This week's Prairie Home episode: July 9, 2011 After each season wrapped — around the Fourth of July — the summer rebroadcast period began. To keep things fresh, the staff cooked up shows combining past shows into themes such as baseball, classical music, Broadway, or simply a location. Here is the first in our summer compilation series from 2011 with bits and pieces from Cincinnati performances. Local boys Jake Speed and the Freddies play the “Queen City Rag,” Howard Levy joins Pat Donohue and The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band on the “Deep River Blues,” Guy Noir investigates the infamous “Cincinnati Four-Way” (chili and spaghetti combo), and poet laureate emeritus Billy Collins recites “Hangover.” Plus, the Boys of the Lough, Kasey Chambers, and Punch Brothers, and in Lake Wobegon, Margie Krebsbach goes to Florida to visit her parents. The link will appear on our Facebook page at 5 p.m. on Saturday. But if you cannot wait, you can use the link below. Listen to the show >>>
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Kasey Chambers spent her childhood living in the family camper-van on the Nullarbor Plain, above the southern coast of Australia, where her father worked as a fox hunter. They had no radio or television; their father played country music to them on an acoustic guitar. They put together a family band and toured Australia as the Dead Ringers. Her solo career took off in 1999 with her first recording, called Captain, and since has taken her around the world and brought on acclaim, awards, and a major-label contracts. She resists, a little, being tagged as a country artist, but will allow that her music is “country enough.” Her 2018 release, Campfire, won Traditional Country Album of the Year at the Australian Country Music Awards. Listen to “The Captain” >>>
The Boys of the Lough were the first of the full-time professional Celtic bands to make a name on the international scene. After their first tour in 1967, the Boys went on to do countless tours of the U.S., plus Australia, Europe, and Asia. They also released more than two dozen albums, establishing a reputation for first-rate musicianship and technical brilliance. At the same time, they helped to keep the centuries-old music of Ireland and Scotland close to its roots. They play, someone aptly wrote, “music that tastes of itself.” An early review from a 1972 Rolling Stone put it about as well as it has been said since: “… and a quartet of young British instrumentalists and singers set the Saturday night crowd howling and dancing in the full fury of an August thunderstorm with Gaelic tunes played on fiddle, guitar, flute and bodhran.” Listen to Boys of the Lough >>>
Multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy is perhaps best known for developing a fully chromatic harmonica style on a standard 10-hole diatonic instrument. Anyone who’s ever picked up a little Hohner Marine Band can appreciate the feat. The musical adventures of this Chicago-based Grammy winner include journeys into jazz, pop, rock, Latin, classical, folk, blues, country, and more. He has appeared on hundreds of recordings.
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