John Prine was among the eleven members of the Solo Legacy Artists inducted into the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame (FARHOF) over the weekend of April 19 and 20, 2024. There have been many great songwriters who have drawn on their life experiences to craft a tune. Few have done it as well as John Prine. His songs are insightful, evocative, philosophical, humorous, and true to life. There is a Zen-like quality to his lyrics, a sense of ultimate reality that is not separate from ordinary reality.
Born on October 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play guitar at age 14. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School Of Folk Music and graduated from Maywood’s Proviso East High School. As was the case with many of his generation, he was unsure of what to do with his life after high school. His active imagination was said to be a distraction and caused him to struggle with academics. He wound up working for the postal service for five years before being drafted during the Vietnam Era.
According to an article on Slate by Carl Wilson, Prine had experimented with songwriting as a teenager and took it up again while in the U.S. Army. He had expected to go to Vietnam but instead was stationed in West Germany as a mechanic. He returned to Chicago and his job with the postal service after he was discharged.
He wrote many of his songs while working for the post office. He may have gone unnoticed were it not for a dare. Prine was a spectator at the Fifth Peg, popular gathering spot for teachers and students from the nearby Old Town School. One of the performers heard him complaining about the lack of talent on stage. “You think you can do better?” the performer challenged. Prine answered by stepping to the stage to play “Sam Stone,” “Hello In There,” and “Paradise.”
He thought he had flopped because the audience did not immediately react after he finished. Their reaction was delayed, however, and he was soon rewarded with rousing applause. Not only that, that three-song set earned him a $1,000-a-weekend residency at the Fifth Peg and allowed him to quit the postal service. Roger Ebert caught his act one night and wrote Prine’s first review, calling him a great songwriter.
The songs he chose for his first ever public performance demonstrated even then Prine’s ability to bring a personal memory to life so that his listeners could almost feel the experience. For example, he starts out the song “Paradise” telling us, “When I was a child my family would travel/Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born.”
Prine’s parents indeed were from the town of Paradise in Western Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County. They would often visit the town when John was a boy. But as the song tells us, Mr. Peabody’s coal company came with the world’s largest shovel and stripped all the land. The land was forsaken and the residents were left with unsafe and uncomfortable living conditions – the progress of man as Prine calls it in song. All that is left of Paradise, KY today is the Paradise Cemetery.
In “Sam Stone” we are given the lines “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.” Not everyone who returned from the Vietnam War came home unscathed. Although he was thousands of miles away in Germany, Prine was aware of those who came home with unseen scars. Those suffering from PTSD would turn to self-medication to ease the pain, all too often with catastrophic and fatal results. Perhaps Christ’s sacrifice did not absolve everyone of the sins they committed.
Prine often told stories from the perspective of others, something he succeeded in doing because he was a keen observer of the human condition. “Hello In There” shows his affinity for the elderly. He once told Performing Songwriter, “I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old people’s home where we’d have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.”
Similarly with “Angel From Montgomery” he tells a story from the perspective of a housewife looking for meaning in a life that has become quite dull. She can’t understand how the hell her husband can …”go to work in the morning and come home in the evening and have nothing to say.” Prine had no misgivings about assuming a female character. As a writer, he felt he could be any gender.
Not all of Prine’s songs had an element of sadness to them. Many of them were lighthearted and infused with fondness. “Grandpa wore his suit to dinner nearly every day,” we are told in “Grandpa Was A Carpenter.” Why? “No particular reason. He just dressed that way.” And then there is the hilarious “Dear Abby.”
In 1971 Steve Goodman convinced Kris Kristofferson to hear Prine play at the Earl Of Old Town in Chicago. Kristofferson later recalled, “By the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the (Greenwich) Village scene.” An invitation to open for Kristofferson at NYC’s The Bitter End followed. In the audience was Jerry Wexler, who signed Prine to Atlantic Records the next day. The rest, as they say, is history.
Prine’s admirers included Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bonnie Riatt, and Bruce Springsteen. Prine himself was an admirer of Dylan and Cash, and considered Gordon Lightfoot to be his songwriting hero. He in turn has influenced countless artists.
John Prine died on April 7, 2020, from complications due to COVID. He had battled cancer twice and survived but the virus proved too much for him. In accordance with Prine’s wishes as expressed in his song “Paradise,” half of his ashes were spread in Kentucky’s Green River. The other half were buried next to his parents in Chicago.
Next up – Gordon Lightfoot
