Back to Minnesota in More Ways than One

Lights, Camera, Action!

The show returns home to the Fitzgerald Theater this week via a LIVESTREAM from Nugs.net. You can join us to watch all the action on Saturday night from the comfort of your favorite chair in your own living room. It should be a memorable 50th Anniversary Celebration for the entire cast since it is Garrison’s first performance from the Fitz stage since February 2016.

Order now an get your nugs.net account set so all you have to do is tune in from your home and then sit back and watch! Order the July 13th show.

Listen to the July 4, 2009, Show

“Stearns County is about as close to Lake Wobegon as you can get so it’s where we plan to observe the 35th anniversary of A Prairie Home Companion — in the town of Avon, which is on the Lake Wobegon Bike Trail, broadcasting live coast to coast and overseas via Armed Forces Radio — a brass band, speeches, acoustic blues and rock ’n’ roll, some reminiscences by old-timers, and the whole big crowd singing the national anthem (our sound-effects man providing the ‘bombs bursting in air’).

I’ve biked the Bike Trail a couple of times and love the ordinary beauty of farmland and meadow and the towns along it. And since the radio show had its origins there, in the stories I heard when I lived near Freeport and hung around St. John's, it's only right to return and say hello.” — Garrison Keillor

Listen to the show.

About our guest performers:

Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon grew up in north central Wisconsin. While a student at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, he started soaking up the music of folk artists like Roscoe Holcomb and Clarence Ashley. Then, in what was to be a three-month independent study project on old-time banjo players, he headed south. And while he ultimately earned a degree, the quest to learn about America's musical traditions is still under way. He is master of a dozen traditional instruments, and his forty-plus recordings have garnered numerous honors, including seven Grammy nominations.

Andra Suchy spent her childhood on a farm near Mandan, North Dakota, the daughter of two talented singers. By the time she was in grade school, she was traveling around, doing concerts and festivals with her family. She has sung with several groups in the Twin Cities area — including the all-girl trio The Dollys. She has also worked as a back-up singer and as a jingle singer on commercials for White Castle, Target, and more.

One Minnesota winter morning in early 1992, Gordy Nilsen, Dave Peterson and Ric Perkins sat in the Anoka Coffee Shop talking about starting a brass band. Soon the pieces began falling into place: Potential players were contacted, music was borrowed from the Sheldon Brass Band in Red Wing, and the first rehearsal was held. Then they asked Garrison Keillor for permission to use the name of the town he put on the map through books and weekly monologues. “The only condition,” he said, “is that you will let me know when the band is formed … and that at some mutually convenient time, you’ll play at a picnic for me.”

This performance of the Lake Wobegon Brass Band is under the direction of Mike Halstenson.

In 2006, Amy Klobuchar became the first woman elected to represent the state of Minnesota in the United States Senate. (Muriel Humphrey also served, appointed to complete the term of her husband, Hubert Humphrey.) She was born and raised in the Twin Cities, then attended Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School. Senator Klobuchar sits on five Senate committees: Agriculture, Environment and Public Works, Commerce, Judiciary, and the Joint Economic Committee.

A Poem for the Show: LAKE WOBEGON TRAIL

On the Lake Wobegon Trail
With the wind at our backs we will sail
Past hog farms and dairy
Across the wide prairie
In a lilac breeze
As slow as we please
And whistle our way past the cemetery.

Oh, what is so fine
In the summer sunshine
As a bicycle ride
With you by my side,
Past cornfield and pond, barn, and homestead,
On the old roadbed of the Great Northern line.
Through St. Joe and Avon it goes,
Albany, Freeport, Melrose,
Past maples and red oaks
And pastures and meadows
And thirty-five years of old radio shows.

Who knows how much farther we'll go?
The western sun is low.
But I’m thrilled with you near
And tonight the sky will be clear
So let’s rest beneath the cottonwood trees,
Then ride by the light of the Pleiades
At another day and a year.

July 6, 1974, Show

Don’t miss your chance to listen to the very first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion since it is available for a limited time only. Listen via our YouTube page. Listen here.

Powdermilk Biscuit Shirt

One of our first shirts as we salute the 50th Anniversary of the show. You can still grab one and it’s the only shirt that looks better the more you wash it! Get the shirt.