A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Kate Rusby

KATE RUSBY is carrying a heavy weight of praise lately; the Daily Telegraph called her "the brightest light in English folk music," and the BBC said she was "One of the ten top folk voices of the century." She's bearing up well under all the fine words, maintaining a sense of humor and still singing "heart-stopping ballads about death, destruction, jealousy, unrequited love, drowning," which she calls "Castle knocking down songs."

She has three albums out on Pure Records, her family's company; Sleepless, Hourglass and Little Lights. They are selling "astonishingly well," as they say, not only over there but over here as well. And she is getting airplay on mainstream radio; and even if she's just past the point of being a rising star, she is apparently still approachable enough for complete strangers to come up to her on the street and say things like: "I hate folk music, but I love YOU."

For more information, see: http://www.katerusby.com or http://www.compassrecords.com.

Fiddlers 4: Michael Doucet, Darol Anger, Rushad Eggleston and Bruce Molsky

FIDDLERS 4 began as an informal jam session after a Fiddle Tunes Festival in Port Townsend, Washington, among Michael Doucet, Darol Anger, and Bruce Molsky. Things went well and they reunited later that summer for an intense two-day session in Colorado, along with cellist Rushad Eggleston.

The album that resulted might have been called, in the current understated vernacular, Monster Fiddle Bash, but they are okay with the modest Fiddlers 4; on Compass Records. Michael Doucet brings the pepper intensity of his double-Grammy band Beausoleil; Darol Anger the dazzling weld of jazz and bluegrass from the Turtle Island String Quartet; Bruce Molsky, whom they like to call "the Rembrandt of Appalachian Fiddling," provides the old time high lonesome drive; and all of it held together by the talented and innovative Eggleston, a newly minted pro who, it is said, "has already done things on the cello nobody's ever done before." He is the first string student ever given a full scholarship at the Berklee School of Music.

The music has been called cross-cultural; but at the same time it is, pure and simple, American fiddle; in all its spirit and imagination.

For more information: see http://www.rosebudus.com/Fiddlers4/ or http://www.compassrecords.com.

Billy Collins

Ladies and gentlemen, BILLY COLLINS, Poet Laureate of the United States. That's it. It's all one would have to say by way of introduction, no matter what the event.

But we add a few bibliographical bits here, not so much to polish the apple as to provide the backdrop: His poems have been published in The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, Harper's and many others. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and a New York Library Literary Lion. Questions About Angels was a winner of the National Poetry Series publication prize; The Art of Drowning is his fifth book of poetry. He is professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He lives in Somers, New York.

John Updike said: "Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."

For more information, see: http://www.bigsnap.com/billy.html