Some fine music from The Windy City

With Sones de México Ensemble, Franz Jackson, Howard Levy, and Eddie Blazonczyk’s Versatones.

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Last Chance for Lancaster, PA

This Saturday, we are gathering the group together to stage a full-on A Prairie Home Companion show from American Music Theater in Lancaster, PA. Comedy sketches include “Guy Noir, Private Eye,” “The Lives of the Cowboys,” “Duane’s Mom,” and “Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian” with the Royal Academy of Radio Acting with sound-effects wizard Fred Newman. There will also be a commercial for Powdermilk Biscuits on the subject: Cheerfulness Is a Choice, and a word or two from the American Duct Tape Council, Real Hot Coffee, Guy’s Shoes, and the Catchup Advisory Board. Features include Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s Hot Shoe Band playing rags, stomps, and blues; duets with Heather Masse and Garrison Keillor of a medley of love poems and old jokes; an audience sing-along intermission, and the latest News from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average. We hope you can join us!

This show is part of our upcoming series of EVENTS — Garrison performing solo or in concert with others. Just a note: Lancaster serves as the first of the 50th Anniversary Shows for A Prairie Home Companion with other shows being announced as we approach the end of the year. VIEW ALL EVENTS here.

Listen to the classic show featured on July 30, 2005

The 2005 season of A Prairie Home Companion was a big one for all involved and saw our small company stage 34 live shows, embark on a cross-country tour, book the first of 11 PHC-themed cruises, and support the filming of the Robert Altman movie A Prairie Home Companion. During the summer off-season, several rebroadcasts were featured, including this one, originally broadcast on November 23, 2002, from the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. We think it ranks as of one our best.

Highlights include a fine tribute to Buck Owens by the Sones de México Ensemble. The Versatones tackle a few classics, saxophonist Franz Jackson plays “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque,” harmonica player Howard Levy sits in with the Shoe Band on “Got My Mojo Working,” plus Guy Noir, Cooking with Studs, and a look at a few political speeches.Use this link to listen. (You can also find it on our social pages on Saturday evening.)

Sones de México Ensemble

Sones de México Ensemble is a Chicago-based sextet that specializes in performing, recording, promoting, and teaching Mexican folk music, including the regional styles of huapango, gustos, chilenas, son jarocho, and more. Formed in 1994, the band uses more than 50 indigenous acoustic instruments to produce the sounds they make. The ensemble is a four-time winner of the Chicago Music Award for Best Latin Entertainer.

Eddie Blazonczyk’s Versatones

For almost 50 years, The Versatones played a mix of both traditional and original tunes, with Eddie Blazonczyk singing in both Polish and English. The band consisted of a fiddler and concertina player, two trumpeter/clarinetists, a drummer, and Blazonczyk himself on vocals and electric bass. At age 22, encouraged by his record label, Eddie began to focus on polka music and recorded over 50 albums, becoming one of the primary ambassadors for Polish-American polka. The Library of Congress named him “one of the most important figures in the creation of the contemporary Polish-American polka sound.” Eddie Blazonczyk was inducted into the Polka Hall of Fame in 1970 and received the National Heritage Fellowship in 1988. He won a 1986 Grammy Award for Best Polka Recording. Blazonczyk passed away in 2012.

Howard Levy

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. His latest album is Duets with Friends (Balkan Samba Records).

A Note from Garrison About this Show from 2005:

Welcome to the historic Auditorium Theater and to this week's live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, which I never intended to become historic but time flies when you're having fun and now I keep running into beautiful young people who tell me they grew up listening to the show. Some of them confess that, as children, they fell asleep to the News from Lake Wobegon and that, during their tempestuous teen years, on family car trips they sat sullenly listening to Guns N' Roses and Bon Jovi on their Walkmans as the parents played old monologues about throwing a tomato at your sister. And now here they are, in their mid-twenties, sitting in the fourth row.Chicago is the home of WLS, which was the home of National Barn Dance back in my childhood, and we listened to it in Lake Wobegon when the wind was out of the southeast. Homer & Jethro played on the show, and the Hoosier Hot Shots, and Pat Buttram, the Sage of the Airwaves, and it was corny and fun and full of hijinks. Chicago gave us Jim and Marian Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly) and the famous closet that cascaded junk every week and the saying, "Tain't funny, McGee." And The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill. And it gave us Studs Terkel, of course, a patron saint of public radio. Studs was in business in radio when I was born, doing a record show, The Wax Museum, on WENR, playing records by his friends Big Bill Broonzy, Woody Guthrie, and Mahalia Jackson, and he is still chugging along at WBEZ.It is so inspiring for an old guy of 60 to see a young guy of 90 going strong, and Studs is the soul of the city. He describes himself as looking like "a minor mob figure the day after he died" but he's a scrapper, a union guy, a White Sox fan, an old progressive, an admirer of Fighting Bob LaFollette and Clarence Darrow because they were their own men and didn't take orders from anybody.Cool good taste and elegant irony don't interest him so much as a good argument, the good fight. Chicago is a city with a heart, and he's a Chicago guy, a free man, an artist, a gentle soul of great humor and kindness, and our show this week is FOR STUDS.
~Garrison Keillor

Garrison’s newest book and cheerful outlook is gathering appreciation from readers around the world but for one Amazon.com fan, it is upsetting her cat as her usual resting spot on her lap is not as comfortable due to all the laughter and giggles coming from the reader. Grab a copy of the book and we hope you'll have a chuckle or two. Cheerfulness is available in our store and wherever you get your books.

The Complete Joke Show Collection

Have you heard the one about the Joke Show? Most years, the staff of A Prairie Home Companion found the latest knee-slappers and groaners for the almost-annual Joke Show.

The Joke Show Collection gathers together all of the jokes from the 12 A Prairie Home Companion joke shows and delivers them via book or CD. The 5th Edition of the joke book contains all of your favorite jokes sorted by category. Plenty of Good Jokes is a 4-CD set containing all of the jokes from the first eight joke shows, while Even More Pretty Good Jokes is a 2-CD set containing all the laughs from the four most recent editions. Combined, they make a great companion for any occasion calling for laughter! Purchase the Complete Collection.

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