Word: keillor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Keillor was not a natural performer as a boy, says his older brother Philip, 48, an engineer whose field is shoreline erosion and flooding. At the University of Minnesota, Gary edited the literary magazine and wrote a noisy, satirical column called "Broadsides," in which he slashed at student radicals, the college president and any other targets that seemed pompous or pretentious. But the storytelling gifts did not immediately appear. In 1966, after he finished college, Keillor "felt a slight urge to head out" from the Midwest, and on a job-hunting swing through the East he applied at half...
Transplanted Midwesterners do much of the heavy lifting for the big Eastern magazines and newspapers, but Keillor was not to be one of them. Back he went to Minnesota, where, among other things, he began a five-day-a-week early morning classical-music show for a public radio station at St. John's University in Collegeville. The Prairie Home Morning Show, as it came to be called, moved to the Twin Cities, where it broadened and loosened to include jazz, country music, fake commercials and references to an obscure place called Lake Wobegon. (He stopped doing that show only...
...live evening show that shortly became A Prairie Home Companion. Years later the great country guitarist Chet Atkins heard from his agent, who said that "somebody in St. Paul wants you to work on a radio show for $300." Atkins was not thrilled, but then his daughter mentioned Keillor's show, and so did another musician. "I decided to tune in," he says. "That man's voice just mesmerizes people. I called my agent and told him to book me." Their first meeting was not electric. "He was backstage wearing a ball cap and casual clothes," Atkins goes...
...Keillor learned to harmonize when he was a boy singing hymns with his family, and he does a lot of singing on the show. Butch Thompson, who plays clarinet and barroom piano, and Peter Ostroushko, who plays fiddle, guitar and mandolin, are regulars on the show, and Atkins, Emmylou Harris, Scottish Folk Singer Jean Redpath, Fiddler Johnny Gimble and a great many others are irregulars. Keillor's tastes are dizzyingly eclectic, though he cherishes what he calls "an irrational distaste for banjos and a normal dislike of operatic sopranos...
Until last year, Keillor wrote almost the entire show, parody songs, phony commercials and all. Now Writer Howard Mohr pitches in on the Raw Bits and the Minnesota Language Systems ads, which peddle cassettes that teach visitors to answer "You bet" for approval, and "That's different" for confusion or doubt, like real Minnesot'ns. But the wondrous, spooky monologues that carry the show are Keillor's. He works without a net. On Wednesday or Thursday he will have started to think seriously about the piece, and by Saturday, most weeks, he will have written out a fairly complete narrative...