Queen of the Ragtime Piano

 Are you familiar with the name Jo Ann Castle? If you watched TV during the 1960s, there’s a good chance you are. For 10 years, beginning in 1959 when she was all of 20 years old, Jo Ann Castle’s performances were regularly featured on The Lawrence Welk Show. She was called the “Queen of the Ragtime Piano” by Welk himself, and she was usually seen playing an upright piano whose upper front board was removed so you can see the hammers striking the strings, like an old honky-tonk saloon piano. 

 Jo Ann Castle’s earliest appearances on The Lawrence Welk Show featured her other major talent, however: she was a quite skillful accordionist.

I must admit that I have only recently discovered Jo Ann Castle, even though I probably have long known her name, deep in the recesses of memory. The simple fact is that my family did not, as a rule, watch The Lawrence Welk Show. Maybe there was something on another channel that conflicted; I cannot remember. Yet, it was impossible not to know it was on every week. Once again, YouTube provides a treasure trove of archived performances demonstrating the high level of accomplishment and entertainment value put forth by that franchise on a continual basis for years.

It is always compelling to consider the career marked by early meteoric success only to plummet to unimagined depths, especially if that career is then redeemed by a rise from the ashes. Such is the career of Jo Ann Castle. Her life was marred by a disproportionate share of bad timing and calamitous bad luck and personal tragedy. Yet, she has successfully reclaimed her life and work; and on November 14 and 15, 2011, Jo Ann Castle will be joining several other former stars of the Welk show in a concert performance at The Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois.

Jo Ann Zering was born 3 September 1939 in Bakersfield California. Jo Ann’s performing career began as a little dancer at age 3. She was given classical piano and dancing lessons until her family determined, when she was 7, that they could no longer afford both. She continued with the music. She started on accordion at age 10. Jo Ann’s introduction to ragtime piano came when her father, a railroad conductor, bought her the sheet music for Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, telling her he wanted to hear her play it. “I’d never seen so many notes in my life and I really didn’t care to learn it, but Dad kept after me until it made sense. In time, I grew to love ragtime and boogie, too, maybe because boogie gave me a chance to show off my strong left hand.”

Here's what she made of the Maple Leaf Rag a little later on.

Jo Ann entertained during her teens at many local functions including civic clubs, schools, church, etc. in the area south of Los Angeles, her family having moved to Ventura when she was 11. In another family decision, her professional name was changed to Jo Ann Castle after a now-defunct accordion maker Castle Accordions. She appeared on television with the Ina Ray Hutton All Girl Orchestra, with Arthur Godfrey, and with Spike Jones. Not yet old enough to order a drink, she was playing gigs at the Dunes and the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas.

In her early endeavor to bring herself to the attention of the Welk show producers, she went into a studio at age 18 and made an album of accordion music for Roulette Records, with a glamour photo on the album cover, which she sent to the show by way of an audition.  It was a successful strategy, as she was called to appear for the first time just a few weeks later.

Here's an outstanding example of Jo Ann's early talent.

She was also able to create a mood.

She made several guest appearances between 1958 and 1959 before being asked to join the show’s “Musical Family”. This is from Jo Ann's first appearance on the Welk show, performing The World is Waiting for the Sunrise, one of the numbers from her album.

Here's Jo Ann's second appearance.

Quite possibly, this was the first (maybe only) instance of a performer being hired while on the air – and on her birthday, no less (her 20^th). She had feared that if Welk divulged her true age, it would blow her cover and prevent her from continuing to work in Las Vegas, where her mother, acting as Jo Ann’s chaperone, pretended to be her sister.

 

Once hired as a regular performer, her main function was to supply ragtime style piano performances on that honky-tonk piano. Big Tiny Little (Dudley Little, Jr.) was leaving the show, and she was called upon to fill his substantial shoes – no small feat. Here's Jo Ann performing together with him.

Since Welk already had Myron Floren as the resident accordion virtuoso (not to mention that, of course, Welk himself was an accordion player, albeit of modest ability – which did not stop him from performing the occasional solo number…  with Myron’s help: "Now for my accordion solo; Myron, will you join me?"), Jo Ann’s accordion performances were featured less often once she was hired as a regular. When she did play accordion, it was usually in a duet with Myron. These duets were superlative, and they continue to tickle the ear all this time later.

Here are Myron and Jo Ann performing Pietro Frosini's paso doble favorite, The Jolly Caballero. This was conceived as a showcase for what, in retrospect, is a completely gratuitous dance number, which can easily be ignored in favor of listening to this exhilarating rapid-tempo rendition played by Jo Ann and Myron lurking upstage of the dancers.

Week after week, Jo Ann provided first-rate ragtime piano renditions, always marked by a grand smile and bouncy vivaciousness. She reportedly had originally told Lawrence Welk that she had some 300 musical selections at her disposal when, in fact, she had only 3 – and had to become a quick study. A self-professed ham, she was also featured in the occasional comedy skit, sometimes even while playing the piano. A regular feature emerged, especially after the show was being produced in color, whereby “the old upright” itself was decorated, whether by paint or some kind of adhesive paper, to match Jo Ann’s outfit and/or the theme of the specific musical number being performed that week. 

