A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Guy's All-Star Shoe Band

The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band is led by A Prairie Home Companion music director Richard Dworsky. A keyboard master with an arsenal of ideas, he has worked with artists from Al Jarreau to Kristin Chenoweth to the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. His latest CD is So Near and Dear to Me (Prairie Home Productions).

Chet Atkins called Pat Donohue (guitar) one of the greatest finger pickers in the world today. And he writes songs too — recorded by Suzy Bogguss, Kenny Rogers and others. Freewayman (Bluesky Records) is the most recent of Pat's nine albums.

Gary Raynor (bass) has performed with the Count Basie band, Sammy Davis Jr. — with whom he toured for several years — and the Minnesota Klezmer Band. He teaches jazz bass at the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul.

J.T. Bates started playing drums when he was seven. By the time he was 15, he was sitting in with his dad's big band. Since then, he has backed up countless musicians, as well as working with his own bands — Fat Kid Wednesdays and Poor Line Condition.

Byron Berline

A three-time National Fiddle Champion, Byron Berline began playing fiddle at the age of five. Berline, an Oklahoma native, has played with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys and with the Dillards. He led the bands Country Gazette; Sundance; and a group called Berline, Crary, Hickman (BCH), with whom he played for nearly 15 years. He's recorded with an enormous list of stars, including Emmylou Harris, The Eagles, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones. For Fiddle & A Song, his Grammy-nominated 1995 album, Berline brought together in the studio bluegrass patriarchs Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. It was the first time in more than 50 years that the two had been in the studio together, and the result was the Grammy-nominated track "Sally Goodin." Berline has toured throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia, Northern Africa, and the South Pacific. After living in Los Angeles for more than two decades, Berline has now moved back to Oklahoma. At 8 p.m. tonight, Berline and Billy Joe Foster will perform in Guthrie at the Double Step Fiddle Shop & Music Hall, owned and run by Byron Berline.

Billy Joe Foster

Fiddler and Oklahoma native Billy Joe Foster last played on A Prairie Home Companion with the band Country Gazette. His father was an old-time fiddler, and Billy Joe received his first mandolin at age five and his first banjo before he was in his teens. In 1965, the Foster family moved to west Texas, where the music of Bob Wills and his band, the Texas Playboys, was all over the radio. In 1974, the family moved back to Oklahoma. Foster began playing bluegrass festivals and made some guest appearances at reunions of the Texas Playboys. In the late '80s, he played with Bill Monroe, and then began playing with Ricky Skaggs, with whom he played until 1995. Foster currently plays solo western-swing performances and has re-formed his '70s-era band, called Special Edition. A new recording featuring Billy Joe Foster and Special Edition is now in production.

Monica Taylor

Singer/songwriter Monica Taylor is a "red dirt girl," who grew up in the small community of Perkins, Oklahoma, near Stillwater. At Oklahoma State University, she honed her skills playing bluegrass and country music. After living in Colorado for a few years, she returned to the Sooner State. She was part of the band Wayfaring Strangers, and for a decade she worked with Patrick Williams as a duo called the Farm Couple. Her latest collaboration is the Cherokee Maidens, three women who sing Western swing repertoire. Monica's album Cimarron Valley Girl came out in 2006, and a new recording is in the works.

John Németh

Rising blues star John Németh — who makes his home in the San Francisco Bay area — started out in Boise, Idaho, singing in church. Now his vocals are steeped in the tradition of B.B. King, Ray Charles and Junior Parker. He is also a harmonica player of riveting intensity and virtuosity, and his decade-long career has found him performing at music festivals in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia. Németh's 2007 debut album is Magic Touch (Blind Pig).

Elvin Bishop

Growing up in Tulsa in the 1950s, guitarist Elvin Bishop could — if the conditions were just right — pick up Nashville radio station WLAC. He was captivated by the piercing harmonica sounds of Jimmy Reed coming over the airwaves. The blues cast a spell on him — one that has never lifted. He went off to college in Chicago and became a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. In 1968, he went solo, moved to the San Francisco area, and now after 45 years of playing the blues and twenty-some albums to his credit, he has just released The Blues Rolls On (Delta Groove Music).

Arlo Guthrie

Singer Arlo Guthrie's career began with the release of the epic Alice's Restaurant in 1967. Arlo, the son of the legendary Woody Guthrie, learned music from his dad and family friends such as Pete Seeger and Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly). He formed his own songwriting style that set him apart from other singer-songwriters during the late '60s. Guthrie's song "Coming into Los Angeles" is remembered for its popularity at Woodstock, and he followed with albums such as Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys, Amigo, and Outlasting the Blues. In the early '80s, he started his own record label, called Rising Son Records, which has re-released his old titles plus his mid-'80s recording, Someday, and a collection of his father's children's music called Woody's 20 Grow Big Songs. Earlier this year, Rising Son released Guthrie's album, Mystic Journey. His award-winning children's book, Mooses Come Walking, was illustrated by Alice M. Brock, best known as Alice of Alice's Restaurant.

Hot Club of Cowtown

You can't keep a good band down. Hot Club of Cowtown, the Austin, Texas-based hot jazz/Western swing trio that formed in the mid-1990s is back after a two-year hiatus — and they are still wowing fans wherever they go. Fiddler Elana James, guitarist Whit Smith and bassist Jake Erwin have taken their music worldwide and even did a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of the Caucasus, including Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan (the first American band to tour there). A retrospective album, The Best of the Hot Club of Cowtown (Shout! Factory Records), is just out, and a new studio CD of original material is slated for release in early 2009.