Daryl Adams, Chet Atkins, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Johnny Gimble, Garrison Keillor, Peter Ostroushko, Butch Thompson.
On The Banks of the Ohio ( Garrison Keillor ) K-E-N-T-U-C-K-Y ( Johnny Gimble ) Kentucky Your the Sweetest Land To Me ( Chet Atkins ) Am I boring? ( Garrison Keillor ) Early, Iowa ( Greg Brown ) Cats You Better Come Home ( Garrison Keillor ) In The Good Old Summertime ( Chet Atkins ) Tiger Rag ( Chet Atkins ) Galloping Guitar ( Chet Atkins , Johnny Gimble ) Right or wrong ( Johnny Gimble , Peter Ostroushko ) Nobody Cares for Me ( Garrison Keillor , Chet Atkins ) Lover Come Back to Me ( Chet Atkins , Butch Thompson ) Faded love ( Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) The Last Waltz ( Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) San Antonio rose ( Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) Fiddling Around ( Johnny Gimble ) Anytime ( Johnny Gimble , Chet Atkins ) Brand new angel ( Greg Brown , Johnny Gimble , Peter Ostroushko ) What a Friend We Have in Jesus ( Johnny Gimble ) A Fool Such As I ( Garrison Keillor , Chet Atkins ) Red river valley ( Johnny Gimble ) Red Wing ( Peter Ostroushko ) The B. T. Polka ( Peter Ostroushko )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Garrison invites cat owners to send their cats to Cat Camp in Canada. ) Chatterbox Cafe Fearmonger's Shop Minnesota Language Systems (Being too direct in Minnesota... If you feel like it, if it's not too much trouble...) Powdermilk Biscuits (Overcoming shyness... not sure it needs to be overcome...All-Star Game... Bus ride data in digital... Where to stand in the Men's Room...) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Raw Bits Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime Whippets
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
There's a bunch of people here from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Station WKYU, out and about that vicinity out there. A bunch of people from Moorhead, Kentucky. Coming in group, they're right in there. Some people too from Lexington. And Bloomington is there too. Bunch of you. All right. New Albany. I thought Albany is in Minnesota. We pronounce it Albany and it's right up there near the town that I come from, Lake Wobegon, where it's been a quiet week this last week. Some of you have come to our concert tonight and were thinking that you would send greetings to your friends and people around the country. You can, but not tonight, because they're not listening to us tonight. They'll be listening tomorrow, I hope. And so if you'd like to leave them, I'm sure you could leave them with an usher, a trustworthy one, and they would put it in the hopper and we'd try and read it tomorrow on the broadcast. But I thought that instead of coming out and telling you what I was thinking about telling you about, I can always tell you about that some other time and also maybe I'll think of it and we'll get around to it. Instead of doing that, I thought I'd do something I wouldn't do on the broadcast because it would drive the engineers crazy, and that is see if any of you have any questions about Lake Wobegon, the town that I'm from in Minnesota, and if you would like to raise them here. I may not be able to answer all of them, but I will try to answer them truthfully because veracity is my strong suit. I do sometimes get details wrong, as anyone would operating under these circumstances, but I do aim for the truth. Now I'm going to begin here and take a question. If he's here, I'm not sure if he came or not. He said he was going to, but you know how it is. From Steve, our local underwriter. Steve, are you here? Right here. There you are. You did come. Yes, sir. Are there any Swedes in Lake Wobegon? Are there any Swedes in Lake Wobegon? What's your last name, Steve? I forgot. Emhoff. Emhoff? That's German, Steve. I'm not sure if you knew that. You might have been... My parents are Carlson. Oh, Carlsons. Carlsons. Yes, well, that is Swedish, all right. There are not any Carlsons in Lake Wobegon in case you were worried about that and thought they might turn up in a monologue someday. They won't. No, there really aren't many Swedes. I'll tell you, it's hard to explain to people the reasons why Scandinavians... You tend to think of Scandinavians all as kind of one little group, you know, and forming kind of a homogenous mass. Especially those of us who live in Minnesota tend to think that way. But actually, there are tremendous rivalries between them, and it's hard to explain here in just a few seconds, but basically it comes down to this, that the Swedes were oppressors and the Norwegians were innocent victims. And so there are a few that have intermarried and a few Swedes have kind of snuck in under the covers, so to speak, but they don't brag about it up there. They keep it quiet, you know, like any other sort of handicap that a person might have of that sort. Now, would there be other questions here now that I've offended those people? Let me take a question from somebody from Indiana. All right. Somebody from Indiana whose first name is Wally. All right. Charles? All right, Charles from Indiana, sir. What movie is playing? What is playing at the local movie theater? A movie that's been there many times before. But they just never tire of it. It's an old B movie, an old black and white movie calledThe Hand Under the Bed. And it stars Monica Montaine. I'm not sure if you've heard of her before. It's set in a motel in a