Wobegon Wisdom
Garrison Keillor Brings Cheerfulness to Arizona Musicfest
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of Garrison Keillor
At 83, Garrison Keillor wants you to sing — not because it’s easy, but because you remember how.
“My generation, I believe, may be the last that truly knows the words,” Keillor says from his home in New York, his voice carrying that familiar cadence — unhurried, wry, altogether Midwestern. “So I can hum a note and start singing ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,’ and they’ll join in. They may not have sung it since fourth grade, but they still remember.”
On Jan. 18, the beloved storyteller will take the stage in North Scottsdale as part of Arizona Musicfest for an evening built around a deceptively simple proposition: happiness may depend on circumstances, but cheerfulness is a choice.
What unfolds over two hours at La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church will be part standup, part memoir, part hymnal — a carefully sequenced performance that moves from sung sonnets and duets to classic poems, jokes, and the iconic “News from Lake Wobegon” monologue, concluding with an unamplified, a cappella sing-along that transforms audience members into co-creators of communal memory.
“I’m very excited about bringing Garrison to Arizona Musicfest,” says Allan Naplan, the concert series’ executive and producing director. “While I knew that Garrison’s celebrity and his signature Midwest sensibility would resonate with so many of our Musicfest patrons, I was equally intrigued by the chance to present an evening that weaves together his prolific humor and insightful essays with songs and communal singing.”
Naplan pauses, warming to his subject.
“Just like his ‘Prairie Home Companion’ broadcasts, I have no doubt he’ll make everyone feel as though we’re gathered in his living room, sharing warm Powdermilk biscuits while he spins a tale of Lake Wobegon.”
A Life in Stories
Keillor’s relationship with cheerfulness wasn’t always automatic. The architect of Lake Wobegon — that fictional Minnesota town “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average” — spent decades so consumed by the weekly demands of “A Prairie Home Companion” that life and work blurred into a single, perpetual deadline.
“Throughout all those years working on ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ I was so focused on the job that I’m not sure I truly had a life outside of it,” Keillor admits.
But as that chapter closed and he fell in love with his current wife, something shifted.
“I came to understand that cheerfulness is something you choose,” he says. “No matter your circumstances, you can choose to be hopeful. When you do, it becomes possible to discover wonder — to find a kind of joy, because there’s something extraordinary in every single day if you’re open to it.”
That revelation — arrived at through misadventures, wrong turns, and eventually, clarity — now anchors his touring shows and recent writing. His mother, he recalls, believed it wholeheartedly.
“She was adamantly opposed to complaining,” Keillor says. “She would remind us that other children would be happy to have what we had.”
He grew up in a fundamentalist family of six children in Minneapolis — no money for extras, but security in abundance. Fiction was forbidden. Comedy wasn’t encouraged. Yet somehow, misbehavior became his education.
“I recall, as a little kid in Minneapolis, sneaking coins from my mother’s change jar in the kitchen, then heading down to a luncheonette to order a cheeseburger — back when a cheeseburger cost 20 cents. The cook brought it out, but when he set the plate down, I saw there was no cheese. So I said, ‘But I wanted cheese.’ And just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder.”
It was his father. He pulled young Garrison away. The boy protested: “But I paid for it.” His father took him home.
“My mother told him to punish me, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it,” Keillor recalls.
His parents shared the story with his aunts, who found it highly amusing — their nephew had told his father “But I paid for it,” even though he had stolen the money.
“They laughed at the story,” Keillor says. “And that’s when I realized misbehavior could be funny — perhaps even funnier than being dutiful.”
The revelation stuck. By 10th grade, when his English teacher handed him a copy of “The New Yorker,” he’d found his calling.
“I read A.J. Liebling and thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ And that’s what I’ve done,” he says. “It’s what I’m still doing — even more engaged now than when I was young. I’m still working to do good work.”
Knowing the Words
What Arizona Musicfest audiences will witness is a format honed over hundreds of dates, alternating attention and release, monologue and music, recollection and participation:
A stand-up prologue on cheerfulness, aging and comic inconvenience, using Keillor’s signature slow-burn cadence to prime the room for listening — and singing.
Sung sonnets — musical settings of short verse on prayer, longevity and love — performed with the luminous vocalist Heather Masse, familiar from “A Prairie Home Companion.” Their duets span Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Greg Brown, Mark Knopfler and Ann Reed, selected for narrative heft and companionable lyricism.
Instrumental interludes from Richard Dworsky, Keillor’s longtime music director and pianist, whose chamber-like responsiveness shapes the evening’s pacing and mood.
An extended medley of classic poems and jokes — literate, playful, warmly democratic. Listeners hear canonical verse alongside kitchen-table humor.
The News from Lake Wobegon, updated but faithful to form: a weekly chronicle interlacing recent indignities and ancient rites with deadpan wonder.
And finally, the closing sing-along — unamplified voices in shared repertoire, ending the evening as communal ritual rather than celebrity showcase.
He may start with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” perhaps move to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — even the challenging second verse: “I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps.”
