Two More Hours from 2014

Listen to the classic show!

This week, we revisit A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor from March 15, 2014. Special guests: sparkling Irish vocalist Karan Casey, the French-styled sounds of Dan Newton’s Café Accordion Orchestra, singer Aoife O'Donovan, and pianist and clarinetist Butch Thompson, with vocalist Hilary Thavis. Plus, the Royal Academy of Radio Actors (Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Fred Newman), the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, and the latest News from Lake Wobegon.

Highlights include Hilary Thavis and Butch Thompson sharing the “St’ Paul Blues,” Karan Casey being “Young and Beautiful,” Aoife O’Donovan and Karan Casey duetting on a trio of tunes, “The St Croix Thaw” from Butch Thompson, and some “St. Paddy’s Day Love” from Richard Dworsky and the band. Plus Guy Noir, talk of Beer, Catchup, Leprechauns, and the latest News. Listen to this jam packed show!

The Los Angeles Times has called Karan Casey’s voice “as pure and clear as the crystal from County Waterford, where she was born.” She spent her childhood singing with her family, then studied voice and piano at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. After courses in jazz at Long Island University-Brooklyn, she joined the celebrated Irish-American band Solas and later embarked on a solo career.

With her ethereal voice and substantive songwriting, Aoife O'Donovan captivates fans and critics alike. She was lead singer of the string band Crooked Still and was a featured vocalist on The Goat Rodeo Sessions, the Grammy-winning album by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, and the new album and tour with I’m With Her.

Pianist and clarinetist Butch Thompson is remembered worldwide as a master of ragtime, stride, and classic jazz. Born and raised in Marine-on-St. Croix, Minnesota, Butch was already playing Christmas carols on his mother's upright piano by age three, and he led his first professional jazz group as a teenager. For 12 years, he was A Prairie Home Companion's house pianist, dating back to the show's second broadcast, in July 1974. Butch passed away in 2022.

Fifty years ago, a Minnesota guy with literary ambitions took a sharp turn into the radio variety show business and thereby turned his life inside out. He was a loner, a stranger to bright lights, and the show brought him into the society of musicians and a stage crew and actors. And every Saturday at 5 p.m. families filed in to fill the empty seats, first a storefront in downtown St. Paul, then little theaters, eventually amphitheaters, concert halls, music parks, fairgrounds. Luckily for him, he wasn’t smart enough to get stage fright. He just went out and pretended to know what he was doing and it was enjoyable because radio wasn’t his ambition, literature was.

Garrison says: “People are awestruck by writers. I met S.J. Perelman once and could hardly get a word out, same with Jane Smiley, John Updike, Philip Roth, Amy Tan — I start proofreading and rewriting the words before they come out my mouth, but when people meet a guy from the radio they walk up, smile and say, ‘Are you —?’ and I am and so we talk. We talk about them because they already know me. I ask where they’re from, what do they do, where they’re headed, and it’s a pleasure listening to them. This happens in shops, airports, doctors’ offices, city parks, and it’s a pure pleasure, and my motive for doing twenty shows celebrating the 50^th anniversary of A Prairie Home Companion was to meet those people again.

They told me how they’d discovered the show, how they took tapes in the car on vacations, how they imagined Lake Wobegon was a real place, how they became fans of the musicians they heard. People in their fifties told me how they were forced to listen by their parents and how they resented it but eventually came to enjoy it.

Bill Kling, the leading light in public radio in America, was the one who put the show on the air. My wife, Mary, sat at the piano and played for the first rehearsals. Tom Keith did sound effects. Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson, Peter Ostroushko, Butch Thompson, Chet Atkins, Rob Fisher, Robin and Linda Williams came and Heather Masse, and countless others. I am the show’s severest critic. But never mind, it became my connection to so many thousands of good people, starting with Mr. Bill Whitworth, my editor at The New Yorker, who, after I wrote a story about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, said, ‘You should try to do something like that.’ So I did and my editor became a listener. I went to Dublin recently and was stopped in the airport by people who said, ‘Aren’t you from Lake Wobegon?’ ‘Trying to be,’ I said.”

Garrison Keillor, Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Fred Newman, Richard Dworsky, Pat Donohue, Bryan Sutton, Richard Kriehn, Chris Siebold, Lawrence Kohut.

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