Snarky? I will admit that I on occasion watch a bit of the 'classic' Welk they show on PBS (usually at about the time you'd return from an early-bird special, hee hee). He had some particularly talented folks in his ensemble (Myron Floren, for example), along with a big band that did pretty well when they were actually allowed to play a blue note.

He even did some 'trad' music, though it was more like re-processed covers of stuff sung by 'real' folk musicians who, lets face it, back in the 50's and 60's were known to water field-collected materials down a bit themselves.

But I maintain that Celtic Thunder is the Lawrence Welk of today. An at once watered-down and gussied-up amalgam of covers of pop and traditional music designed to be, at best, inoffensive to the average 60-80 year old.

As my grandfather used to say, when tuning in Lawrence Welk during the Beatles era: "Now that's real music!"