By Jenni Todd
Murray, KY – Media Release: Tickets Available for A Live Broadcast Performance of A Prairie Home Companion
Date: 10.14.11
Contact: Jenni Todd (jtodd14@murraystate.edu, 270-809-4748)
On Saturday, November 5, 2011, Murray State's CFSB Center hosts a national broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" featuring host Garrison Keillor's endearing monologue "The News from Lake Wobegon." Doors open at 4 p.m. The audience must be seated by 4:45 p.m. The broadcast goes live to nearly 4 million listeners on about 600 public radio stations across the nation starting at 5 p.m.
There are still good seats available at reasonable prices for the nostalgic, humorous, music-filled variety radio show at Ticketmaster.com,800-745-3000 or at the CFSB Center Box Office at Murray State University. MSU Students with ID receive a $5 discount with a two ticket maximum. The live broadcast continues from 5 to 7 p.m. The advance team for the show praised the CFSB Center's ambience and acoustics for the broadcast.
"A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor" is a rare breed on radio anywhere now. Weekly it presents a musical variety show with comedic and reflective interludes featuring special guest artists and an ensemble cast. In Murray, Mr. Keillor's guest artists are musicians who do not regularly perform together. What they have in common is playing with Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass Music. Eight of them were actually band members in Monroe's group, The Bluegrass Boys. Two of them performed with Mr. Monroe at various times during his six-decade long career in music.
The lineup features Roland White and Stuart Duncan, mandolins; Blake Williams and Bob Black, banjos; Bobby Hicks and Richard Greene, fiddles; Tom Ewing and Peter Rowan, guitars; Mark Hembree, bass; and Kathy Chiavola, vocals.
Writing for BluegrassToday.com, Richard Thompson calls "A Prairie Home Companion" a "universally popular radio show," and notes that vocalist Chiavola was a "great friend of Monroe."
In addition to this amazing line-up of bluegrass instrumentalists, Mr. Keillor comes to Murray for the show with several members of the regular ensemble heard on "A Prairie Home Companion" Saturday evenings on public radio stations across the nation. These include mouth-sound-effects wizard Fred Newman, actors Sue Scott and Tim Russell, pianist Rich Dworsky and guitarist Pat Donohue. WKMS broadcasts the show at 5 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. Sundays.
See the two schedules of all WKMS programming at www.wkms.org. The station's media services include 91.3 WKMS, Murray; WKMS HD-1 and All-Classical HD-2; 90.9 WKMD, Madisonville; 89.5 WKMT, Fulton; 99.5 Paris, TN; and All-Classical 92.5 Paducah and 101.5 Madisonville. The station also streams both WKMS HD-1 and HD-2 at www.wkms.org.