A Prairie Home Companion: December 6, 2003

Special Guests
Saturday, December 6, 2003

Randy Newman is one of America's greatest singer-songwriters and film composers. He was born to a musical family in 1943, and became a professional songwriter seventeen years later. In 1968 he released Randy Newman, the first of many acclaimed albums. He is known as a pop singer for acerbic hits like "Short People," "I Love L.A.," and "It's Money that Matters," and as a composer of the scores for dozens of films, including Ragtime, The Natural, Forrest Gump, Pleasantville, and Seabiscuit. In 2002, he won an Academy Award for the song "If I Didn't Have You" from Monsters, Inc. He has also written a full-length musical based on Faust, which premiered in 1996. Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman was released as a 4-CD career retrospective in 1998. His most recent recording is The Randy Newman Songbook, Volume 1, featuring solo vocal/piano performances of eighteen of his songs.

Boys of the Lough, originally formed as a trio in 1967, was the first full-time professional Celtic band to achieve international prominence. Their music combines elements from the rich traditions of Scottish and Irish Music. Over the course of more than three and a half decades, and through lineup changes that have included over a dozen musicians, Boys of the Lough have strictly adhered to traditional instrumentation and vocals, creating "music that tastes of itself."

Singer-guitarist Geoff Muldaur emerged from the folk, blues, and folk-rock scenes of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Woodstock, New York. Muldaur was a founding member of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in the 1960s, and also collaborated with such artists as Paul Butterfield, Bonnie Raitt, Jerry Garcia, and his then-wife Maria Muldaur. He has toured England, Ireland, and Germany, and has appeared at Lincoln Center, London's Royal Festival Hall, and many folk and blues festivals around the world. Muldaur's current album is entitled Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Beiderbecke.