Christmas time’s a-coming. Christmas time’s a-coming … ’Tis the season and thus it’s time for some holiday cheer! We’ve added three holiday-themed concerts to our upcoming tour schedule. Join Keillor & Company: A PRAIRIE HOME HOLIDAY with Garrison, Prudence Johnson, and Dan Chouinard for a few holiday favorites combined with a Christmas tale or two plus the latest News from Lake Wobegon. Come prepared to sing along to some of your favorite holiday songs and carols.

Dec. 10     7:30 PM     Bridge View Center, Ottumwa, IA         TICKETS
Dec. 11     8:00 PM     Rialto Square Theatre, Joliet, IL           TICKETS
Dec. 12     7:30 PM     Holland Civic Center, Holland, MI         TICKETS
                           
                                 
ALSO AVAILABLE: 
Information regarding previously announced solo shows in addition to dates with the Hopeful Gospel Quartet are available on our website.

View ALL Tour Dates >>>

   

I love October and I hate to see it pass so quickly. My love and I ate dinner outdoors last Friday and it felt like the Last Time and as an old man I find Lasts rather painful. I rode the Amtrak into New York from Boston, with that delicious flight in Queens as the train descends toward the tunnel to Manhattan and we’re skimming the housetops like Clark Kent in pursuit of evil gangsters, and I thought, “When will I get to do this again?” and it pained me.

It pains me to see the wave of puritanism in the arts, arts organizations competing to see who can write the most militant mission statements declaring their dedication to Equality and Inclusivity and Anti-Elitism, which tells me clearly that the end is near. Art is elitist because some people are better singers than almost anyone else and some plays astonish and others only fill the time, and if equality is now the goal, then where do we go to experience the extraordinary? Art then becomes ideology, and for astonishment we must wait for the next blizzard or thunderstorm. A Manhattan thunderstorm is worth waiting for, but still...

   

 

A few tricks and a few treats as we get set to celebrate October with a repeat from 1996 featuring Marcia Ball, Cephas and Wiggins, the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, and our acting company. Highlights include “Power of Love” and “La Ti Da” from Marcia Ball, “Backwater Blues” from Cephas and Wiggins, “Bringing Mary Home” and “A Little Kiss Each Morning” by the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band — plus Cafe Boeuf, Mel’s Diner, Ghosts, Famous Celebrities, and Rhubarb, featuring the full acting company. All this plus the latest News from your favorite small town: Lake Wobegon. Join us Saturday for a listen via our Facebook page at 5 p.m. CT (or click the link below).
More about this week’s featured guests
Born in Orange, Texas, in 1949 to a family whose female members all played piano, Marcia Ball grew up in the small town of Vinton, Louisiana, right across the border from Texas. She began taking piano lessons at age five, playing old Tin Pan Alley tunes from her grandmother’s collection. From her aunt, she heard more modern and popular music. But it wasn’t until she was 13 that Marcia discovered the blues when she heard Irma Thomas deliver a soulful and spirited performance. “She just blew me away; she caught me totally unaware,” says Ball. “Once I started my own band, the first stuff I was doing was Irma’s.” Marcia Ball — called a “powerhouse” by the New York Times — is an eight-time Blues Music Award winner and a 2010 inductee into the Gulf Coast Music Hall of Fame. 
Almost immediately after guitarist/vocalist John Cephas joined forces with harmonicist/vocalist Phil Wiggins in 1978, the blues community took them to heart. Critics and fans proclaimed Cephas and Wiggins as the new champions of the East Coast Piedmont style of blues, a style first popularized by artists like Blind Boy Fuller, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Blake. They performed for people all over the world, from clubs for only a handful of people to major blues festivals in front of thousands to a 1997 inaugural party for President Clinton. A listen to “Richmond Blues” gives us a musical roadmap of the century-old blues sound of the Piedmont.

Just released in paperback (wherever books are sold) — bestselling author and humorist Garrison Keillor returns to one of America’s most beloved mythical towns, beset by a contagion of alarming candor.

“The novel is a nifty flight of fancy: The sensationalist title refers not to COVID-19 but to an imaginary plague that induces unseemly forthrightness among the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, a ‘temporary loss of social filter,’ as one character puts it.” —Washington Examiner


A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens, and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, inappropriate confessions, and rhapsodic proclamations, while their teenagers watch in amazement. Meanwhile, a wealthy outsider is buying up farmland for a Keep America Truckin’ motorway and amusement park, estimated to draw 2.2 million visitors a year. Clint Bunsen and Elena the hometown epidemiologist to the rescue, with a Fourth of July Living Flag and sweet corn feast for a finale.
 
In his newest Lake Wobegon novel, Garrison Keillor takes us back to the small prairie town where for so long American readers and listeners have found laughter as well as the wry airing of our foibles and most familiar desires and fears — a town where, as we know, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”