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A Prairie Home Commonplace Book
(1999)25 Years On the Air with Garrison Keillor
A non fiction book by Garrison Keillor
On July 6, 1974, about twelve Minnesotans filed into an auditorium in St. Paul to watch the first live Saturday afternoon broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. The host and writer, Garrison Keillor, came out in a white suit and hat and sang the theme song, "Look who's coming through that door, I think we've met somewhere before," accompanied by the twin guitars of his pals Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson. And so began one of the longer runs in radio.
The show's inspiration was an assignment by The New Yorker to cover the last performance of the Grand Ole Opry in Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in March of that year: "I stood in the wings at Ryman, behind the rope rigging, and watched the musicians onstage and listened to the pickers in the stairwell and out by the Opry's backdoor and I thought, 'A person could do this.' I went back to St. Paul, wrote the piece, talked to Bill Kling at Minnesota Public Radio, and we started 'Prairie Home.'"
Almost a thousand broadcasts later (and tours to forty-four states, Canada, and Great Britain), the show is heard every Saturday night by over 3 million listeners across the US.
For fans of Prairie Home Companion, the Commonplace Book contains a selection of scripts, songs, poems, monologues and photographs of the show and many of its regular performers. Guy Noir is here, Dusty and Lefty, Bob the Young Artist, Gloria, plus duct tape, rhubarb pie, a drama about dying flies and another about ants, an ode to plumbers, limericks, Peter Ostroushko's recipe for borscht, and a tale about a warm spring Sunday in Lake Wobegon when the organist stepped on a bass pedal during a sermon on Job. Learn how guests are booked, how the stage is set, what Tom Keith uses to make his sound effects, how the audio engineers work. And who selects the greetings that are read on the air. PLUS The New Yorker story that inspired the show (its first appearance in book form).
The show's inspiration was an assignment by The New Yorker to cover the last performance of the Grand Ole Opry in Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in March of that year: "I stood in the wings at Ryman, behind the rope rigging, and watched the musicians onstage and listened to the pickers in the stairwell and out by the Opry's backdoor and I thought, 'A person could do this.' I went back to St. Paul, wrote the piece, talked to Bill Kling at Minnesota Public Radio, and we started 'Prairie Home.'"
Almost a thousand broadcasts later (and tours to forty-four states, Canada, and Great Britain), the show is heard every Saturday night by over 3 million listeners across the US.
For fans of Prairie Home Companion, the Commonplace Book contains a selection of scripts, songs, poems, monologues and photographs of the show and many of its regular performers. Guy Noir is here, Dusty and Lefty, Bob the Young Artist, Gloria, plus duct tape, rhubarb pie, a drama about dying flies and another about ants, an ode to plumbers, limericks, Peter Ostroushko's recipe for borscht, and a tale about a warm spring Sunday in Lake Wobegon when the organist stepped on a bass pedal during a sermon on Job. Learn how guests are booked, how the stage is set, what Tom Keith uses to make his sound effects, how the audio engineers work. And who selects the greetings that are read on the air. PLUS The New Yorker story that inspired the show (its first appearance in book form).
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