A Prairie Home Companion: December 18, 2004

Special Guests
Saturday, December 18, 2004

Boys of the Lough

They were the first of the full-time professional Celtic bands to make a name on the international scene. Since their first tour in 1967 the Boys have done fifty-four tours of the U.S., four of Australia and countless more of Europe and Asia. They've also released 18 albums, establishing a reputation for first-rate musicianship and technical brilliance; and at the same time have help to keep the centuries-old music of Ireland and Scotland close to its roots. They play, someone aptly wrote, "music that tastes of itself." An early review from a 1972 Rolling Stone put it about as well as it has been said since: ". . . and a quartet of young British instrumentalists and singers set the Saturday night crowd howling and dancing in the full fury of an August thunderstorm with Gaelic tunes played on fiddle, guitar, flute and bodhran."

Inga Swearingen

She won the Shure Jazz Voice Competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 2003 and returns this year to Prairie Home as a celebrity guest. She also sang at the Live Oak Music Fest near Santa Barbara again this summer, this time with her sister Britta, here tonight and with whom she recorded her CD, Learning How to Fly. She is within a few months of earning a Masters Degree in Choral Conducting from Florida State University in Tallahassee and has plans to record another album after graduation; get married in August, and then just see what happens.

John Niemann

He got started in music at the right time and place, and for the right reasons; he was in high school and there were girls there. He began with Leo Fender's gift to the world, the electric bass, and started a rock and roll band. In college he discovered acoustic music on the West Bank in Minneapolis and learned the guitar, fiddle and mandolin, eventually finding himself playing a 1920s Gibson mandocello in Peter Ostroushko's band, the Mando Boys. He played kick-butt fiddle for seven years in the Stoney Lonesome bluegrass band, did a number of guitar gigs with various honkytonk bands around the cities, and for three years was in "the house band at a place called Billy Bob's, or something," at Riverplace. After years spent as a road musician and working in construction, he has settled into the relatively quiet St Paul life of a finish carpenter. He keeps his music honed with jam sessions in the basement.