The backing musicians always seemed to really enjoy playing with her.

 

The woman's got some serious chops!

Jo Ann’s first marriage, to TV cameraman Dean Hall, ended in divorce. There had been a daughter, Deana, who had cerebral palsy and mental impairment, living only until 15. Jo Ann remarried on Christmas Eve 1967 to an ex-Marine, Bill Roeschlein. There were two more children: William Jr., born 24 April 1969; and Joanie Lynne on 24 April 1970. (She had her labor induced, when Joanie was about to be born,  so that her children could share a birthday!)

Welk regarded her as an asset to his show, but Jo Ann felt that she had become pigeon-holed. “I knew that once Lawrence typecast you, that was it.” Anxious to pursue other avenues, she determined to leave the show after 10 years of abiding by his rules. (He was adamant in having his performers adhere to a wholesome image even off camera. Thus, for example, the women were prohibited from wearing pants in spite of current style.) Castle and Welk parted amicably, even though he had tried to persuade her to stay (“You only have to play once a week”). She related frequently that Welk’s eyes were teary in that meeting, realizing for the first time that “he really, really liked me”. I would conjecture that Welk had always been smitten with her, probably right from the start. I do not suggest anything even remotely inappropriate; only that he, as much as all the male admirers whose letters had convinced him to hire her in the first place, was not immune to her charms, not to mention her sparkling talent.

After leaving The Lawrence Welk Show, Jo Ann Castle’s career began its precipitous disintegration. At some point, there was a falling out with her mother. (Had Jo Ann been exploited for her talent as a child?) She had some fair and night club bookings, but these eventually dwindled. It may have been the fact that the culture had undergone a shift by the late 1960s and early 1970s; that the very thing at which Jo Ann was an exemplar, producing spectacular renditions in what was, by then, an essentially nostalgic musical style could no longer draw an audience outside of the environs of the Welk show, with its calculated appeal to a conservative, older crowd. Although she had become frustrated with her typecast role in the context of the TV show, longing to break out of stale routine and indulge her free spirit, she was a star of a very particular niche.  This was, after all, just prior to the “rediscovery” of ragtime music marked by Marvin Hamlisch’s adaptation of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer for the 1973 movie “The Sting”. After that time, ragtime music showed up all over the place; but what was remarkable is that it was the “classical” performers like violinist Itzhak Perlman or the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine that led this new vanguard. A complete set of Joplin’s rags was recorded by pianist Joshua Rifkin, notable for its strict adherence to Joplin’s admonitions never to play ragtime fast. The results were…. slow.

With her second marriage ending in another divorce, Deana’s passing, and bookings on the decline, Jo Ann took solace in food and alcohol, her weight increasing to 300 pounds. There was a third marriage (none of the sources I’ve seen mention her third husband’s name), but this marriage was an outright disaster. Husband #3 beat Jo Ann so severely that she ended up in a cast and on crutches. She dumped him but had, by then, lost her house and eventually ended up in Arkansas with her kids, sleeping on her sister’s couch, struggling just to get by.

By the mid-1980s, according to accounts, Jo Ann was on the way to her comeback. Shedding pounds, and retooling her act to include singing as well as piano-playing, which included classics, boogie-woogie, Fats Waller as well as ragtime. Her key now was a series of appearances with other former stars of the Welk show. She even showed up back on the show, in 1985, as a Christmas-time guest.

She signed with Randy Wood to his label Ranwood Records. She headlined at the Lawrence Welk Champagne Theater in Branson Missouri between 1994 and 2001. Jo Ann got to perform again with Big Tiny Little in Branson in 2000.

 

In 2002, Jo Ann was the host of a PBS special “The Legendary Liberace”, the subject of which had been a good friend of hers.  (I would’ve loved to be in the room if they’d ever faced off in dueling versions of Chopsticks or the 12^th Street Rag.) Anyway, here's what Jo Ann had had to say about Chopsticks early on. 

SERIOUS chops indeed!

I believe in the possibility of redemption. I also believe in the power of music to facilitate such redemption in the face of crises of the spirit. Jo Ann Castle had been performing from the age of 3; and if anything can be said about the body of her work documented on recording and especially on video, it is her sheer physical joy in the making of music. At the piano, in addition to the remarkable things she did with her fingers and hands, she was always bouncing, her feet going up and down together on every beat – total involvement. Playing the accordion, she seems to envelop that cumbersome instrument, so strong is her commitment. The smile was always genuine, even if it was strenuously “encouraged” from on high. Jo Ann credits her sense of humor for seeing her through the dark times; but she has existed by and large to make joyous happy music.

She has now had a longstanding relationship with jazz trumpeter Lin Biviano. 

Her children are now adults with professional careers in business and law; and there are grandchildren too. 

Here, following a clip of an earlier performance, is an interview Jo Ann Castle gave with her fellow Welk show alumna, Mary Lou Metzger.

Since she makes a point of citing her performance of Sheik of Araby, here it is.

At 72, Jo Ann Castle is back doing what she does best… bringing elation to her audiences. If you’re anywhere near Chicago next week, go pay tribute to this grand lady and share the joy!