Radio royalty Garrison Keillor strode onstage at the Ruth Eckerd Hall on Monday night and burst into song. There was no lead-in, wind-up, or introduction. For the next five minutes he unreeled a spontaneous a capella ballad about life, death, and immortality, right off the top of his scruffy-haired head: it was an impressive feat.
But his next trick was even more compelling: Without losing the tune he asked his audience to join him in four-part harmony, and then led a version of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Accounting for the terminally shy, about a thousand voices joined in. The sound was stupendous. When it ended people started clapping, maybe surprised at themselves.
Keillor has an obvious love for the sound of the audience; it's own personal pipe-organ. Really, he has an obvious love for the whole process of stagecraft, whether singing or storytelling or standup comedy. He has to love it: Only a near-obsession could've kept the man grinding away on "A Prairie Home Companion" for its four-decade run. He retired earlier this year and left youngish mandolinist Chris Thile in his place — but really, what does retirement mean when the man was onstage in Clearwater on a December night, clearly hard at work?
Much of Keillor's two-hour set revolved around the fear of aging out, the brass ring, becoming obsolete. This is understandable. The man is 74, and reports that he began to feel old recently. But from a few dozen rows up, he had me fooled by a couple of decades. His overall health appears strong, toned by years of rambling around stages and belting bluegrass. His rumpled black suit and scraggly hair were those of an English professor just starting on the tenure track. He wore tangerine Sauconys and red socks, for God's sake — the man was borderline hip.
Surely Keillor is holding up better than his exact contemporary and fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan. He told an offhand story about knowing Dylan at the University of Minnesota, even said they pledged the same fraternity; this reporter has been unable to find evidence to confirm the claim, but that's unimportant. Surely Keillor, like Dylan, knows what it is like to be an over-awarded cultural icon.
On receiving Lifetime Achievement awards, Keillor said, "It's embarrassing…it means you've failed to offend as many people as you should have." It seems that he would know. It was always easy to jab "A Prairie Home Companion" as being too comforting, too nostalgic, too…companionable? But if that is really your hangup, Keillor's performance on Monday night may have changed your mind. He skewed away from radio skits and Powdermilk Biscuits, and closer to his daily NPR snippet "The Writer's Almanac" and the important work he has done for poetry throughout the years. Partway through a Lake Wobegon skit, he broke seamlessly into a full recitation of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29". The importance of literature, and reciting literature, was never far from the surface.
A theme of the night was Keillor's musing that he is "the last of the line" — a feeling shared by old people everywhere, that they are the endpoint of a cultural inheritance that will pass away with them. This fear is usually overblown, but it's hard not to feel that in Keillor's case it may be true. Who else today could swim from a dissection of the Trump presidency to a Shakespeare sonnet to memories of a mid-century Minnesota farmhouse? But on Monday night, it was no time to be mourning anything. Our host wore tangerine Sauconys, red socks and led us in a beautiful version of "Silent Night."
Read Cathy Salustri's interview with Garrison Keillor.
This article appears in Dec 8-15, 2016.