A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion is a weekly radio variety show created and hosted by Garrison Keillor that aired live from 1974 to 2016. In 2016, musician Chris Thile took over as host, and the successor show was eventually renamed Live from Here and ran until 2020. A Prairie Home Companion aired on Saturdays from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota; it was also frequently heard on tours to New York City and other U.S. cities. The show is known for its musical guests, especially folk and traditional musicians, tongue-in-cheek radio drama, and relaxed humor. Keillor's wry storytelling segment, "News from Lake Wobegon," was the show's best-known feature during his long tenure.
This article is about the historic radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. For the later radio show hosted by Chris Thile, see Live from Here. For the film, see A Prairie Home Companion (film).Genre
Comedy–music variety
2 hours
United States
English
Garrison Keillor
(1974–1987, 1992–2016)
Sue Scott
Tim Russell
Fred Newman
Garrison Keillor
July 6, 1974 –
September 2, 2016
Distributed by Minnesota Public Radio's distribution arm, American Public Media, A Prairie Home Companion was heard on 690 public radio stations in the United States at its peak in spring 2015 and reached an audience of four million U.S. listeners each week.[1] The show borrowed its name from a radio program in existence in 1969 that was named after the Prairie Home Cemetery near Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota.[2] It inspired a 2006 film of the same name, written by and featuring Keillor.
History[edit]
Origin[edit]
The Saturday-evening show was a partial spin-off of A Prairie Home Morning Show with Keillor and Tom Keith, which ran from 6 to 9 a.m. on Minnesota Public Radio and was continued by Keith and Dale Connelly for many years as The Morning Show.
After researching the Grand Ole Opry for an article, Keillor became interested in doing a variety show on the radio. On July 6, 1974, the first live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion took place on Minnesota Public Radio. That show was broadcast from St. Paul in the Janet Wallace Auditorium of Macalester College. Twelve audience members turned out, mostly children.[3] The second episode featured the first performance on the show by Butch Thompson, who became house pianist. Thompson stayed with the program until 1986 and frequently performed on the show until its 2016 conclusion.
In 1978, the show moved into the World Theater in St. Paul, which Minnesota Public Radio purchased and renovated in 1986 and renamed the Fitzgerald Theater in 1994. This is the same venue the program used to the end.
A Prairie Home Companion began national distribution in May 1980.[4] Because National Public Radio (NPR) rejected the show due to its president Frank Mankiewicz perceiving the show as too expensive and insulting towards small towns, the show was initially distributed through a public radio satellite system that had been completed by June 1980 and allowed NPR member stations to distribute programs outside the NPR network.[4] In 1983, Minnesota Public Radio president William Kling started a new company to distribute A Prairie Home Companion called American Public Radio, which would later be renamed Public Radio International in 1994.[4][5]
Hiatus[edit]
The show went off the air in 1987, with a "final performance" on June 13, and Keillor married and spent some time abroad during the following two years. For a brief time, the show was replaced—both on the air and in the World Theater—by Good Evening, hosted by Noah Adams, a live variety show designed by ex-Prairie Home and All Things Considered staffers to retain the audience Keillor had cultivated over the years. However, many stations opted instead to continue APHC repeats in its traditional Saturday time slot.[6]
In 1989, Keillor returned to radio with The American Radio Company of the Air (renamed Garrison Keillor's American Radio Company in its second season), broadcast originally from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The new program featured a broadly similar format to A Prairie Home Companion, with sketches and musical guests reflecting a more New York sensibility, rather than the country and folk music predominant in APHC. Also, while Keillor sang and delivered a regular monologue on American Radio Company, Lake Wobegon was initially downplayed, as he felt it was "cruel" to talk to a Brooklyn audience about life in a small town. During this period, Keillor revived the full APHC format only for "annual farewell performances." In the fall of 1992, Keillor returned to the Fitzgerald Theater with ARC for the majority of the season, with Lake Wobegon and other APHC elements gradually but unmistakably returning to prominence.