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BECKY MCGUIRE: Hi.

PAT MCGUIRE: Hi.

SPEAKER 1: How are you?

PAT MCGUIRE: Great, hi.

BECKY MCGUIRE: There's a gala lots.

LAURA MCCALLUM: Pat and Becky McGuire greet guests as they enter the side door and drop the $5 admission into a wicker basket. The 85-year-old home, with its hardwood floors and high ceilings, is warm and inviting. Decaf coffee is brewing, and the popcorn is ready. Guests settle into folding chairs in the 20x40-foot living room.

PAT MCGUIRE: Let's welcome, once again, Bill Staines for a return engagement.

[APPLAUSE]

BILL STAINES: So how are y'all doing? Good.

[GUITAR TUNE PLAYING]

LAURA MCCALLUM: Guitarist and vocalist Bill Staines has performed at the McGuires ever since they began holding house concerts five years ago.

BILL STAINES: I do a lot of songs with choruses to them. And so it's nice to have that audience feedback. And the more immediate it is, you just feel it's just more of an intimate atmosphere. And I think you get to see the faces of the people and how they're reacting to the music, and enjoying it, or falling asleep, or whatever. It's just, you're just more in tune with the audience.

LAURA MCCALLUM: House concerts give performers like Staines a break from weeks of touring and hotels. In return for their performances, the musicians receive a meal and a night's stay.

BILL STAINES: Because when you're out on the road and you're traveling by yourself, and then oftentimes, the only people you speak to are store clerks. And so it's nice to sit around afterwards or beforehand and talk with the people who run the house concerts and the audience too.

LAURA MCCALLUM: Regulars say they keep coming back to the McGuires for the music and the atmosphere.

SPEAKER 2: Well, you have a chance to be in someone's living room, with someone that usually you see from a long distance, from a big audience. And I like the way it sounds here. And it's just like a friend coming over.

SPEAKER 3: You get to see the entertainers close up. You get to talk with them between sets and things like that.

SPEAKER 4: Because they offer such a simple sincerity of Americana. It's an opportunity to experience music at the very basics. And I think the flavor of it is so honest and really a great talent that is overlooked oftentimes.

[COUNTRY MUSIC]

[LAUGHTER]

LAURA MCCALLUM: The audience sings along as the McGuire's cat wanders through the rows of chairs. Pat and Becky McGuire say they wanted to expose people to music that's hard to find in Little Falls. And Pat says they had no reservations about opening their home to strangers.

PAT MCGUIRE: We'd like to have people around, we always have. And I think even when we lived elsewhere, we kind of opened our home to people and things, not necessarily just anybody off the street. But we have, we've had kind of an open household. And so it fit in with what we do.

LAURA MCCALLUM: Pat McGuire says he hopes the Little Falls house concerts are becoming well known among folk musicians and other performers. While house concerts are common on the West Coast and in parts of the Midwest, the McGuires believe they have the only house concert series in outstate Minnesota. They say they'll keep holding the concerts as long as audiences keep demanding them. For the FM news station, I'm Laura McCallum, in Collegeville.

[COUNTRY MUSIC]

[APPLAUSE]