Deep River Blues from 2009

A classic broadcast from June 13, 2009, from the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. With special guests: Australian alt-country duo Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson, Chicago harmonica legend Howard Levy, acclaimed opera soprano Angela Brown, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Listen to the show.

We're in Cincinnati and it's good to be here
In a city of pork and a city of beer.
Old beer signs everywhere you walk:
Good Old Brucks, Brenner's XL Pilsener, John Hauck
Barbarossa, King Gambrinus, or Crown.
You eat you some pork hocks with leeks and garlic cloves, you need beer to wash it down.
Similarly, to go along with a pint of beer, you need more than a pretzel
You need pork meatloaf with brown gravy and spaetzle.
A big pork sandwich and something to drink,
Geisbauer, Bierbrauer, Linck.
Nothing chintzy
Here in Cincy.
Like it or not, Cincinnati was not vegetarian.
It went for pork shanks with bread dumplings and a pitcher of Bavarian.
No lemonade, no cranberry juice, no apple cider,
But a big mug of Weber's, Lackman, Jackson, Mohawk, Gerke, Burger, or Foss-Schneider.
And all of the pig was used, even the snout
To make bierwurst, mettwurst, bratwurst, piled high with sauerkraut.
Beers with distinguished names like Butcher & Weidmann and Windisch-Muhlhauser
To give a sense of dignity to the drunken carouser
City of suds and city of swine,
Some greasy goetta sausage and a glass of Christian Moerlein,
Or Little Kings cream ale
Beer by the bottle, the barrel, the hogshead, and the pail,
Golden brown glasses of beer with nice big heads
And Hudepohl-Schoenling, Cincinnati's finest, hudey — Hudey think gonna beat them Reds —
It was the national capital of beer.
In 1890, they produced a million barrels a year.
Old breweries along McMicken Avenue on the hill north of Liberty Street,
Making beer out of water, yeast, sugar, plenty of hops, and wheat.
Oh, in Cincinnati there was lots to do:
You had a Hudy and a pork cordon bleu.
Cincinnati was a regular culinary riot.
How sad to be on a diet.
What a terrible loss.
To miss out on the roast pork loin with beer sauce.
And it is politically incorrect
And you may object
To my saying so, but I suspect
Something joyful and boisterous and profane
Was lost when we decided to abstain.
A man sitting down to pork braised, roasted, fried, boiled, battered, with a glass upraised,
A man who is a little fried himself and his eyes are glazed.
That may have been the night he became your daddy
Here in Cincinnati.

More about our guest performers:

Kasey Chambers spent her childhood living in the family camper-van on the Nullarbor Plain, above the southern coast of Australia, where her father worked as a fox hunter. They had no radio or television; their father played country music to them on an acoustic guitar. They put together a family band and toured Australia as the Dead Ringers. Her solo career took off in 1999 with her first recording, called Captain, and since has taken her around the world and brought on acclaim, awards, and a major-label contracts. She resists, a little, being tagged as a country artist, but will allow that her music is “country enough.” Her 2018 release, Campfire, won Traditional Country Album of the Year at the Australian Country Music Awards.

Multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy is perhaps best known for developing a fully chromatic harmonica style on a standard 10-hole diatonic instrument. Anyone who's ever picked up a little Hohner Marine Band can appreciate the feat. The musical adventures of this Chicago-based Grammy winner include journeys into jazz, pop, rock, Latin, classical, folk, blues, country, and more. He has appeared on hundreds of recordings.

Billy Collins was twice appointed United States poet laureate and also served as New York State poet laureate. In 2004, he was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humor in poetry. The poems in Questions About Angels; Picnic, Lightning; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Nine Horses; The Trouble with Poetry; Ballistics, Musical Tables, and his other best-selling books have sparked a firestorm of interest in the art.

A collection of highlights from America's favorite live radio show, with over 85 tracks (five hours) of the finest performances from the vast archives of A Prairie Home Companion, including material from the 40th Anniversary celebration itself. The deepest dive into the archives of the radio show that welcomed over 10,000 musical guests to its stage over 40-plus years includes this duet featuring Jethro Burns and Chet Atkins, Get the 40th Anniversary Collection of CDs.

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