deserted area where she has stayed. And she's, what is she, eight years old, I think. This is a complicated plot, but basically she's all right in the motel in the deserted area where mutant dinosaur eggs have cracked because of nearby nuclear testing. She's all right. There's no problem. These gigantic mutant creatures just go thundering past her. But she goes home to her parents' home, this little child. And she's with some people named Henderson, but then they leave for some reason. I don't know. They drop her off at her parents'. I guess they're on a field trip of some kind. She's there in her own bedroom and her own dog Buster is right there. She's lying there peacefully and it's a Friday night and she's in her bed again and feels so happy. And then a big hand comes up from under the bed. From under the bed. It's... Well, I don't need to go into the rest of it. Let me take a question now from someone who left small children at home with a babysitter. I probably owe you something at this point. Oh, yeah. All right. Wally, let's get to you from Indiana. I got one little white jack with Buster in your broadcast. Why who? Jack. Jack of Jack's Auto Repair? Why he sponsors... Yeah, why he sponsors our broadcast. He's wondered that many times. And he has bought time on our show in order to ask that question publicly in front of our entire audience of literally hundreds of people from coast to coast. And he's embarrassed me, and I'm sorry, that you brought him up, Wally of Indiana. You and he ought to get together. Let me take somebody from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Yes, all right, you. If you come to Lake Wobegon, first of all, stay at a boarding house. If you stay in Lake Wobegon, if you come to visit in Lake Wobegon, where should you stay? I take it you don't have relatives there. If you do, you really should stay with them. It's a pretty small town. And news of your arrival would get around rapidly, and they'd be hurt. But if you don't have relatives there, the only place really is to stay out at Arts Bates and Night Arrest Motel. And I want to tell you that Art is a gruff man. He has a gruff exterior which masks an even gruffer interior. He is Norwegian, and Norwegians are not renowned in the hospitality industry, so-called. He has what are called lakefront cabins. They are about the size of a double bed. These are deep valley beds with the trough that runs down the middle. So if you are with a spouse that you're having an argument with, I recommend you don't sleep in one of them. I also recommend that you be careful with everything and observe all of the signs that you see around Arts Bates and Night Arrest Motel because he means every one. Such as: - Do not clean fish on the picnic tables. - How many times do I have to tell you this means you? - Where were you brought up? In a barn. That sign has wound up in a lot of adult people being chased off the place in full view of their little children. It's resulted in ugly scenes, so I'd be careful if I were you. How about Lexington, Kentucky? Yes, there you are. Does Bob take his bank with him on vacation? He's referring to Bob's bank in the little green mobile home. The bank whose motto is neither a borrower nor a lender be. Bob takes his bank everywhere he goes, on vacation and everywhere else, because that makes his vacation a deductible business expense. It cuts down on deposits and causes some worries among depositors, but he's got about enough of those anyway. Yes, I thought I saw a hand go up right in there. Are the Lutherans having church camp this summer? Son, is the Pope a Catholic? A summer without church camp would be like a summer without rain in Lake Wobegon. It is crucial in the raising of children in Lake Wobegon that all of them go to Bible camp. It certainly helps out on discipline for children to sit and to hear what has happened in the past to people who were disobedient on even the smallest counts in the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament was not some deity who went in for a slap on the wrist. When God smote, he really smote. He smote so you stayed smitten. Children who attend Lutheran Bible camp in the summer are quiet and extremely polite and cheerful for 10 to 15 days after that, almost up to the time school starts when it becomes somebody else's problem. Somebody up in the balcony over there. I'm sorry. You go first. Tell me. Oh, tell you. I should tell you about my Sunday school teacher. Well, I'll tell you, we were church people. I grew up in a church-going family by which I mean that we sat under some strong teaching on Sunday morning from our Sunday school teacher. But also this was in a day when little children went to long meetings. There was a two-hour worship service on Sunday morning. We were not Lutheran. They were, I don't know, an hour or something. We were members of a little fundamentalist sect called the Sanctified Brethren. And we had no clergy. So that meant that everybody just sat around in a circle and waited for the Holy Spirit to tell us what to do. It takes longer that way. Long moments would pass. We were fundamentalist people by which I mean that, well, back in 1910, Halley's Comet came through this country. It was a tremendous phenomenon people had never seen before. And for weeks afterward, people were in a state of hysteria. They gave up all pleasures. They gave up everything. They went off. They sat up on hillsides. They prayed constantly. And they became recluses. They thought it was