A Prairie Home Companion: November 8, 2003

Special Guests
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Richard Dworsky is the music director for The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band and a regular on APHC since 1986. He has been a studio musician for 30 years and has worked with the Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis, singer Al Jarreau, Kristin Chenoweth, the Hopeful Gospel Quartet, and has recorded on the Windham Hill label. His latest CD is So Near and Dear to Me (Prairie Home Productions, LLP).

Robin and Linda Williams have been making music together since 1973. They have appeared on The Grand Ole Opry, Austin City Limits, All Things Considered, and numerous editions of A Prairie Home Companion. They have recorded numerous albums and have performed at dozens of folk festivals across North America. As songwriters, their work has been recorded by such artists as Tom T. Hall, Holly Near, Kathy Mattea, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Robin & Linda's debut CD for Red House Records will be on the streets in mid-February of 2004. Special guests on the CD include Iris DeMent, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sissy Spacek, and her daughter Schyler Fisk.

Mountain Heart, formed two years ago, won the International Bluegrass Music Association's (IBMA) prestigious Emerging Artist of the Year award even before releasing its first album. A succession of nominations and awards has followed. With Steve Gulley on guitar and lead vocal, Adam Steffey on mandolin, fiddler Jim Van Cleve, bassist Jason Moore, Barry Abernathy on banjo, and Clay Jones on guitar, the group is equally proficient in traditional bluegrass and bluegrass gospel. The band's third and most recent release, No Other Way, is its first on Skaggs Family Records.

Mike Seeger is a five-time Grammy nominee who has devoted his life to singing and playing music from True Vine (music made by American southerners before the media age). At age five Mike learned the old ballad "Barbara Allen" from his musicologist/composer parents. Soon he was listening to and learning from their collection of early documentary recordings. He began playing instruments in his late teens, learning first from nearby musicians such as his close friend Elizabeth Cotten, and later seeking out other master stylists like guitarist Maybelle Carter, banjoists Dock Boggs and Cousin Emmy, and autoharpist Kilby Snow. As a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike played an integral role in helping to revive interest in a variety of traditional musics, now played by thousands of young musicians across the country. Since his first recordings with the Ramblers in the late 1950s, Mike has gone on to record almost 40 albums, both solo and with others.