He’ll offer hymns like “How Great Thou Art,” Beatles songs like “In My Life,” Western standards like “Red River Valley” and “I Ride an Old Paint,” and spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
“Experiencing a cappella singing is rare nowadays, and it’s deeply moving to me,” Keillor says. “It’s mysterious. There’s no piano or organ driving them — just voices singing, often in beautiful harmony: two, three, sometimes even four parts. It’s incredibly powerful.”
He wouldn’t hesitate to have them sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“People don’t sing it at ballgames anymore, at least not that I’ve noticed — maybe an organ will play it, but the crowd doesn’t join in. I think it’s a song that deserves to be sung.”
A Cultural Imprint
Keillor’s cultural imprint is double-stranded: a literary voice and a broadcast architecture. “A Prairie Home Companion,” which debuted in 1974, reimagined the live variety format for late 20th century public media — bluegrass and gospel sets, sketch comedy, fake advertisements, and culminating Lake Wobegon monologues — becoming a repository of humor that resisted both irony and partisanship, even as it smuggled in sharp observations about community life.
In print, Keillor produced memoir, novels, story collections, and verse — from “Lake Wobegon Days” to “That Time of Year” to recent projects like “Cheerfulness” and “Brisk Verse” — treating small-town rituals, Protestant eccentricities, and Midwestern stoicism with gentle satire and stylistic polish. The literary Lake Wobegon functions like a map of moral weather, a theater of understatement where potlucks and school board dramas reveal the odd dignity of restraint.
“I’ve always appreciated how Garrison championed a wide array of musical genres — from bluegrass and opera to klezmer and jazz, often in consecutive broadcasts,” Naplan says. “He was not only an exceptional host but also an advocate for each artist and musical style. It’s a spirit that parallels the way Musicfest celebrates such a broad and diverse range of musical offerings.”
Recent anniversary tours — marking 50 years of “A Prairie Home Companion” — have revived character sketches like Guy Noir and Lives of the Cowboys, spoof ads for Powdermilk Biscuits and the Ketchup Advisory Board, reaffirming the format’s live-wire charm with original cast members and sound-effects wizard Fred Newman.
What endures is technique: a voice that takes time, notices neighbors and puts audience members on the same side of the joke.
The Art of Searching
For Keillor, storytelling isn’t calculation — it’s discovery.
“When I tell stories to an audience, my goal is always to keep them engaged — I can usually sense if I’m succeeding, or if I’m beginning to lose them,” he says.
But the deeper purpose isn’t merely to hold attention.
“Ultimately, I believe that telling a story is an act of searching — not just for the listener, but for yourself,” Keillor says. “It’s not a cold-blooded technique or a calculated plot designed to impress. You want the story to surprise you, as much as your audience.”
He compares it to walking a tightrope.
“You need to keep moving forward into the unknown, even when it feels precarious and you fear you might lose your balance. That’s where fiction comes in — it’s meant to surprise even the person telling it.”
These days, he’s working on an autobiographical book, mining memory for stories he wishes he’d asked his elders about when they were still alive.
“I regret not inquiring with my parents, aunts and uncles about their childhoods, because once they’re gone, there’s no way to recover those stories,” he says.
He thinks often of his parents’ marriage — begun under scandalous circumstances when his father got his mother pregnant before the wedding.
“The shame of my father getting my mother pregnant before marriage, I think, made them cherish each other all the more for more than 60 years,” Keillor says.
That security — the knowledge of being cared for, of having enough — shaped his understanding of gratitude long before he could articulate it.
“We didn’t have much money, but there was never any worry about having enough to eat or something to wear,” he says.
A Midwesterner in the Desert
Keillor hasn’t spent much time in Arizona. He admits the desert has always seemed like unfamiliar territory.
“I come from a prairie state, where there’s typically enough rainfall to keep things fairly lush throughout the summer,” he says. “So deserts — and mountainous regions, for that matter — have never really felt like home.”
He describes himself, without apology, as a small-town Minnesotan — even now, living in New York because his wife prefers it.
“I’ll always be a small-town Minnesotan,” he says.
Yet he’s aware of the generational divide that makes every audience an uncertainty.
“When we step out to meet an audience, we’re never entirely certain what awaits us,” Keillor says. “There comes a point in life when you realize you’re simply out of date.”
He worries about performing for college students, whose generation feels “so far removed” from his own. In New York, he sees school buses arriving from New Jersey, half the children glued to their phones as they enter a city filled with skyscrapers, bustling crowds and flashing lights.
“Yet, they’re focused on texting rather than the world around them,” he says. “I wonder if their environment holds any real attraction compared with the screens in their hands.”
He shrugs philosophically.
“But it’s not something I can change. I come from the rock ‘n’ roll generation — Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the rest. The music young people listen to now is completely foreign to me.”
Still, he shows up. He keeps working. At 83, Paul McCartney is still performing, “doing his best,” Keillor notes — though that’s not something he aspires to emulate.
What he does aspire to: leaving audiences with a sense of how much they carry inside, waiting to be recalled.
“I expect the Arizona audience will know these tunes,” Keillor says. “I want to leave them with a sense of just how much they carry inside, waiting to be recalled.”
Garrison Keillor at 83
Sunday, Jan. 18 // 7:30 p.m. // La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church // 6300 E. Bell Road, Scottsdale // $66+ // 480-422-8449 // azmusicfest.org