Garrison Keillor Travels East . . . and Beyond Tickets are on sale now for “Garrison Keillor Tonight.” featuring opener Debi Smith. Join them for shows at the City Winery in Boston and New York as Garrison performs a program that will include poetry, sing-alongs, a few stories, plus the News from Lake Wobegon. It should be memorable, and we surely hope you can be there for some great entertainment, tasty food, and maybe a glass or two!
Oct 12 8:00PM City Winery in Boston, MA TICKETSOct 13 8:00PM City Winery in New York, NY TICKETS ALSO AVAILABLE:
Information regarding previously announced solo shows in addition to dates with the Hopeful Gospel Quartet are available on our website. |
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Lonely guy seeks old café and three buddies
I am an orphan, which is not so unusual for a man of 79, and like everyone else I know, I work out of my own home and at the moment I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios beside the laptop and a cup of coffee (black). I have no office anymore. I’ve had offices, not cubicles but offices with doors and a window, sometimes a credenza, since I was 22 years old. I miss them.
Go to Garrison Keillor and Friends on Substack
to read the rest of THE COLUMN >>> Become a member of THE BACK ROOM on our Substack page for exclusive access to News from Lake Wobegon stories, Post to the Host columns, writings, excerpts from unpublished works, previews of other works and a second weekly column. |
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This week on "A Prairie Home Companion" The stunning music is as gorgeous as the colors of the fall leaves, so listen in this coming Saturday for a wonderful classic show with BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet, a group that combines Cajun, zydeco, Tex-Mex, and New Orleans jazz. Jazz vocalist Prudence Johnson joins GK for some duets. We also have our Royal Academy of Radio Acting and Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band and an update on all the latest happenings in Lake Wobegon … honey, could you ask for more?
Highlights: “I Still Miss Someone” from Prudence and Garrison, John Niemann joins the band for “The Hard Way,” “Les Fleurs Fleurissent” and “Chère Bébé” from BeauSoleil, plus a few tunes from Pat Donohue and the house band, a vampire song, some Bush humor, Guy Noir and the News from Lake Wobegon. All in all, it’s a pretty good show, and we hope you join us. The link is posted on Saturdays at 5 p.m. CT each week on our Facebook page (also below, for your enjoyment anytime). Listen to the Show >>>Like our Facebook page >>> More about this week’s featured guests
During a New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Bob Dylan was asked what he thought of BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet. Dylan replied, “That’s my kind of music!” Lots of folks could say the same. Michael Doucet and the group have spent 40-plus years dedicated to preserving the Cajun style, and blending elements of zydeco, New Orleans jazz, Tex-Mex, and more into a tasty musical mix. The band for this show: Michael Doucet, David Doucet, Billy Ware, Tommy Alesi, Jimmy Breaux, and Mitch Reed. “Zydeco Gris Gris” >>>View available music >>> Prudence Johnson’s silky voice has taken her from the Midwest to the Middle East, honky-tonks to Carnegie Hall, theater stages to the silver screen — appearing in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It and in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion. But be it concert hall or tiny jazz club, Prudence is the perfect complement. As one music critic put it, “[There’s] not a genre she hasn’t interpreted with her ducky, sensual alto voice and terminally good taste.” Prudence sings at Peace Coffee >>>View available music >>> More from Prudence Johnson
So, how does one go from a small town like Moose Lake, MN, to the world stage? Were you raised in a musical family?
My father has a beautiful voice and loves to sing. For decades, he was the go-to guy in our area for weddings and funerals. Singing together was something we always did; until a certain age, I thought all families did. People ask me how to learn to hear harmony parts. Ummm … your dad teaches you when you’re four?
I wouldn’t say I had ambition, so much as a certainty that that’s what I was meant to do, and I just put one foot in front of the other. My family of course thought I was nuts, especially since I was a young mother trying to make a living as a freelance musician. I believe it was my appearances on the Prairie Home show in the early ’80s ( it was nationally broadcast by then) that changed their minds.
You’ve released more than a dozen albums, collaborated on many more, written and performed in plays, performed in several feature films, released several multimedia projects combining music and history. With all the time at home due to the pandemic, are there any new projects on the horizon?
I was very busy during the darkest days of the pandemic working at an independent bookstore (Birchbark Books) in Minneapolis. I love the world of books and got a part-time job there in 2008, mostly to support my book habit. But over the years, my commitment deepened and I took on a lot of duties there while maintaining a schedule creating new shows, recording, and performing. To everyone’s surprise, when we closed our doors to the public in spring 2020, the store got much busier than ever before. So I wasn’t really isolated and I had very little downtime. I left Birchbark in the end of May after 12 1/2 years and had a great summer, and I’m just now really giving some thought to what’s next. I LOVE being in the studio but I realize I don’t recognize the landscape anymore — the business of making and releasing recordings has changed so fundamentally. Working with Garrison and with Robin and Linda, as the next incarnation of the Hopeful Gospel Quartet, is sort of a “new old” project that I’m really looking forward to. |
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"From the Archives" We have been fast at work assembling the latest of the digital offerings in the From the Archives series. This collection gathers together all the Lake Wobegon stories from September to December of 1982, thus all the monologues from 1982 are available to download (with the forthcoming CD release arriving in November). We hope you are enjoying this deep dive into the vault and hearing how the stories have progressed. Jan.–April 1982 >>>
May–August 1982 >>>
Sept.–Dec. 1982 >>> |
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A Prairie Home Companion Hat |
| Two- tone truckers-style hat featuring a mesh back that will help keep you a bit cooler. The A Prairie Home Companion microphone logo is displayed on the front. Hat is adjustable so one size fits most. |
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Get the Cap >>> |
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| English Majors Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of people who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.) Selections include “The Six-Minute Hamlet,” a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting “Lives of the English Majors” drama, and literary guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr., and Calvin Trillin. 2 1/2 hours on 2 discs.
GET THE CDs >>>
Listen to a sample >>>
Track Listing:
Disc 1: Amazon >>> iTunes >>> - English Majors
- John Henry
- “The Old Life”
- Guy Noir, Private Eye
- “The Lanyard”
- “The Revenant”
- Emily Dickinson Suite
- The Six-Minute Hamlet
- Long Time Leaving
- English Majors: For Whom?
- The Hochstetter House
Disc 2: Amazon >>> iTunes >>> - Celebrity Classics: The Ten-Minute Macbeth
- Red, Red Rose
- Starting a Poem
- Song of Myself
- Kerouac
- The Scarlet Letter
- Family Man
- The Family Shakespeare
- “Wild Geese”
- Helen Marie
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