audition. Fountain joined the cast in 1957, packed up his family, and moved to Los Angeles, the only time in his life he lived outside New Orleans for any extended period.
He Was an Overnight Hit and an Immediate Problem
The audience response to Fountain was immediate and overwhelming. His fluid, warm clarinet tone, his youthful ease on camera, and the genuine heat of his playing made him stand out from everything else on the program. He became one of the most visible jazz artists in the country almost overnight, performing for millions of viewers every week on ABC.
The problem was that what Fountain did naturally was almost the opposite of what Welk wanted. Welk ran his show with total control over every arrangement. Nothing deviated from the score. The musicians wore what he approved, looked how he approved, and played exactly what was written in front of them.
Fountain was a jazz musician. Improvisation wasn’t a stylistic choice for him. It was the entire point.
He tested the limits regularly. He was known to order double drinks to work around Welk’s no-drinking rule. He once read a Playboy magazine at his stand while other musicians were reviewing their scores.
On one occasion Welk tried to teach him a lesson at the Aragon Ballroom by calling for five consecutive clarinet features, apparently expecting that Fountain would tire or make mistakes. Instead Fountain played with increasing heat and precision, turning what was meant as punishment into one of his better evenings.
What Happened on That Christmas Special
The end came during a live Christmas broadcast in late 1958. Welk had given Fountain explicit instructions for his performance of “Silver Bells”: play it as written, keep it traditional, keep it melodic and holiday-appropriate.
On live television, Fountain swung it. He improvised. He played “Silver Bells” the way he played everything, which was the way he knew how to play and the way his entire musical identity had been built over twenty years in New Orleans jazz clubs.
Welk was visibly upset. The conversation that followed was not a long one. Fountain’s final appearance on the show was March 11, 1959.
His summary of the incompatibility was concise: “Champagne and bourbon don’t mix.” He also said, with equal simplicity, “I guess I’m just a saloon player at heart.”
Both lines turned out to be more accurate than either man probably realized at the time.
New Orleans Threw Him a Parade When He Got Home
When Fountain returned to New Orleans in 1959, he was no longer a struggling local musician scraping for work. He was a national celebrity. The city declared October 23, 1959, “Pete Fountain Day.”
He opened his own club, the French Quarter Inn, at 800 Bourbon Street in the spring of 1960. It became a landmark almost immediately.
Frank Sinatra came. Phil Harris came. Robert Mitchum, Jonathan Winters, Brenda Lee. His idol Benny Goodman visited twice, though notably without his clarinet both times.
The club moved locations twice over the following decades, eventually settling into a thirty-year run at the Riverside Hilton as Pete Fountain’s Jazz Club, which became one of the primary tourist destinations in New Orleans from 1977 to 2003.
His friendly rivalry with Al Hirt, whose own club was nearby, defined the nightlife of Bourbon Street for a generation. The two traded musicians, sat in on each other’s sets, and drove each other to play better.
His Recording Career Produced More Than 40 Hit Albums
Fountain signed with Coral Records after leaving Welk and later recorded for Decca, Southland, and Verve. Working primarily with producer Bud Dant, he released more than 40 hit albums over his career.
His 1959 recording of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” sold over 500,000 copies and became his unofficial theme song. It remains one of the most recognizable instrumental recordings in traditional jazz.
He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 58 or 59 times over the decades, which functioned as a sustained national advertisement for New Orleans jazz and for Fountain specifically. He performed for four U.S. presidents and played halftime at two Super Bowls.
In 1968 he recorded a duet album with Brenda Lee. In 1987 he played for Pope John Paul II during a papal Mass at the University of New Orleans, after which the Pope reportedly complimented his playing directly. It was a long way from the fence outside the Top Hat Dance Hall.
He Founded One of New Orleans’ Best Mardi Gras Traditions
In 1961 Fountain founded the Half-Fast Walking Club, a Mardi Gras tradition that endured for decades. The club, consisting of musicians and friends in red blazers and straw hats, took a musical stroll through the city every Mardi Gras morning, starting at Commander’s Palace in the Garden District and ending in the French Quarter.
The name was a cleaned-up version of something considerably more colorful. The spirit was the same either way. The group handed out paper flowers, beads, and doubloons, played music through the streets, and became one of the more beloved sights of the New Orleans carnival season.
It captured something essential about Fountain’s relationship with his city. He wasn’t just a musician who happened to be from New Orleans. He was a steward of what the place meant, someone who understood that the music and the community were the same thing.
Hurricane Katrina Destroyed His Home and He Kept Playing
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed Fountain’s waterfront home in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. He lost almost everything. He moved eight times in the eighteen months that followed, and the upheaval contributed to a significant period of depression.
His clarinet had been saved. He noted this specifically. “I can still toot,” he said. For Fountain, that was the relevant fact.
He had already undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery in early 2006, followed by two minor strokes and a bout of shingles. He kept performing as long as he could.
He and Welk Eventually Made Their Peace
The departure story gets told as a conflict, and it was. But the longer view is more complicated. In later years both men spoke about the other with genuine warmth.
Fountain credited Welk with giving him a national platform he couldn’t have built any other way, and acknowledged that the business discipline Welk demanded had served him well when he became a club owner himself. Welk spoke well of Fountain in return.
In 2001, Fountain appeared in the PBS special Lawrence Welk: Milestones and Memories, recorded in Branson, Missouri, performing alongside the Lennon Sisters, Myron Floren, and other Welk alumni. He didn’t have to do that. He did it anyway.
New Orleans Said Goodbye the Right Way
Pete Fountain died of heart failure on August 6, 2016, in New Orleans, at the age of 86. He and Beverly had been married for 65 years.
His funeral Mass was held at the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. Afterward, a second-line jazz funeral wound through the streets, led by the Half-Fast Walking Club. Kermit Ruffins and James Andrews were among the musicians who joined the procession. It was exactly the kind of farewell the city gives to people who belong to it completely.
He had started out standing outside a dance hall in Mid-City as a kid, listening through a fence because he was too young to get in. He ended up as the sound of the city itself, the musician most synonymous with what New Orleans jazz meant to the rest of the country for half a century.
Champagne and bourbon don’t mix. But bourbon, played well enough, can fill a room for a very long time.
