Off the Air

A collection of press clippings, special projects or appearances including Garrison Keillor.

Summer Love Tour: East Bound and Down

September 10, 2011

PHC staffer Ella Schovanec is on the Summer Love Tour with Garrison, Fred Newman, Andra Suchy, Heather Masse, Sara Watkins, and The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band and will update us periodically from the road.

Our Summer Love Tour brought us to Tuscaloosa, Alabama on Friday, an antebellum beauty. We knew we were in the heart of Dixie, surrounded as we were by southern hospitality: sweet potato pie, bacon-wrapped steak, and gravy as a condiment at every meal.

The Tuscaloosa Amphitheater is right next to a huge, dark M&O wooden train trestle. It was built in 1898 and looked mighty rickety to our eyes, but the locals assured us that freight trains still crossed it daily. But the only train we heard Friday night was coming from our sound effects man, Fred Newman. Garrison and Sara Watkins sang some powerful duets under a nearly full corn moon, and Sara joined Richard Kriehn for a fiddle medley that fired up the chilly night. Almost Fall, the evening air has a real bite to it, but Indian summer lingers on and we have Chattanooga, Tennessee ahead of us.

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