This Garrison Keillor CD, Gospel Birds is yet another HighBridge Audio anthology of News From Lake Wobegon as heard on Prairie Home Companion.

Like most Highbridge Audio CD sets, the packaging shows Keillor is an important part of their business. The stories on Gospel Birds are some of the best Keillor has ever told and definitely better than what we have heard in the last couple of years or so as News From Lake Wobegone.

Aside from a fairly weak entry, Sylvester Krueger’s desk, a somewhat interesting  story about Garrison Keillor finding a name carved on a school desk and wondering what happened to that person, the other News From Lake Wobegon stories are quite funny and interesting. Babe Ruth Visits Lake Wobegon  is exactly about that but also about a father who has drilled his nine sons in the fine art of baseball and the confrontation between the father and Babe Ruth during a whistle stop the Bambino made in Lake Wobegon. The Tollerud’s Korean Baby is about the Tollerud clan (they are many) going to the airport to welcome the latest addition to the family. Cynics would say this story shows how ethnocentric and white-bread Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion can be as the Korean child in question has never been heard from again. Gospel Birds, Vol. 1 mp3 download at Amazon

A Day at the Circus With Mazumbo, a funny Lake Wobegon serves as a closer to a previous story on Garrison Keillor’s Gospel Birds: Mammoth Concert Tickets. Mammoth Concert Tickets is about one of the kids from Lake Wobegon waiting outside a Minneapolis concert hall for concert tickets and being taken for a patsy by his friends. This story ends without an appropriate ending (a feature of many recent Lake Wobegon stories) when the mother thinks about destroying the tickets. The Mazumbo story ends that mystery.Gospel Birds, Vol. 2 mp3 download at Amazon

Bruno the Fishing Dog is the original version of the story about Lake Wobegon’s only fish-catching dog. Garrison Keillor has revived this old chestnut so often I am starting to hope Bruno chokes on a fish bone one day. Still, the original is a funny story. Pastor Ingqvist’s Trip to Orlando is exactly about that and is one of the funny Pastor Ingqvist stories.Gospel Birds, Vol. 3 mp3 download at Amazon

If, as I have, you have grown jaded by Garrison Keillor’s new personal soapbox version of Prairie Home Companion, get Gospel Birds. It will take you to a kindler, gentler time in Lake Wobegon. Click here for our Garrison Keillor page

Gospel Birds and Other Stories from Lake Wobegon
Garrison Keillor
A Prairie Home Companion CD
HighBridge Audio

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