G

arrison Keillor’s voice is one of the most recognizable that one will ever hear. 

Getting a call from him jolted me back to that familiar baritone voice my family and I heard on car rides every Saturday night as Keillor welcomed us to his live broadcast of a Prarie Home Companion show on NPR: “Oh, hear that old piano from down the avenue…”

Back on the road, Keillor will be joined by his longtime musical director, Richard Dworsky, in the Event Gallery at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on Sunday, April 19.  

For 40 years Keillor wrote fiction and comedy, invented a town called Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, and transforming listeners to a small Midwestern town where his performing troupe delivered anecdotes, share limericks and lead an audience in a communal singalong. It was old-time radio that Keillor remembered hearing in Minnesota and that he always wanted to bring back and share.

You’ve taken recent falls while walking in the city. How are you feeling? 

Well, I’m feeling fine. I’m feeling my age, I’m almost 84 and my balance is not what it once was, for the obvious reasons. I’m married, so I’ve sort of been in assisted living. She keeps reminding me you’ve got to go out and do that, but I have urgent business. When you get to be 84 there are things that demand to be done. And you want them to be good. You don’t want to waste your time on something halfway. I’m trying to write a book about the perspective of being my grandmother’s age, which is an interesting stage of life.  

Can I call you a fellow New Yorker?

I always will be a Midwesterner. But living in New York, you are so aware of how you depend on other people. You go out the door, and you are always among people. They look out for each other. Which you will discover, should you trip on some piece of sidewalk that’s sticking up or some curb you didn’t notice and you come crashing down. And within four seconds, there are three people standing over you. They’re reaching down, they’re saying, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ And they make sure that you are. And you say, ‘Yes, yes, I’m okay. I’m fine, I’m fine, thank you.’ And you stand up. And they make sure that you are making eye contact. You are talking. You’re making sense. This is not so much the case out in freeway America. 

Do you consider yourself a frustrated singer. 

I love to sing, especially in a duet with a woman. Singing harmony to a soprano is my idea of a good time. I don’t do lounge music. I never cared for it. I grew up in the 50s just as black music was coming into commercial radio in Minnesota. You could hear R&B, and you could hear Little Richard and that was it for me. 

When you start writing a story do you know how it will end? 

I don’t read stories to an audience. I think they would take that as an insult. They want me to look at them and talk to them. It works best if I tell a true story. The audience can smell fiction. I don’t count on my being able to fool them. But when you get to be 84, you do have some stories, mostly about your own embarrassment and the times you’ve fallen on your face. 

Is that because people can relate to falling on their faces? 

I don’t know their motive. I tell a story back in 1985 when I was on a successful book tour out west and decided to stop at Sundance and rent a cabin. It was February. I went to my cabin. It was a beautiful place up in the mountains. I saw there was a hot tub on a deck out back. There was snow on the deck, but the hot tub was steaming. On an impulse I took off all my clothes, and I went out the door. And I heard the door shut and I could hear it lock. And people like that. The famous man, naked in the snow, gets into the hot tub and waits for help to arrive and help does not arrive. And now he has to go find somebody. 

Was the idea for A Prairie Home Companion always on your mind? 

It was the sort of show that I heard as a child, but which had so passed out of currency by 1973. That it seemed like an innovation. And that’s a real trick if you’re so lucky. To imitate something you loved when you were little. My family was evangelical and they refused to get a TV. Because that was Hollywood. And so, TV had no impact on me whatsoever. It still doesn’t. It just is flat to me. Whereas the spoken word has been powerful to me since I was a child and listened to my aunts tell stories. They’d come to visit on Saturday night, talking always family history. And nobody would interrupt them.  

Playing where Woodstock took place, do you          consider its historical significance?  

It was jubilation, this communal experience which I think was the rock and roll that was celebrated at Woodstock. It was generational music. And it was not exclusive. The music that I loved was music that you could remember the words. Paul Simon wrote very memorable songs. The Beatles, of course did. Van Morrison, the Dead and the Rolling Stones. If I stood up in front of that audience at Bethel Woods, and I just started singing, ‘When she was just 17, if you know what I mean,’ people would know the words. ‘Do you remember when we used to sing shalalala’ People would be there. The words are in their heads, so it becomes communal. And that’s the beauty of it, in the age in which people go around with earbuds and headphones. They are in their private space. You could not give a party today, put 50 of your friends in a room, and expect that you could find a song that they would all dance to. 

Could your stories about human nature take place if they weren’t in Lake Wobegon?    

I could not create a location in the Bronx. People would know that it was artificial. I created Lake Wobegon so that I could have a serial every Saturday, and I would say, ‘It’s been a quiet week,’ and it would not need a continuous narrative line. There would not need to be a single story, a hero, you know, sidekick, a love interest. It would not need to have these characters making progress towards something in the future. It would simply be the ordinary events of the week. And you could talk about any one of maybe 30 different characters that the audience would have some recollection of them. It would have an air of familiarity about it. And there would be joke characters like the Norwegian bachelor farmers, there would be clergy. You would observe religious holidays, national holidays. You would observe the Midwestern seasons. There would be an air of reality to it. But I can put myself in the story. I can be a character and also an observer, which is a rare thing to be narrator and persona. That’s the only way I could keep that thing going for 40 some years, you know.

Why can’t you do it now?

I don’t do Lake Wobegon anymore because I’ve moved to New York. I mean, I can sort of refer to it, but I don’t do the scripted show, the characters, Guy Noir, Dusty and Lefty, the Cowboys. I mostly do a sort of stand-up routine. But with this message about being an octogenarian, you discover you are not a solo character. You are very dependent on other people. I don’t want to get political because other people do it much better. But I want to be a seriously funny show. That’s what I try to do. 

You said that you couldn’t pay me enough to be young again. But what if you could go back with the knowledge of an octogenarian? 

Oh, wow, that’s a great question. I would go back if I could just be braver. And that I should be grateful. I wasted time, especially as a teenager and in my early 20s, trying to be unique and wanting to stand out from other people. I think that when I left my evangelical church when I was 20, that was a brave move. I wanted to see the world, but I hesitated. My wife came to New York when she was 16. And I did not have her bravery when I was 16 or when I was 26. I stayed in a comfortable corner too long. And I wish I had ventured out. I have no idea what would have happened. All I can say is that I was fabulously lucky. You look back and see three things that happened, ding, ding, ding. And there you are. You have this wonderful situation that you did not earn. That’s the truth. You just need to be grateful for it. 

Garrison Keillor will be at Bethel Woods on Sunday, April 19 at 8 p.m. A pre-show dinner will be held at 5 p.m. Tickets and more information at www.bethelwoodscenter.org.