Chet Atkins, Butch Thompson Trio, Cal Hand, John Hartford, Garrison Keillor, Peter Ostroushko, Becky Reimer Thompson, Paul Yandell.
Deep river blues (Butch Thompson Trio ) Give me your telephone number (Butch Thompson Trio ) Melancholy (Butch Thompson Trio ) Old fashioned love (Butch Thompson Trio ) I've been mistreated (Butch Thompson Trio ) This can't be love ( Chet Atkins ) Rocky top ( Chet Atkins ) Heart of glass ( Chet Atkins ) Vincent ( Chet Atkins ) Alexander's birthday ( Garrison Keillor , Becky Reimer Thompson ) Ain't you tired of making me blue ( Becky Reimer Thompson ) I never learned how to dance ( Becky Reimer Thompson ) Skippin in the Mississippi Dew ( John Hartford ) Take Me Back ( John Hartford ) Don't leave your records in the sun ( John Hartford ) In Tall Buildings ( John Hartford ) Birthday messages ( John Hartford )
Ajua! Hot Sauce Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bunsen, Clarence Butch Thompson Music Corporation Chatterbox Cafe Minnesota - North Dakota Line Pastor Ingqvist Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime
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Well, sir, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It was kind of warm one day this last week, got up to 40, had people talking about how spring couldn't be far away. Then it snowed that night, and the next day was cold and windy. It's a dismal month, the month of March. Come down to the end of it here, I think the truth can be told. It's been a brutal winter, and March is the worst part of it in Minnesota. Just enough pleasant days in the month of March to get your hopes up. And then it makes all the other 25 of them seem much more dismal. Those of you who don't drink and have always been curious what a hangover is like, it's kind of like the month of March. Like Wobegon, anyway. Even for those Norwegian bachelor farmers, winter's getting kind of stale. They live out there west of town in their little farmhouses or shacks, depending on how you look at it, without much entertainment. Live there alone, not much to do during the winter except read old catalogs and listen to the radio. Sit out there, play solitaire, throw tin cans out the back door, try and hit the trash pile. That's about... All they have for fun. They come down to the month of March. It's starting to get kind of thin for them. Though if you drove out that way this last week, you would have seen one of the first signs of spring. The bachelor farmer's bed sheets all hung out to dry on the bushes out behind their back doors. Even Barney had his Sheets hung out to dry. They're kind of surprising sheets that he has. They're sheets that Mrs. Krebsbach bought a couple of years ago in the cities. They're Hawaiian sheets with big swashes of bright tropical colors on them. But Carl Krebsbach couldn't get to sleep in them, so she gave them to the church, and Barney picked them up there at a church used sale for a quarter. They're not the sort of sheets you'd associate with him. I mean, if you saw him walking down the street and were thinking about that, you know, trying to guess what kind of bed sheets he had. You'd never guess Hawaiian for Barney. See, his real name is Einar. And Barney is his nickname. Nicknamed him Barney on account of the way he smells most of the time. Which a lot of people make fun of in Lake Wobegon, but I don't care to make fun of him anymore. I think that there are basically two sorts of personal odors. There's fresh and there's stale. There's a lot of different kinds. But you have to prefer fresh. And Barney's is nothing but fresh, I'll tell you. It's not really a barn smell, it comes from his hobby, which is trapping skunks. He traps skunks and skins them and takes their skins and makes them into coats and jackets. That's his hobby during the winter. A lot of the Norwegian bachelor farmers have bought jackets and coats from him. I guess they're pretty warm. So it was good to see the bed sheets hung out to dry. And now a week from tomorrow, the high school choir will give their spring concert. Miss Falconer has been drilling them, and they may just blossom. You never know. And then sometime after that, Those Norwegian bachelor farmers who'd be hitching up the big Belgian horses, their teams of big black Belgians, hooking them up to the plows and heading out across the dry stubble. Drop the plow, pull the lever, drop the plow, and off goes the team leading the way, the man riding behind. Plowshare bite into the dirt. And the sideboard turns it over and up comes the smell of sweet black dirt. Looking forward to it. Love that smell. Wouldn't mind smelling like that myself. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking. And all the children are above average.
BT's auto-pianist allows you to talk and play piano at the same time.
Standard Speaker Mar 31 1983
Berto: re-broadcast on March 26, 1988
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl