Listeners’ Choice from August 2005

Featuring Marni Nixon, Emmylou Harris, Greg Brown and Renée Fleming

Under the BIG TOP on August 27th

Garrison returns to Bayfield, Wisconsin, for a show near the shores of Lake Superior. Garrison and his Prairie Home friends (Fred Newman, Heather Masse, Rich Dworsky, Richard Kriehn, Joe Savage, and Dean Magraw) will take the stage at Big Top Chautauqua for an evening of laughter, song, and the News from Lake Wobegon.

The Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua is a 900-seat music venue and performing arts center. It is an all-canvas tent-theater that has operated since 1986, primarily during the summer. It is one of Garrison’s favorite venues — he says it’s so lovely to tell stories on a summer’s night with the light breeze wafting from Lake Superior. Join us for an unforgettable evening.

Get tickets to the August 27 show in Bayfield

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Listen to the Listeners’ Choice Show

Back in 2005, we asked listeners to submit their favorite bits and pieces from LIVE A Prairie Home Companions shows and received thousands of comments about many of their favorite broadcast moments. This Listener’s Choice special gathers together many of those moments along with a listener memories or comments to accompany the pieces. We had a wonderful time reading and hearing your stories and putting together a Listener’s Choice show all about them. 

Many fans’ favorites were included such as The Whippets Rag, Raw Bits, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, Six Minute Macbeth, Guy Noir, some fine music and 3 classic News from Lake Wobegon stories. Join us on Saturday night via our Facebook page for a listen at 5pm CT or click the link to listen now.

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Marni Nixon

Marni Nixon was dubbed by Time magazine as the “Ghostess with the Mostest,” a compliment to the famous invisible voice. Actresses who don’t sing are as common in musicals as actors who don’t fight in action films, and the female singing voice you hear in West Side Story, My Fair Lady, An Affair to Remember, Mulan, and The King and I is Marni Nixon’s. She dubbed for Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Moreno; she did a voice in The Secret Garden for child actress Margaret O’Brien, and she did the angel voices heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc. On her own, she released albums that include Marni Nixon Sings Gershwin and Marni Nixon Sings Classic Kern, and she appeared as a cabaret and musical comedy performer, opera diva, stage actress, recitalist, symphony guest artist in both classical and pops repertoire, and recording artist. Marni Nixon passed away in 2016.

Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris’s albums are mainstays in any music fan’s collection: Wrecking Ball, Luxury Liner, Roses in the Snow, The Ballad of Sally Rose, Trio, Red Dirt Girl. The list goes on and on. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in North Carolina and Virginia, Harris began playing the guitar at 16 and eventually left college to pursue a career in music. In the early 1970s, she moved to Los Angeles and joined forces with Gram Parsons, with whom she made two albums. After Parsons’ death in 1973, Harris made her major label debut, Pieces of the Sky. Now, after more than 50 years of performing and countless awards, including 14 Grammy Awards plus induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Emmylou maintains a widespread and loyal following, whether she’s singing folk, country, pop or traditional tunes. On this broadcast, she joined Mark Knopfler to share several songs from their duet album.

Greg Brown

Greg Brown was raised in southeastern Iowa, with a banjo-playing grandfather, a poet grandmother, an English teacher mother who played guitar, and a Pentecostal preacher father. The environment, combined with abundant talent, produced one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of the past half-century. Said a Boston Globe music critic, “Brown is to this country what Richard Thompson is to Britain: its most essential modern troubadour.” Greg’s dozens of recordings may just prove the point.

Renée Fleming

While studying at the State University of New York, Renée Fleming sang with a jazz trio and was discovered by jazz legend Illinois Jacquet, who invited her to tour with his band. Renée went to graduate school instead, where she focused on classical music at the Eastman School of Music and The Juilliard School. Fleming’s professional break came in 1988 when she was invited to sing the role of the Contessa in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro with the Houston Grand Opera, and in 1989 she made her New York City debut in La Bohème. She sang in London’s Covent Garden and returned to New York in 1991 to make her Metropolitan Opera debut. Since then, the Grammy Award winner, who is recognized as a risk-taker in her field, has created many roles for the operatic stage and has premiered many songs written for her. She has performed in the world’s most distinguished venues with today’s foremost orchestras and conductors and recorded numerous award-winning discs.

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This episode features a number of sketches and bits from the archives and also from many of the previous CD releases. Early on, the Lake Wobegon Whippets had a featured spot on the show with weekly updates on our favorite hapless team, including the song “The Whippets Rag.” Here it is as featured on The Family Radio and on this classic listeners’ choice special.

WOBEGON WHIPPETS RAG
(Garrison Keillor)

Well, hello team, I'm on my way
I'll be in shape and ready to play
By the end of August if not in May
It's the Wobegon Whippets Rag.

When you're dressed in a nice clean uniform
And you loosen up and your arm is warm,
And you drop the ball going round the horn,
That's the Wobegon Whippets Rag.

Well here's how you do the Whippets Rag,
There's a high pop fly you just can't shag,
Throw it to second and miss the tag,
And over to first, take your foot off the bag.

Well sure is lonely here in right,
A long way to walk and the sun's too bright,
Sure am glad this'll be my last year
I wish somebody would send out a beer.

Here's the windup and here's the pitch,
There's a fly to right, son of a gun,
Can't let it drop or another man scores,
It's mine and I got it, no it's yours.

That makes the score 20 to 2
Sorry coach I had a stone in my shoe
Why are they yelling, why do they boo?
Yeah, buddy, well same to you.

I do my best but it ain't enough
Seems like I done lost my stuff
How could a fellow concentrate
With that woman in the bleachers behind home plate?

I wonder what she's doing after the game
I wonder if anybody knows her name
If I knew her name, I'd give her a call
O goodness sakes, here comes the ball

Lake Wobegon Family Reunion

From America’s favorite storyteller, here are 19 memorable monologues, handpicked from over 15 previously released collections and 40 years of A Prairie Home Companion live broadcasts. This is the closest that we have gotten to compiling a “very best of Garrison Keillor” collection. It was assembled using fan input regarding their best-loved stories. The product pages for the CDs in our store have been updated with detailed track listings and easily downloaded links from Amazon and iTunes. Here is “Bruno, The Fishing Dog” as featured on this week’s listeners’ choice special and on this special collection of stories. Get the CDs or download.

The Best of Guy Noir

It’s a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but high above the mean streets, a light burns on the 12th floor of the Acme Building, where Guy Noir — hard-boiled, world-weary, yet surprisingly articulate — is trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. In his big swivel chair under the bare bulb beside the beat-up gray file cabinet, he awaits the call of his clientele: the disappointed, the paranoid, the embittered, the rejected — and the hilarious.

Garrison Keillor’s private eye spoof thrilled audiences every week for over twenty years on live public radio broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. Thirty-six all-time favorite Guy Noir episodes are available in one collection. Follow the intrepid detective as he solves cases no other gumshoe would touch, and enjoy Keillor’s intelligent — but always funny — spin on the classic detective genre.

Featuring Garrison Keillor, Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Fred Newman, Tom Keith, Walter Bobbie, and special guests, with music by Richard Dworsky. Below, is a classic sketch featuring Renée Fleming as Renata Flambé. Get the CDs or download.