The Mom and Dads - Band Biography

Band Biography

The band, which formed in the early 1950s, named itself after its main repertoire; "Music for Mom and Dad". . In the early years of its history, the band was strictly a part-time endeavor with its members holding down more typical jobs during the week.

Their LP album entitled Presenting... The Mom and Dads had a mini biography printed on the back of the album sleeve. The section claimed that the Mom and Dads were able to play nearly any type of then existing dance music. From turn of the century dance music such as the Three Step, to more modern sounds, such as country and western.

Their biography states that all the band members had individually begun to play dance music between the ages of 12 and 14. Doris Crow and Leslie Welch had been playing together for over 22 years when the youngest member of the band, Quentin Ratliff joined them. The group finally became a four-piece 7 years later when Harold Hendren, who had begun his musical career in New Mexico, joined the band on drums.

Most of the band's fame was in Canada, where they first gained fame when a disc jockey at a high-powered radio station in Great Falls, Montana played their first recording, The Ranger's Waltz, a song composed by Quentin Ratliff, the group's saxophonist. This broadcast carried into the Canadian province of Alberta, and they also gained a following in Australia.

"The Ranger's Waltz" marked their peak in 1971, when the title cut off the same-named album climbed into the American Top 10 country music charts, topping out at Number Four and eventually achieving double-platinum sales figures. The band had first started to appear on music charts earlier that year with the album "In the Blue Canadian Rockies".

The Mom and Dads also began their first international tour, albeit reluctantly, when they went to Australia in the fall of 1974, after another act had cancelled. They spent four weeks promoting their albums overseas before returning home and resuming performance dates in their native Pacific Northwest.

The Mom and Dads were seen in a string of late-night television commercials in the United States during the mid-1980s.

The group continued to tour and record regularly until Welch's death in 1983.