DATE: Saturday, May 10, 1997                TAG: 9705090063

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  141 lines

POPULAR "COMPANION" REINFORCES WONDERS OF HUMAN SOUND EFFECTS

WHEN TOM KEITH was a kid growing up in St. Paul, Minn., he played cowboys and Indians. He'd whoop and holler, go bang-bang and whinny like a horse.

To his family's astonishment, Keith now simulates gunfire, critters and a host of everyday incidents for a living.

The sound-effects wizard stands up on stage most Saturday nights as an active participant in ``A Prairie Home Companion,'' a live radio show aired on 400 public radio stations nationwide.

Tonight, host Garrison Keillor is broadcasting his old-timey radio show from Norfolk's Chrysler Hall. ``A Prairie Home Companion'' will air live from 6 to 8 p.m. Although the homespun variety show's local appearance has been sold out for several months, those without tickets can listen in on WHRV (89.5 FM).

The show's guests include musicians associated with Virginia - Portsmouth native and rhythm and blues singer Ruth Brown; Norfolk-reared Rob Fisher, a celebrated Broadway music director; and Mike Seeger of Lexington, Va., a leading figure in old-time music who plays a dozen instruments.

Besides the all-American music characteristic of Keillor's show, its two million listeners will absorb the quintessential storyteller's weekly report on mythical Lake Wobegon, Minn., and hear a few skits played out.

The skits are where Keith really shines. What the folks at home can't see is Keith on stage before his table of props - rattling, hitting, breaking and bending things to produce particular sounds.

He's like a percussionist, performing on cue in the context of a Keillor tale.

Those in the audience at Chrysler Hall may be struck dumb to see Keith rustle cellophane and wax paper to recreate the sound of crackling fire. Their jaws will drop as they watch him simulate a lawn sprinkler with his mouth.

Pfffft. Pfffft. Pfffft.

Meanwhile, folks from Hoboken to Hannibal will lean forward on their couches to hear Keith crunch cornstarch, faking the sound of a Minnesotan slogging through snow.

He's shopped in thrift stores, seeking old-fashioned shoes with hard soles to recreate a crisp and genuine walking sound. And when he's not fiddling with props, he's manipulating his vocal instrument.

BAAAAAAHHHH. Mew. Ruff! Ruff! Squuueeeeaaaaak.

While he's been doing this for more than a dozen years, and has earned some measure of fame as the last of the homemade sound effects creators, Keith persists in calling it a hobby.

``People think it's my life, but it isn't,'' he said over the phone earlier this week from St. Paul. He had just finished airing the weekday morning show he's co-hosted since 1982 for Minnesota Public Radio.

It wasn't like he planned to become a sound effects guy. In the early 1970s, Keillor was hosting that very same morning show, and Keith was hired on as an engineer.

``I was basically just sitting around in case anybody needed help, which I hoped they didn't. I was not that good of an engineer. And Garrison had some scripts and ideas he wanted to test out.''

Since Keith was the only one around, he got drafted.

At the University of Minnesota, he had minored in theater and majored in speech and broadcasting, so it seemed like good fun to warm up the old pipes.

Time passed, and Keillor gave birth to ``A Prairie Home'' in 1974. Two years later, Keith joined the gang as an engineer.

Soon Keillor started writing simple sound effects into his scripts, and asked Keith to do them. Then the requests got more and more complicated. He started with animal sounds, then began incorporating props, then took on character voices.

By the early 1980s, Keith was onstage for much of the show, armed with a complete arsenal of aural sensations. As the years progressed, his adrenalin surged as he awaited a quickening onslaught of cues.

Now Keillor partly gears his skits to Keith's repertoire of sound effects.

He has his own set of sound effects values: ``It should be close enough to give you an idea. It should enhance the story, not be the story. Although, the way Garrison writes it, it's part of the humor.''

There's a joke he and Keillor have. ``It's an animal sound. For different animals like elk and moose and deer, I'll just do the same sound. For every one of them.''

While some are so simple a 7-year-old could do it - part of the show's charm - others are real feats.

``One time, Garrison needed the sound of a car stuck in snow, spinning its tires. And I was trying to figure out how to reproduce it using props. But I couldn't do it.

``But during that week, someone actually got stuck in the snow outside my apartment window. I listened and reproduced it vocally until I got it close enough.''

His solution: ``Whistling and humming at the same time, and changing the pitch.''

The first time Mike Seeger heard from Garrison Keillor was in the mid-1970s, before ``A Prairie Home'' went national (in 1980).

``He called me on the phone, asking me if I could help him with some background on Maybelle Carter. He was trying to do a profile on her, I think, for The New Yorker.''

Keillor had been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1969 and, like Seeger, had a particular interest in homemade acoustic music created among friends and family on the porches of backwoods America.

Keillor had gone to the source. Seeger, 64, is a leading authority on old-time music. He was born into a musical family, each member having contributed significantly to the folk music field: father Charles was a pioneering folk music scholar; mother Ruth a composer who collected and published folk songs; Peggy is a folk singer; and half-brother Pete was famous for mixing folk songs with activist politics.

Mike Seeger has studied and performed what he calls ``minority'' - or non-mainstream - music for nearly five decades.

Early on, he toted a 70-pound tape player to the homes of rural musicians and recorded them. From Seeger's mountainside house overlooking the town of Lexington, he spent more than a decade copying 300 hours of such music he had taped.

That done, in June he is releasing ``Close to Home'' on Smithsonian Folkways. The recordings date from 1952 to 1967 and include tunes by banjo player Dock Boggs, guitarist Elizabeth Cotton and autoharpist Maybelle Carter.

Tonight on the radio show, he'll likely perform a song or two that's on that forthcoming CD, he said.

True to the recording's name, some of the tunes might be very close to home indeed.

He met one of the performers at age 12 in his home in the Maryland suburbs. That would be Elizabeth Cotton, who wrote the well-known folk song ``Freight Train.''

But the Seeger family didn't know that when they hired ``Libba'' to clean their house while Ruth taught piano on Saturdays. Five or six years after she started with the Seegers, the family heard her playing the song on a guitar.

``We asked her where that song had come from. `Oh, that's my song. I made that.' With other songs, she'd say `Oh, I learned that from my brother or so-and-so.' ''

She didn't know that her tune had been passed around, and became a hit in certain circles. She never saw much money from its popularity, either.

Years later, the tables switched: Seeger became her roadie and opening act as she performed around the country, cutting records and becoming known - until her passing in 1987.

``As we traveled together, we became friends. She was a wonderful, rare person, as well as a wonderful musician,'' he said, wistfully.

``I play the guitar and the banjo somewhat like her at times. When you're close to someone, their way of thinking becomes part of you.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

FREDRIC PETTERS

Tom keith, left, will deliver sound effects for "A Prarie Home

COmpanion." Tim Russell, right, is in the cast.

DAVID GAHR

Mike Seeger will be a guest on ``A Prairie Home Companion'' tonight. KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW PROFILE

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