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Special Guests
Saturday, March 27, 2004
John Koerner was born in Rochester, New York, and enrolled in the University of Minnesota's engineering program in 1956. However, two years later he decided he would rather be a student of the folk scene, so with a borrowed guitar and a Burl Ives songbook, he began what has become a 40-year journey through American country blues and folk music. Koerner's musical career has taken him to stages all over Europe and North America as a solo artist and with a variety of partners. He has released several albums, his most recent being Raised by Humans in 1992, and has contributed to many artistic projects like the Redhouse tribute recording, A Nod to Bob, released in April 2001 for Bob Dylan's 60th birthday. Koerner has also made appearances on National Public Radio's Morning Edition and Weekend Edition, and he was featured in the PBS Educational Series River of Song, in Part 1 (of 4) in 1999.
Mike Rossetto is a solo entertainer performing under the assumed name of Spaghetti Western. Mike is 24 years old, a first-generation American. His goal is to fuse European folk songs with American bluegrass. His parents came over from Italy—his father from a small town near Turino, and his mother, a Sicilian, from the town of Portocello in Salerno. Mike graduated from the University of Minnesota a couple of years ago with an American Studies degree. He wrote his thesis on the music in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. He got to work with Mr. Rogers and his staff while writing the thesis. Mr. Rogers had a live improvised jazz ensemble during the show, and Mike's argument was that the music acted as another character in the show. He's lately been playing as a one-man band and uses a sampling device to loop instrument over instrument to build a massive soundscape. For the Rhubarb Show, he wanted to fill his sound out with live performers. Tonight he is joined by Nicholas Lemme, Travis Even, and Denise Guelker.
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In Garrison Keillor's latest book, Lake Wobegon native Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her — he's been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussie Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Colosseum...
It's a story of Wogegonians in a strange land, telling stories of kinship and self-revelation — all delivered with Keillor's trademark humor.
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From Garrison Keillor:
“When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state’ for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude.”
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