Boohers picked for 'Prairie Home'

The Booher Family will perform for a national radio audience. Photo provided

Dolores Booher hung up the phone, jumped in the air and gasped with excitement. She'd just been informed her four youngest children were selected to perform live for millions of listeners on National Public Radio.

Brendan, 22, fiddle; Meriwyn, 26, guitar; Gabe, 20, guitar; and Ben, 24, bass, will perform and sing three to four old-school, Western-style songs on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" -- a 29-year-old, Minnesota-based, weekly radio show that travels from state to state to broadcast various artists to its approximate 3.9 million listeners.

In its first appearance in Central Oregon the show will be aired on NPR at 3 p.m. on Saturday from the Les Schwab Ampitheater in Bend.

Given the show's popularity, public tickets for the 350-seat venue sold out before June 6, when a representative of the show invited the Booher family to perform, Dolores Booher said. Dolores and her husband Mike received the last two complimentary tickets.

Dolores Booher said she has admired Keillor's various music shows over years of listening to "A Prairie Home Companion" and watching him perform with gospel and Western singing groups on television. Booher read about the show coming to Oregon and mailed in two of the Boohers' (The Diamond B Wranglers) albums to the show about six weeks prior to the happy phone call.

The four siblings, however, appear to be anticipating their first performance before such a large audience with a trusting ease and a look upward to their Lord.

"It's another bookmark on the road to success," joked Brendan Booher, with the child-like humor and whole-hearted laughter characteristic of the Booher siblings. Then, seriously, he said, "If I get on stage I might be nervous, but I'm not right now. Performing and being on stage is like second nature and fun because we get to share the musical gifts that the Lord has abundantly blessed us with so that He would receive glory in it all."

Keillor's three-hour show will also feature special guests Jearlyn Steele, a gospel singer of "The Steeles" of Indiana, and Howard Levy, a world-renowned, grammy-award winning harmonica player who has performed in two guest appearances on "A Prairie Home Companion."

Neighbors know various Boohers as owners of Papandrea's Pizza, Espresso Junction, and the Diamond B Chuckwagon, which hosts the four youngest performing five nights a week in a cowboy-style supper show in Tumalo.

The Boohers presence on national radio is likely to sky-rocket their business at the Chuckwagon, Dolores Booher said.

"Anytime anything happens with the public, we get a mushroom of business for six weeks," she said. "This time it should hold because the broadcast will reach people from all over the nation who will come to Central Oregon to vacation."

The Boohers were raised on an 18-acre farm in Yoncalla, Oregon, in what they call a simple life -- one characterized by home schooling, no TV, Bible reading, quality family time and constant music. The family moved to Sisters and opened the Chuckwagon in July 1998.

Having opened their first business, the family struggled through their first year just selling enough dinners to pay the bills, Dolores Booher said. The next year, she said they earned enough to pay the bills and to pay each of the performers a base salary. Notwithstanding a setback last year, business at the Chuckwagon has slowly increased each year to average about 50-60 summertime guests in the 160-seat show, Dolores Booher said.

Their vision: to pack out the show regularly for two consecutive years, Meriwyn Booher said.

That kind of business would give the Boohers enough money to purchase a 400-seat stage in a log building, Meriwyn Booher said. Meriwyn is hoping coverage from the radio show will boom business and help make that dream possible.

"Then we won't have to travel as much and we can live here and lead fairly normal lives," Meriwyn said. "We won't have to 'make it' in the professional music world because that can be a very rough road and because it creates pride and I've seen many families split apart because of it...

"People keep asking me, 'You feel like you're famous?' because we'll be on the national radio... but my music is not about being famous, it's about sharing what we have to encourage others... and I think the Lord has given me grace in that."