Hot Music from September 2006

Featuring Jearlyn Steele, Howard Levy, and Studs Terkel

A Trio of shows in Wisconsin

After a great show in Bayfield, Wisconsin, Garrison plans to trek further into the heart of Wisconsin with a trio of shows from Brookfield to Madison to Eau Claire in late September.

GARRISON KEILLOR at 80 is a show of music, stories, and stand-up on the theme of cheerfulness — happiness depends on circumstance but cheerfulness is a choice. The show includes Keillor’s sung sonnets and duets with Heather Masse on songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Greg Brown, Mark Knopfler, and Ann Reed, plus an extended medley of sung classic poems and jokes.

Keillor also delivers the News from Lake Wobegon, reflecting on his generation, the one that knew about outhouses, slaughtered chickens, hitchhiked, drove a straight-stick transmission, skated on outdoor rinks, and told jokes.

The program concludes with the audience singing a cappella an impromptu medley of familiar songs — “America,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Oh Susannah,” “In My Life,” “Going to the Chapel,” etc. “We are the last generation who knows all the words,” says Keillor. “When we’re gone, they’ll disappear.”

Get Tickets:

September 23 at 8:00 p.m. at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts in Brookfield, Wisconsin

September 24 at 4 p.m. at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin

September 25 at 7:30 p.m. at RCU Theatre in Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Listen to the classic show from September 16, 2006

We’re going to heat up the fall with a compilation of two earlier shows. These compilations almost feel like a new show so join us for a listen. Featured picks from the first show will be gospel singer Jearlyn Steele, award-winning pianist Reginald Robinson, Chicago community builders The South Shore Drill Team, and our own Rich Dworsky and Fred Newman. Picks from the second show include the great American author, historian, and broadcaster Studs Terkel, legendary jazz figure Franz Jackson, and the hero of the modern harmonica, Howard Levy.

Highlights include Jearlyn belting out the classics “I’ll Take You There” and “Lean on Me,” a great fall stomp from Reginald Robinson called “The Maple “Leaf Rag,” the Gary Comer Center Youth Choir crooning “Oh Happy Day,” plus Howard Levy’s got his mojo back on the harmonica, a bit of cooking with Studs, talk about the end of the world, Ketchup, sound effects, and the latest News from Lake Wobegon. Use this link to listen now or join on our Facebook page where the link debuts on Saturday at 5:00 p.m. CT.

Jearlyn Steele

Growing up in Indiana, Jearlyn Steele sang with her siblings as The Steele Children. One by one, they moved to Minnesota and started singing together again. Now music is the family business. Jearlyn also hosts Steele Talkin’, a Sunday-night radio show that originates on WCCO in Minneapolis.

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).

Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel called himself a "disc jockey," a reference to his role as host of the Peabody Award-winning talk show, The Studs Terkel Program, heard for 45 years in Chicago on WFMT. Before starting with WFMT in 1953, Terkel had starred in Studs’ Place, one of the programs that created the Chicago school of television. The show began airing in 1950, the year that Joseph McCarthy began claiming that he had a list of Communist Party members in the U.S. State Department. The popularity of Studs’ Place couldn't keep it on the air: the program was dropped by NBC when Terkel wouldn't reverse his “pro-Communist” positions in favor of price and rent controls and against the poll tax and Jim Crow laws. By the mid-’60s, Terkel’s interviews on WFMT began to be noticed outside of Chicago. In 1965, his first oral history was published, Division Street: America, about class differences in Chicago. Terkel called his writing “bottom-up history ... [interviews with] ordinary people who have something real to say about themselves.” He published 18 books and to compile each of these books, Terkel met with hundreds of “ordinary people” and then sifted through the hours upon hours of resulting tape until the interviews were distilled down to bare truth. He was honored with an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and a Pulitzer Prize.

Reginald Robinson

Chicago born and raised, Reginald Robinson is a pianist and composer whose music ranges from of semi-classical to ragtime, Latin American to early jazz and blues. Reginald has been consumed with music since early childhood. At home, his parents played records of classical music and R&B and everything in between, and Reginald and his brothers started making music together. But it was a junior-high assembly about ragtime that cinched it. A guest musician played the melody Reginald had heard coming from the ice cream truck every summer, but to hear “The Entertainer” played as a serious piano piece was utterly captivating. He read everything he could about ragtime and its most famous composer, Scott Joplin. That Christmas, Reginald was given a small electronic keyboard, and he started teaching himself to play. By studying school music books, he learned to read and write music. He pored over ragtime transcriptions, comparing them note for note with old piano roll recordings. The hard work of his youth paid off. He has recorded five CDs, including The Strongman, Songs in Silhouette, and Euphonic Sounds, all on the Delmark label, and he has performed across the U.S. and in Europe at venues such as the Chicago Jazz Festival, Ravinia and the Gilmore Keyboard Festival. In 2004, Reginald Robinson was honored as a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow, the so-called “genius grant.”

Convention Speeches

Here are a couple of convention speeches featured in this week’s classic show:

William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the 9th of July 1896.

Mr. Chairman & Gentlemen of the convention:

The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty, the cause of humanity — The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this is a contest over a principle.

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Theodore Roosevelt, National Progressive Party, Chicago, Tuesday, August 6, 1912.
The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either … boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on the vital issues of the day. This new movement is a movement of truth, sincerity, and wisdom, which proposes boldly to face the real and great questions of the day, and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties. We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter what their past political differences, if they are content to face the future and no longer to dwell among the dead issues of the past.
Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are engaged. I hope we shall win, and I believe that if we can wake the people to what the fight really means we shall win. But win or lose, we shall not falter. Whatever fate may at the moment overtake any of us, the movement itself will not stop. Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness; and even though we who now lead may for the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph. … To you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.

A Prairie Home COMEDY

Released in 1998, this humorous favorite is celebrating its 35th anniversary later this month. It features 34 of the best-loved, most-requested songs and sketches from the original radio broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion, including this wonderful ode to the tuna-noodle casserole.

Listen to a sample.

Get the CD or download

Lake Wobegon USA

Released 30 years ago, this collection of stories, mostly from the New York years, has become a favorite of fans. Garrison Keillor’s fourth collection of “The News from Lake Wobegon” monologues contains 17 exquisitely crafted tales about such things as the luxury of rhubarb pie, the Krebsbach’s thrifty vacation, and the vapor lights of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility — all of which make us believe that we, too, are citizens of a place “where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Each CD or download is themed: Fertility, Rhubarb, Youth, and Patience. Over 5 hours on 4 CDs or 4 downloads.

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