The Cold Hard Facts of February 14, 1997

Del McCoury Band and Leo Kottke

Jul 12, 2023

Garrison Keillor has a lot to say about cheerfulness in his new book, titled (yes) Cheerfulness. With this set of eight notecards — each featuring a different colorful photo and quote from the book — you’re ready to send a little cheer to brighten someone’s day. Approximately 5" x 7". Below is the text from each card. Get the set.

Cheerfulness is a great American virtue, the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, step up to the plate and swing for the fences, do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron.
***

The uncertainty of tomorrow makes today rather cheerful. Beautiful, in fact. This is our time. We’re lucky to have been born when we were, any later and we wouldn’t know how lucky we are, any earlier and we’d be deceased.
***

Cheer up. Put your bare feet on the floor in the morning and meet the world’s
indifference with a light heart. Pull on your pants, buckle your belt, get your head on straight and go to the work you were put here to do. The world will be improved by your enthusiasm.
***

The secret of cheerfulness is to Delete. Cut out watching golf or basketball on TV, loud restaurants, science fiction, most of Florida, the Book of Revelation, broadcast journalism, and irony, and you’ll be much happier.
***

Gloom is just like carbuncles:

Yours is the same as your uncle’s

Whereas the hilarious

Is wildly various

Like the wildlife found in the jungles.

***

Work is crucial. Usefulness can lead to genius. Edison invented the talking machine to help execs dictate letters and Caruso sang into it and Jimmie Rodgers and King Oliver and the seeds of jazz and blues blew around the world.
***

Happiness is circumstantial, bliss is brief, joy is for angels and small children,
contentment is fragile and easily interrupted, gaiety doesn’t happen until eighty, and for jubilation you need to find a good roller coaster and someone to ride it with you and scream, but cheerfulness is a choice, like choosing chocolate rather than a spoonful of mud. Take the chocolate.
***

Cheerfulness is a choice. Every morning you’re offered Anxiety, Bitterness,
Cheerfulness, Dread, Ennui, and Forgetfulness. It’s a new day, there is work to be done, you are loved, the coffee is on, so choose C. C is always the correct.

Listen to this July 16, 2016, classic (a repeat from October 1997)

This week’s classic show travels back to February 14, 1997, for a show from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bluegrass stalwarts The Del McCoury Band make their first appearance on our show and heat up the Fitz with “Baltimore Johnny” and “Love is a Long Road”; guitar hero Leo Kottke puts on a veritable six-string clinic, including his tune “Regards from Chuck Pink” and The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”; and the Cowboys, Dusty and Lefty, find themselves imprisoned, accused of rustling forty-three hundred head of longhorns. Plus: music from The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band and a word from Swanson’s Self Storage and our other sponsors. In Lake Wobegon, Earl Dickmeyer builds The World’s Largest Pile of Burlap Bags, which attracts international acclaim. Click here to listen to the show or join us via our Instagram page each Saturday at 5 p.m. CT.

Del McCoury Band

The Del McCoury Band is led by Del McCoury, who’s been playing bluegrass for more than six decades. McCoury spent most of his youth in York County, Pennsylvania, and learned music from his mother, Hazel, a church organist who also played guitar, piano, and harmonica. In his teenage years, he and his older brother played together in a church quartet. That led Del to a job picking banjo for a local bluegrass band that played on a Pennsylvania radio station, which led to appearances in the late ’50s and early ’60s with groups like the Blue Ridge Ramblers and the Virginia Playboys. It wasn’t long before he met Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, who asked McCoury to play in his band, The Blue Grass Boys. McCoury played guitar and sang lead vocals with The Blue Grass Boys and traveled with them for a year before quitting the band and getting married. McCoury ended up back in Pennsylvania, working at a sawmill and playing music on weekends. As his boys got older, they began playing with their dad in his band. Ronnie joined the band in 1981 and Rob followed in 1987. In the early ’90s, this five-person band was formed. The Del McCoury Band was named Entertainers of the Year nine times by the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), and in won a Grammy Award for their 2013 album, The Streets Of Baltimore.

Leo Kottke

With his quick wit and astounding virtuosity, guitarist Leo Kottke has amassed a huge and loyal following since making his debut album in 1969: 12-String Blues, recorded live at the Scholar coffeehouse in Minneapolis. Then came major-label releases Mudlark and the seminal 6- and 12-String Guitar, which has been reissued on CD three times since it first came out in the early 1970s. Among his dozens of albums are Try and Stop Me and Sixty-Six Steps, a collaboration with Phish bassist Mike Gordon.

HERE’S WHAT SUE SCOTT HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS SHOW:

“It’s so much fun to hear my buddy Tom Keith’s voice in this show from October of 1997! Tom was a sound-effects wizard, absolutely, but an incredibly funny and talented actor, too! His character choices and sense of timing never ceased to make me laugh out loud. In the sketch ‘Underwear,’ Garrison’s Carson has just learned that he has been relieved of his duties as a public radio underwear model. He has to give up his mansion on the hill along with his loyal butler, Nigel. Tom’s Nigel is spot on! During the sketch, ‘Force Ten Wake-Up System,’ we hear some of Tom’s classic sound effects. What a treat to revisit this master talent who left us way too soon.”

Long before the A Prairie Home Companion movie, Garrison wrote new words to Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River.” The song is sung by Garrison accompanied by Rich Dworsky and the band on this program but is more known for Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin’s movie performance as the singing Johnson sisters. Here are the lyrics to the tune:

Way down upon that old Mississippi River,
Not that far away
That’s where I hope to live forever,
That’s where I’m going to stay.
 
I’ve traveled ’cross the whole creation
Ten years and more
Right here I found my satisfaction
Down by the river shore.
 
All of the world, it is so sad and weary,
Everywhere I roam.
Oh, Mama, how I missed the prairie,
And my Minnesota home.
 
I walked along the Danube
Watched the tide come in on the Thames
Floated on the Hudson, the Columbia
Had a picnic by the Seine.
 
All the world, it is a world of rivers
Flowing to the sea
And here on the banks of the Mississippi
Is the place for me.

LIFE THESE DAYS: Stories from Lake Wobegon

This week’s classic show features a favorite News from Lake Wobegon story about the World’s Largest Pile of Burlap Bags. The story was so popular at the time that when the next collection of stories was being assembled, the story was included alongside 10 others including Pastor Ingqvist’s trip to the Mall of America and the story where Clarence Bunsen gets frozen on his roof like a hood ornament. You will treasure these tales detailing what happens during life these days in Lake Wobegon. Get the CDs.

Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

READ A PREVIEW

The Doo Dads are singing “My Girl” on the radio and fourteen-year-old Gary is studying pictures of naked women, aware that Grandpa is looking down from heaven wondering how the boy turned out so badly. He has never so much as kissed a girl, except his rebellious cousin Kate, a sophisticate of seventeen who knows about The New Yorker and also how to swear and exhale smoke rings. But this is a summer of change for Gary: he fights back against his bullying born-again sister and his tyrannical teacher, and most significantly, he receives an Underwood typewriter—a typewriter that will help Gary believe he can become a writer.

With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures a newly minted postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural Midwest. Get the book.

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