Prine, who has died at the age of 73, inspired a generation of musicians. Martin Chilton remembers a man ‘who had a unique take on life’
The outpouring of sorrow at the death of John Prine is testament not only to his magnificent songwriting, but also to the impact this wise, humorous and good-hearted man had on the world.
Prine, who was 73 when he died on 7 April of Covid-19 complications, had survived previous battles with neck and lung cancer. When I interviewed him in 2013, he told me that illness had changed his outlook on life. “It makes you look properly at all the things around you, think about what you have accomplished, in your family life as well as your work. Think about what fruit all this has borne.”
The legacy of Prine’s professional life is a collection of some of the most poetic, empathetic songs in popular music. Prine was revered by contemporaries, such as Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, who praised his “beautiful songs”. When Prine first came to London in 1972, Elton John and Bernie Taupin showed up at a press show at the Speakeasy Club, so they could tell him what his music meant to them.
A new generation of Americana musicians, including Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and Brandy Clark, are avid fans. Amos Lee told me: “John Prine’s Great Days anthology helped me figure out how to live.”
Prine, who was born in Maywood, Illinois on 10 October 1946, was full of surprises. His nickname at Proviso East High School was “Tippy Toes Two”, because of his medal-winning prowess at gymnastics. “I had more form than substance,” he joked.
After graduating, he worked for the Post Office for two years before being drafted into the Army, where he was based in West Germany. He headed a motor pool working on construction equipment. In one Sergeant Bilko-esque moment, he recalled being told off by a commanding officer, who said that an inspection had revealed one more bulldozer than registered. “That’s just as bad as being one short, so we buried it,” Prine said.
After being discharged, he resumed work as a mailman, composing songs in his head as he walked around Chicago’s suburbs. He likened the mail route to a library with no books and said he “passed the time each day making up little ditties”. In 2005, at the request of US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Prine spoke and performed at the Library of Congress. Prine told Kooser that songs would “come along like a dream or something, and you just got to hurry up and respond to it, because if you mess around, the song is liable to pass you by”.
The songs that came to him were masterpieces. When he was reluctantly persuaded to take the stage for the first time, at an open-mic night at the Fifth Peg club, he performed “Hello in There” and “Angel from Montgomery”. Can there have ever been a better open-mic debut? He was stunned by the clapping. “I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate deep feelings and emotions,” he said. “And to find that out all at once was amazing.” Fortunately, Roger Ebert, the film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times, saw Prine and wrote his first review, praising “The Singing Mailman”.
A few weeks later, when Prine was in New York, his advocate Kristofferson invited him onstage at the Bitter End. “Bob Dylan was at my very first show in Greenwich Village,” Prine told me. “He came along with a bunch of harmonicas and said he just wanted to be a sideman and play support. I was knocked out over just being in New York. To have Dylan play with me seemed just surreal.”
His eponymous debut album was released in 1971 and was full of superb songs. “Sam Stone” poignantly captured the tragic life of a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran (“There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes”), while “Hello in There” was a heart-rending song about the loneliness of old age, all the more remarkable for being written by a man in his twenties.
One such song would have been enough to signify a major new talent. Prine’s debut also featured sharp-eyed portraits of the human condition in “Donald and Lydia”, “Far from Me”, “Illegal Smile”, “Six O’clock News” and “Angel From Montgomery”, later recorded by Bonnie Raitt.
Prine’s longstanding guitarist Jason Wilber said that one time in school, Prine’s classmates were all expressing their pride in their various heritages when the shy youngster stood up and shouted: “I’m pure Kentuckian, last of a dyin’ breed.” Prine’s father and mother had moved north from the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky in the 30s. In the song “Paradise”, another from that amazing debut, Prine lamented the destruction of his parent’s hometown: “The coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/ And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/ Well, they dug for their coal ‘til the land was forsaken/ Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
Although many of Prine’s songs focus on matters of the heart – “My Mexican Home”, about the death of his father, is one of my favourites – he did sometimes stray into political commentary, as in the anti-war song “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”. It’s no surprise that he disliked what Donald Trump stands for. In some of his final concerts, Prine would introduce his anti-war song by dedicating it to “our current Fuhrer: Donaldo Benito Trumpitini”.
Prine, who won two Grammys and was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, also had the rare gift of being genuinely funny in his lyrics. Among his best offbeat songs are “Jesus, the Missing Years”, “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” and “Dear Abby”. Elvis Presley was such a fan of Prine’s sardonic song “Please Don’t Bury Me” (“Give my feet to the footloose/ Give my knees to the needy”) that his bass player Duke Bardwell recalled that Presley once ordered him to repeatedly sing it for him in a hotel room. “I don’t know how many times he told me to sing Prine’s song. Had to be 20. I lost count,” Bardwell recalled.
He was always a joy to see live. Prine loved being on stage and his patter between songs was happy and candid. He was good company off stage, too, something that appealed to the actor Billy Bob Thornton, who cast Prine as his brother in Daddy and Them – a 2001 movie that starred Ben Affleck and Walton Goggins. The film spawned one of Prine’s finest comic songs, a duet with Iris Dement called “In Spite Of Ourselves”.
Prine had a unique take on life – he told me he was not an avid reader and usually started a book somewhere in the middle “to see if it hooks me” – and talking to him about our mutual love of comedians WC Fields and Laurel and Hardy is something I treasured.
When he met my family in London, he could not have been sweeter. He had just finished a long spellbinding gig at the Barbican and chatted after he’d eaten the two separate dinners of steak and potatoes that was part of his rider for most of his career. He loved fishing, drinking, playing pool and Christmas decorations – which he kept up in his office all year round.
For a few years late in life he found it a struggle to write and said he was “knocked out” by the positive reception for 2018’s “The Tree of Forgiveness”, his eighteenth and final studio album. “Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see,” Prine sang in “Souvenirs”. His tragic loss to coronavirus is enough to break any music lover’s heart.