the second coming. When it turned out not to be, then they went back to their regular lives. What people did for 10 days after Halley's Comet in 1910, my people have been doing for, oh, 100 years. We believe that people are basically degraded, that we fell back due to Adam's sin, due to original sin, that people are degraded and worthless and of no account. And I haven't seen a lot since then to change my mind about that. Present company accepted. We also believe that we were redeemed. We were saved. We were sanctified. But we were nervous about it. So we held frequent revival meetings, and some people went up frontoften. They were powerful, powerful events, powerful events to attend when a preacher would stand up in front of us and create for us a very graphic picture of the end of the world, of our own demise, the demise of all of our friends and loved ones, and our everlasting torture in the lake of fire. I always thought this was done pretty casually, but they believed in it, and so the second coming was beat on pretty heavily in front of me for many years. I used to think when I got to be about 16 years old, 17, I used to sit and listen to these revival sermons, and I'd think, Lord, don't come again until I have had sexual intercourse. I had my own theology on this. I, first of all, had not previously had, and I thought it was probably pretty good, but I did not think we would have any in heaven. And what's more, I was pretty sure that we would be so happy in heaven that I wouldn't even think about it in heaven, which really bothered me, the idea that, first of all, I would never have it, and secondly, that I wouldn't even miss it. You see, that I would more or less just forget about it completely, that it would not even exist for me as a possibility. So I guess it's an example of small-mindedness, of which my town is famous for many, many examples. I love those people, though. I was not a particularly good son. I remember going to a revival meeting with my mother. She made me go. I was so angry that I was forced to go that I promised myself all the way to the revival meeting that I would not rededicate my life to Christ. At the meeting, we sat through, I believe, 16 choruses of Almost Persuaded, and I held off. We drove home, and I drove kind of fast, and my mother said, I wish you'd slow down. So I did to 15 miles per hour. This was in the country. I drove along at 15 miles an hour, waiting for her to say, well, I didn't mean this slow, and then I would say, well, you're telling me how to drive. Why don't you tell me exactly how fast you want me to drive, huh? And then she would say, well, I mean, you know, just go the speed limit. So I would go 60 miles an hour around all the curves and down the driveway. That's the kind of kid I was. She never said that, so we drove 15 miles an hour all the way home. It took us about an hour and a half, and as I inched up the driveway and the headlights fastened onto the garage door, she turned and said to me, someday you'll have a child of your own. And when you do, you could finish this sentence for me, couldn't you? When you do, you'll realize that it isn't that easy. I now have a son who is 16. I keep waiting for him to do something that is going to teach me a lesson. I don't think he realizes that he owes it to his Grandma Grace to be a jerk. Somehow I've escaped thatjudgment. I'm a lucky man. I'm a lucky man. I'm very fortunate. I want to close off this. Lucky man. I'm a lucky man. I'm very fortunate. I want to close off this little monologue here, or whatever it was, in behalf of my little town. I want to close it off with a hymn, the first hymn I ever wrote, the most recent one too, back in the fall of last year, the year before last. It's a hymn for a little town where, as I say, all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average. But of course, when I say that, I'm not saying it so much for the people in my hometown that it may be true of them. I'm really saying it about you. I've met a lot of you in the 11 years that we've done this show, and it's been true of all of you. We're very fortunate. Here's a little hymn. I want to close off my part with this. Darrell, give me a little chord here. Morning light, soft and bright, woe be gone reveals. Early frost lies across farm and woods and fields. Coffee done, I'll have some, step outside alone. Look around, set the dough on a slab of stone. By the barn, cattle turn, murmur in the pen. Strong and pure, cow manure, I know where I am. I know where I am, I am home again. Precious Lord, by your word, simple gifts are blessed. Creatures all great and small, heavenly love express. Love and faithfulness, let the promise of salvation come from daily observation. In this farmyard, Lord, be with us. My old dog takes his walk, sniffing every tree. Every smell seems to tell his biography. Chickens dash across the grass, cats patrol the yard. Seven geese march at least, form another guard. Then the small trumpet call, ringing to the skies. Three loud barks. My old dog takes his walk, sniffing every tree. Every smell seems to tell his biography. Wake up and arise, be in paradise.
History of Louisville. The story of humorist Grady Nutt. The Whippets won 7-0 by a forfeit. Slow talkers... Midwesterners problem... Garrison @ 85 words per minute...
Star Tribune Jul 19 1985 Lexington Herald Leader Jul 14 1985
1985.07.14 Lexington Herald: rehearsal show / rebroadcast on July 29, 1989.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl