Tag Archives: A Prairie Home Companion

A Prairie Home Apology to Chris Thile

Chris Thile/ Photo by Devin Pedde / livefromhere.org

This morning I came across a BuzzFeed list of “21 Signs You’re Officially An Old Person,” and not surprisingly I connected with about half of them. Indeed, I had to hand crank the windows of my old cars, carried around both a flip phone and an iPod Classic at the same time, used a card catalog at the library, put photos in a photo album, and lately I’ve noticed that I involuntarily make a noise whenever I stand up. On the other hand, I still enjoy listening to new music, have never watched Golden Girls, can’t tell the weather with my knees, and don’t yet need to lower the volume on the radio when I put my car in reverse. Best I can figure, I’m simply a middle-aged man with Peter Pan syndrome, trapped inside a body manufactured in the summer of 1951 and delivered the following February.

Earlier this month I downloaded an expensive meditation app at the suggestion and cost of my employer to improve my emotional health, relieve stress, control anxiety, lengthen attention span, address memory loss, and … I forget the rest. If this program wasn’t also offered to all 120,000 of my fellow team members, I might have thought it was specifically directed toward me and my job performance. But alas, it’s rare to work for a corporation that actually cares about their employees’ well-being, so I have dutifully taken anywhere from one minute to a dozen each day to just do it. Old dog, new trick: I like it.

A week or two before I began my new meditative journey, I was driving home from work on a Saturday night and turned on Live From Here, the radio show hosted by Chris Thile formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion. It was at the precise moment of the above video performance with Thile and Chris Eldridge, minus the spoken introduction, that the notes and interplay of mandolin and guitar affixed to my brain as if by super glue. Not only could I not stop thinking about it, but when I began to meditate it would interrupt my concentration on breathing. And it was not some weird attachment to an old J.S. Bach-written Glenn Gould recording, but an unconsciously unresolved resentment toward Thile that took me weeks to identify.

Call it coincidence or perhaps some sort of cosmic time realignment, but that skit was performed on Oct. 15, 2016. It was the very first show that officially featured Thile as host, taking over for Garrison Keillor. It was a truly a great show, featuring a new house band and guests Maeve Higgins, Lake Street Dive, and Jack White along with a number of special guests and collaborations that included Margo Price, Sarah Jarosz, Brittany Haas, and Paul Kowert. In that week’s Broadside column I wrote:

“Although it wouldn’t have been fair to expect that Thile would offer up the intellectual depth or comedic talents of Keillor, the applause coming through my car radio speakers sounded as if he won over the crowd at the Fitzgerald Theater with a stellar band and great guests. As you can hear for yourself, the show continued with the tradition of delivering the goods in American roots music.”

Thirteen months after that great opening show, Minnesota Public Radio announced it was terminating all of its business relationships with Keillor as a result of allegations of inappropriate behavior. While he denied multiple accusations, a long public disentanglement commenced and, as Keillor owned the trademark for the name A Prairie Home Companion, Thile’s show began broadcasting under its new name, Live From Here.

It was and continues to be a tough time for those who were deeply touched by the talent and spectacle of over four decades with Keillor and his Saturday night radio shows. Throughout the years I’ve loved the music and humor, could picture Lake Wobegon in my mind, read the man’s books, watched a lot of videos, loved the Robert Altman film enough to buy it, and added hours and hours of musical and comedic show snippets into my digital jukebox that remain to this day.

Over the past three years I have dropped in and out of Live From Here. Instead of purposely tuning it in each week and attending the shows when they come to town, I simply punch the dial when I’m in the car on Saturday nights, grabbing musical moments on the fly. Often I’ll visit the show’s YouTube page, which is probably the greatest source and presentation of modern-day roots music performances you’ll find. Kudos to them for posting them each week. When it comes to the non-musical portions of the shows, rarely have I found the comedy to be very funny, and Thile’s “oh boy gee whiz” excitement about almost everything hasn’t yet been contagious to these old ears. And what’s up with shouting “Ahoy!” throughout the show?

That aside, I awoke this morning, did a five-minute guided meditation, and made a mental note that I, or perhaps speaking for the collective “we,” need to acknowledge that we are quite blessed to have Chris Thile both perform and present the music we endear. He has stepped out from the shadow of Keillor that I’ve held onto and resented him for and created a new tradition and pathway. He is respectful of the old, enchanted with the current. And for that, I personally feel I owe him an apology, and am fortunate to have this soapbox where I can do so publicly.

Regarding that BuzzFeed list of “signs you’re officially an old person,” I’d like to add one more: You grew up listening to A Prairie Home Companion and are still pissed off that it’s not on anymore. My newly acquired post-enlightenment advice? Get over it.

Postscript: Shortly after publishing this column I went to two successive Live From Here broadcasts at Town Hall in NYC. Damn, they were great. Beyond my expectations and it’s the best place to be in Manhattan in a Saturday night, save for when they venture out or are on hiatus. One note of irony: on the second floor of the venue in a small alcove near the bar, there are about a hundred black and white photographs featuring headshots of people who have performed there in the past. In the middle looking down at the line pf people buying beverages and snacks is Garrison Keillor.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Molly Tuttle: From Her Tweens to Her Twenties

The Tuttles With AJ Lee

Considering that she is only a quarter-century old and just released her first solo album, one might suggest I could be jumping the gun on writing a retrospective of Molly Tuttle’s musical career and highlights. And had she not grown up in the era of the magical time machine also known as YouTube, we might have thought she just landed under a Nashville cabbage patch one day and — poof — a star was born. But this young woman began playing guitar at the age of eight, recorded her first album of duets with her dad at 13, and has won more awards than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill.

Molly, Michael, and Sullivan Tuttle’s bluegrass version of “El Cumbanchero” was uploaded in 2006 and has been viewed more than 1,750,000 times. And just to see what four additional years of practice and growing up can do to one’s musical skill sets, here is their 2010 version, with Molly moving from guitar to banjo:

Jack Tuttle is a distinguished bluegrass musician, teacher, author, and historian, and he came from a musical family in rural Illinois where he first learned to play guitar at age 5. Migrating to California, he began developing a complete lesson program for fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar and has taught thousands of kids and adults since 1979 from his home base at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto. Known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass,” he taught his own three children how to play and through the years they’ve been highly active on the festival circuit and at music camps, through the California Bluegrass Association (CBA), Northern California Bluegrass Society (NCBS), and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).

For those of us guitar players who’ve been around a while and think we might be pretty proficient, watching Molly Tuttle’s right hand technique is a jaw-dropping experience. It seems to be a hybrid of Merle Travis’ style combined with clawhammer banjo, and the result is stunning. When you add in her abilities as a cross-picking, lightning-fast flatpicker, it’s no surprise that in 2017, Tuttle was named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year, an honor that was repeated the following year. She also won this year’s Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award. In addition to her fretwork virtuosity, she’s an exceptional banjo player, singer, and songwriter. Here’s one she wrote back in her teens.

The first album Tuttle recorded was in 2006, a duet project with her dad titled The Old Apple Tree. Around that time, the IBMA began a program for pickers between ages 4 and 17 called Kids on Bluegrass. Held during the annual World of Bluegrass festival, the kids get to meet up with others for the chance to play and perform together. Tuttle was one of many talented participants, as were Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, Alex Hargreaves, Molly Cherryholmes, and another Californian, a bit younger than Tuttle, named AJ Lee. Here’s Lee, Tuttle, and Angelica Grim with Luke Abbott in 2009 at the Brown Barn Bluegrass Festival in San Martin, California:

Like Tuttle, Lee began studying and performing bluegrass at a very young age. She was about 10 or 11 and attending a CBA event when Jack Tuttle introduced himself to her father, Rodney, and shared that he was working with groups of kids and wondered if Lee might want to join in. That was the genesis of The Tuttles with AJ Lee, featuring Jack on bass and occasional vocals, with the three Tuttle kids and Lee taking the spotlight. Here they are in 2010 at the Strawberry Music Festival at Camp Mather, California. Molly Tuttle is 17 here.

The group released their first self-titled album in 2010, followed by a second release titled Endless Oceans. Lee, whom I’ve written about before, is now 21, plays in the band Blue Summit that also features Sullivan Tuttle on guitar, and has won the Best Female Vocalist award from the Northern California Bluegrass Society seven times. Her mom, Betsy, has told me that “what AJ learned mostly from her work with the Tuttle family was humility among greatness and the ability to play with intent.” While Lee was poised to make the move to Nashville, as Molly Tuttle has done, a year ago, she’s backed off for now, telling me not too long ago that her “heart is in California.”

In 2012, Molly Tuttle had a huge year when she was awarded merit scholarships to the Berklee College of Music in Boston for music and composition as well as the Foundation for Bluegrass Music’s first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship. She won the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest and received both Female Vocalist and Guitar Player awards from the Northern California Bluegrass Society. (The Tuttles with AJ Lee took home the NCBS’s Bluegrass Band award that year.)

In October of that year, she and her father participated in a duet contest on Prairie Home Companion and won second place. In an article for Bluegrass Today, she wrote:

“I have been listening to Prairie Home Companion since I was a kid, so it was a dream come true to play on the show. I loved seeing how it all comes together. Everyone who worked on the show was so professional, but also really friendly and nice. After the show Garrison invited us all to his house for a party, which was wonderful with lots of good food and people. He led a jam around the piano and asked if I would like to sing a Hazel Dickens song with him, so we sang ‘Won’t You Come and Sing for Me.’ All in all it was such an honor to be on the show and one of the best weekends of my life!”

Over on the Tuttles with AJ Lee website, on the front page it says “We don’t really play together as a band anymore but most of us still do still play music a lot. Thank you for being so supportive of our music over the years. Please keep in touch with us and we hope to see you some time at a show or festival.”

Molly Tuttle is on tour supporting When You’re Ready — you can check the dates on her site. This is the link to AJ and Sully’s Blue Summit site, and if you’d like to learn more about Jack Tuttle and perhaps want to take some lessons, just click on his name. I’ll close this one out with one of Molly’s signature concert tunes, the Townes Van Zandt cover she’s been doing for years. This video is from the family band’s Freight and Salvage gig in Berkeley in 2014 and it’s a barn burner. Great music from fine folks.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

My Favorite Un-Americana Music of 2017

Photo by Oliver Zühlke/Creative Commons

This is the season that I try to be the first kid on the block to beat out the barrage of those end-of-the-year lists from critics and pundits. At No Depression, and other like-minded music websites and magazines, the official music polls from readers, contributors, and reviewers will be coming in December. Had I been born a betting man, I’d lay down a few hundred bucks that there’ll be little variation or surprises between any of them. Ever since the term roots music has morphed into a more definable mainstream “Americana” tagline, diversity has seemed to have left the building. While you won’t get much disagreement from me on the quality and depth of music that has been released so far this year, it seems that I continue to find myself taking the road less traveled.

This year it feels as if I’ve been walking down the dark side of the street, whether we’re talking about art, culture, politics, or simply life in general. There were health issues to deal with and the loss of a parent. I’ve found myself constantly concerned for my children that a madman lives in Washington who is one button away from annihilating the planet when he’s not chipping away at the fabric of our society by normalizing the abnormal. From the racist cries of “blood and soil” to an unjust justice system that tips to white skin and wealth to revelations of what we already know … that bad men do bad things to women and children … and to all the other natural and human disasters we’ve lived through so far, I’m only finding shelter by cocooning with music, books, and video.

So with that bright and shiny preamble, here’s some of my favorite aural oddities and mainstays for the year. As always, I use a different yardstick to measure and compile my list. This is what I have either discovered or gravitated to, undefined by such things as release dates. Whether it was brand new this year or merely recycled from the past, who cares?

The Entire Ry Cooder Catalog

I wish he would have titled one of his albums Pastrami on Ry, and I’m sorry that for most of his career I’ve largely ignored his solo work. Aside from a seemingly infinite number of songs he’s done session work on for others, the only albums I’ve really known inside out have been two from the ’70s: The Gabby Pahinui Band Volume 1 and his solo Bop Til You Drop. So now, thanks to the magic of touch and click streaming, I’m making my way through everything else. While skipping around and sampling from this era and that, I’m spending most of my time with Paradise and Lunch, Into The Purple Valley and Chicken Skin Music.

A Prairie Home Companion

While I know he’s trying his hardest and still growing into his role, Chris Thile’s voice reminds me of Opie Taylor and he’s yet to hone his comedic skills with timing and inflection. But on the other hand, he’s doing an amazing job at making great music with that killer band he’s assembled and presenting exceptional guests week after week. He’s going down the right path but one suggestion would be to please stop referring to Sarah Jarosz as “inimitable.” Why continually state the obvious? Finally, a note about Garrison Keillor. Over the years he’s entertained millions of us and his wit, humor and his support of musicians won’t be forgotten. And while it was sad to witness his termination played out in counterpoint to rapists and serial harassers , he had to go.

David Rawlings

I got a chance to see David and Gillian right before the release of Poor David’s Almanack, and it was the first time I’d ever seen them live in concert. Tickets have always seemed to get swallowed up the minute they go on sale and my budget doesn’t include StubHub. After 21 years of being a devout fan of their partnership, each and every note, song, and harmonic moment gave me a night of multi-orgasmic goosebumps.The album is simply perfect.

Freakwater and The Mekons

In September these two bands reunited as The Freakons and performed two nights in Chicago. Monica Kendrick for The Reader broke the news about a new album they’re now recording. She wrote that it’ll consist of “traditional songs about an industry that links the English Midlands, the Welsh valleys, and the ‘dark and bloody ground’ of Appalachia: coal mining. Haunting tunes in that vein came from both sides of the pond, and the Freakons take them on in the high-lonesome, rabble-rousing tradition of late West Virginian labor singer Hazel Dickens. Proceeds from the album, when it’s finished, will benefit Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a grassroots organization that promotes voting rights and opposes mountaintop-removal mining.”

Rodrigo Amarante

Gotcha … right? A Brazilian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Amarante is a member of Los Hermanos, a band that still plays live but hasn’t recorded since 2005. He partnered with The Strokes drummmer Fabrizio Moretti and American musician Binki Shapiro, who in 2008 released an album on Rough Trade as Little Joy. In 2015 he wrote and recorded “Tuyo,” which has been used as the theme song for the Netflix series Narcos. It’s an earworm.

Tom Brosseau

The ten songs on Treasures Untold were recorded live at a private event in Cologne, Germany. The album features six American folksongs and four originals. Brosseau was born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where in 2007 the mayor awarded him the key to the city. I think about that often. Since 2003 he’s lived in Los Angeles, has recorded a bunch of albums, and toured Iceland. Well … other places too.

Valerie June

I don’t pretend to understand her and I don’t listen to her albums. But I’ve seen her perform twice and she is the modern-day Nina Simone. Undefinable and undeniable.

Tom Russell

He celebrated his 68th birthday last March and has released 29 albums, two of which came just this year. The first was his tribute to his old friends Ian and Sylvia, and now he is out on tour supporting Folk Hotel, a collection of originals. Two shots here: Tom playing with Max De Bernardi “The Last Time I Saw Hank” at Knuckleheads Saloon in Kansas City, Missouri in September 2017. And while I’ve been enjoying both new albums, I also want to share the song that was my first introduction to Russell and remains my favorite.

And to those who passed…

Down that dark side of the street we’ve lost too many folks this past year. I’m not going to list them all here, but we’ll close it out with this … a tribute to them all.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

The Prairie Home Antidote For American Political Anxiety

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By the time this column is published, the last presidential debate will have either occurred or been cancelled, more women may or may not have come out to tell their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of a repulsive Republican nominee, Wikileaks will have posted information that indicates HRC is indeed a typical hack politician who says one thing to one group and something completely different to others, accusations will be made, lies will be told, and 92 percent of Americans will have already decided who they’ll vote for in less than three weeks.

If life was fair, we could just hit the the fast-forward button, race to the punch line, and be done with it all.

Whether you lean to the left or feel proud to be alt-right, everyone in our country is in the same boat: The U.S.S. Stressed Out.

While I think a solid argument could be made for dumping a strong dose of Xanax into the nation’s water supply, many humans find natural ways to soothe our souls and chill out when the going gets tough. Exercise, eating good food, hanging out with friends, dancing, taking nature walks, getting a massage, watching sporting events … you get the idea. And with 286,942,362 Americans currently connected to the internet, many are shopping, doing research, streaming films and music, engaging in meaningful dialogue on social media (yeah … I’m joking) and, of course, there’s always porn. Back in 2013 Google reported that there were more visits to porn sites than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. It’s huge!

But all this is just locker room banter — boy talk.

So lets get to the music.

Almost every Saturday night when I get off from work, I run to my car and turn on A Prairie Home Companion. Not one to actually sit still in front of the living room radio for two hours each week like they did back in the old days, my experience with Garrison Keillor and crew has always been more hit-and-miss. Fifteen minutes here, another five or ten there. Catch a comedy sketch, listen to a musical interlude. Over the years, I’ve read Keillor’s books, watched a lot of videos, loved the Robert Altman film enough to own it, and I have hours and hours of show snippets sitting in the digital jukebox that I liberally sprinkle into my playlists.

Last week, October 15 to be exact, was the official coming out party for Chris Thile as the new host of APHC. This is a great opportunity for Thile, but ever since Keillor announced his retirement, his departure has been mourned by many as the end of a grand American institution. I too have shared my own trepidation and despair on these pages as well. But surprise, surprise, surprise!

With the weight of the daily news cycle on my head and politics consuming my thoughts, it was with a low threshold of anticipation that I tuned into the show while driving home from work, and was confronted with the perfect antidote for my ballot box blues.

Making my way home, I hopped in and out of my car a few times — at the local Korean market for steamed fish and rice, a quick sprint through Trader Joe’s for uncured all-natural beef hot dogs, zucchini, and coffee, the local fluff and fold — and sweet music flowed in my ears every moment I was behind the wheel. Although it wouldn’t have been fair to expect that Thile would offer up the intellectual depth or comedic talents of Keillor, the applause coming through my car radio speakers sounded as if he won over the crowd at the Fitzgerald Theater with a stellar band and great guests. As you can hear for yourself, the show continued with the tradition of delivering the goods in American roots music.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression dot com. Because of space consideration I didn’t include a few other videos that I wanted to share, featuring Jack White, Margo Price and Lake Street Dive. And so now, here they are.