Thank You, Garrison Keillor

Tonight I will be listening to the last A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. I started listening well into its run, from around the time that I attended a small mid-Western liberal arts college called the College of Wooster in Ohio, which is about an hour or so south of Cleveland. It was part of my regular Saturday routine. I was a young music major living in a small mid-Western town which didn’t have many excitements in it. It was the mid-90s, and the Internet was still in its nascence as a mass medium. There were the odd weekends where I’d buy one of the low-cost student-subsidized tickets to see the Cleveland Orchestra or go with some friends to a movie or out to dinner at a place like Olive Garden and go to Borders. Of course, I’d do some practicing and homework, but that was usually on Sunday. On Saturday I had a regular radio routine which meant spending most of the day listening to WKSU, the classical/folk/news public radio station out of Kent, Ohio, and I still remember how an ideal Saturday would go.

Garrison Keillor on stage at A Prairie Home Companion

I’d wake up late and catch the end of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, with one of his ever-so-charming cultural stories or interviews, and basically ignore whatever hard news features were on the show. Then there was Car Talk, which was pretty funny, and somewhat informative with those wise-cracking Tappett Brothers from Boston, followed by some Mid-Western humor from Jim Feldman’s Whadda Ya Know (which at this point in the day, I could only take for so long), before getting into the repeat of Prairie Home Companion or classical music. At that point, I’d usually be in my room reading or off doing errands. (I had a car from my sophomore year on, so the radio was usually on). I would usually turn it back until the 6 o’clock hour to hear PHC. After it aired, I would tune in for Rabbit Ears Radio (lots of good storytelling on that) and folk music with Jim Blum.

Garrison Keillor wasn’t a stale, tired figure to me. He was a plain-spoken guy who was a college graduate and something of a role model. His occasionally-useful English degree affirmed the path I was on: that the humanities helped mold character and trained one to be happy in their skin. He was a convener of good company: a bringer of tall tales, entertainer of folks who went to church every week or at least did the New York Times crossword puzzle, and like that uncle we all have, a jokester who reveled in telling shaggy-dog stories and making bad puns. It was good, wholesome fun, which both you and your parents and grandparents could enjoy together.

He brought classical, jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, gospel, and other styles of music together, along with storytelling and acting. He presented a slice of life from an idealized, imagined, old world Minnesota whose agrarian worldview was in competition with a noisy, fast-paced, ever-changing urban world. (I learned to appreciate both ways of being in the world). His show and other programs from the public radio universe focused me, settled me down, and helped me get through a demanding four-year music program, from which I was never going to be a top performer.

I eventually chose arts management, then music librarianship as my path. Eventually the study of the history of and practice of radio became important to me too, as I worked as a music librarian for several public radio stations, and became a volunteer classical and folk DJ at a college station in Bloomington, Indiana, and later in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since I started working in the largest sound archive in the country, I’ve gotten to know a lot about radio’s Golden Age, and the variety show genre on which Garrison Keillor modeled PHC on. I knew there had to be an invisible community of folks like me who got through their days by tuning in to radio like this.

The cadences and rhythms of public radio, including the parts between the shows (which we call interstitials in the trade), seemed just as important to me as a daily soundtrack, as the classical music I was studying. Prairie Home Companion was itself a literary and musical salon that exposed me to the arts of storytelling, radio drama and comedy, and often poetry (especially through Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac) on a weekly basis. The never-changing structure of the show seemed as artful to me as the way opera is constructed. Keillor was as important as Pete Seeger to me, in setting forth a canon of Protestant hymns and folk songs which he would adapt to ever-changing lyrics depending on what was in the news or who the show guests were that week. He did it in a way that combined humor and wit by parodying some of the most well-known songs of white, middle-class Christian America (albeit the songs our mothers and grand-mothers sang, or we had learned at camp).

His gentle lampooning of small-town America was part of the point of what he was doing, but I didn’t experience the substance as irony; more an inculcation of how the world was (or at least from my small perspective) what it should be (even if it never existed). I was a gay teenager who was shy, too smart for his own good, and closeted. I took pleasures from the mainstream where I could: good coffee, books and CDs, classical and folk music performances, and a steady diet of public radio. And as I was at this point in my life drifting away from the United Methodism of my youth, GK’s “News from Lake Wobegon” became my weekly sermon on how to be a better person.

Not being popular or athletic in high school, I will never understand the folks who say that high school was the best time in their life. For me for a long time I thought it was college, when I was sheltered in a small, Mid-Western town at a Presbyterian liberal arts school, going to the library and the music building, hanging out with my tribe of music majors, and listening to A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday nights. Life changes, and though I haven’t listened to PHC in the last couple of years regularly, I still feel those nostalgic twinges when I hear Garrison singing about “hearing that old piano from down the avenue.” The past may not be a place in which I can or want to reside, but I enjoy visiting whenever I’m called to it.