It was Saturday, March 14, 1993, and Emmylou Harris had about an hour to get to her hometown of Birmingham for a special show.

She only had to get through a foot of snow from a freak blizzard the night before.

Harris was the special musical guest for that night’s broadcast of “The Prairie Home Companion,” the long-running radio variety show hosted by humorist Garrison Keillor.

As recounted on Keillor’s website, before the live broadcast was set to begin, Harris called from her bus on the road. They were 55 miles out of town, and at a standstill.

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But, the show went on, providing the hardy patrons who made it to the Alabama Theatre an evening they wouldn’t soon forget.

Keillor, impressed by the freak snow, rewrote the words to “Oh! Susanna.”

“Oh! Susanna! O don’t you cry for me

For I’ve gone to Alabama for a couple days to ski.”

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The Blizzard of 1993

In a 2013 interview, Keillor recounted the evening.

“It was a great snowstorm,” he said. “We came in the day before the (sold out) show, which was at the Alabama Theatre, and were snowbound in Birmingham for three or four days.”

At 5:20 p.m., Harris arrived.

“She just strode out on stage, people applauded, she walked up to the microphone and she and I sang a duet,” he said. “I think we sang, ‘There’s a dark and stormy side of life, there’s a sunny side, too. Though we meet with the darkness and strife, the sunny side we also may view.’”

Keillor remembered the theater as being “about half full.”

“Of course, the people who did come were terribly proud of themselves,” he said.

It was a special night for many, including those listening over the airwaves.

The columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, at home in Mississippi amid her own snow drifts, wrote, “If I’d known about the snowfall and Emmylou beforehand, I’d have walked all the way to Birmingham.”

For his part, Keillor returned later in sunny June for a repeat performance, performing “an extra-long” three-hour taped show as payback for the people unable to catch the earlier show.

On a return visit in 2008, Keillor said the blizzard was “like coming back home.”

‘’I’d come back here at a moment’s notice if I knew there would be a blizzard,” he told that audience.