Paradise

April 9 2020

John Prine's songs will outlive us all. He chronicled regular people and their everyday lives. His words lodge in the brain; his tunes replay effortlessly.

He came from Chicago, the city of broad shoulders and shift workers and blue-collar stiffs, but his parents were raised in Paradise Kentucky. A coal-mining town. How striking, the irony of that name. It protests too much. It suggests we should be suspicious of names, because they often pretend to be the opposite of what they are.

Coal country, where the earth is scarred. Where faces are black, with white owlish eyes. And where hands are big and hard from work. But even there, they pick guitars, strum on banjos, drum whatever's handy. They sing in sweet unschooled voices. Or voices like his, weighted with gravitas, and gravel.

The music of the working man.

And a troubadour of song.

His dad was a tool-and-die maker at American Can. And he was a journeyman, a self-taught savant of melody and words. He poured their molten liquid – a mixture of wisdom, whimsy, and wit – into our eagerly awaiting ears, where they will always remain, as permanent as forged steel.

I've loved John Prine's music ever since I first heard him in my early 20s.

In his later years, he suffered from 2 kinds of cancer, but would ultimately succumb to Covid-19 in the pandemic of 2020. He was memorialized in this obituary in the NY Times.

After reading it, I couldn't get that reference to Paradise Kentucky out of my head. Along with everything else in his background that made him such a song-writer of the people: a man from a working-class family from blue-collar Chicago who wrote in his head while walking his mail route; a man with no pretension to academics or higher education.

So here is a prose poem in praise of the late great John Prine: a commemoration; a rumination; a paean.

Prose poetry is a style I almost always try to at least approximate, even though the end result often doesn't seem that way. I like its informal conversational tone. The challenge comes from its open-endedness: without a rhyme scheme or fixed rhythm or formal rules, there is no external structure to discipline your work. So the secret is to have an ear for language: for the well-balanced sentence, the trenchant word, the internal music of prose. The only constraint is your own judgment. When you can theoretically say as much as you want, the art of a prose poem comes from saying just the right amount:  not too much and not too little. It's the Goldilocks principle. And since I tend toward prolixity, that's never easy for me! Every word counts, so the compression and distillation of poetry still apply. Yet it also has to sound natural and unaffected. 

RASPY-VOICED SONGSMITH WAS A ‘TRUE FOLK SINGER’

• The Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition)
• April 9, 2020

MAS SZLUKOVENYI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Performer was a relative unknown in 1970 when Kris Kristofferson heard him play at a small Chicago club, but was soon touted as a successor to Bob Dylan – who would become one of his biggest fans

John Prine, the raspy-voiced country-folk singer whose ingenious lyrics to songs by turns poignant, angry and comic made him a favourite of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and others, died Tuesday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He was 73. The cause was complications from COVID-19, his family said.

Mr. Prine underwent cancer surgery in 1998 to remove a tumour in his neck identified as squamous cell cancer, which had damaged his vocal cords. In 2013, he had part of one lung removed to treat lung cancer.

Mr. Prine was a relative unknown in 1970 when Mr. Kristofferson heard him play one night at a small Chicago club called the Fifth Peg, dragged there by singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. Mr. Kristofferson was performing in Chicago at the time at the Quiet Knight. At the Fifth Peg, Mr. Prine treated him to a brief after-hours performance of material that, Mr. Kristofferson later wrote, “was unlike anything I’d heard before.”

A few weeks later, when Mr. Prine was in New York, Mr. Kristofferson invited him onstage at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where he was appearing with Carly Simon, and introduced him to the audience. “No way somebody this young can be writing so heavy,” he said. “John Prine is so good, we may have to break his thumbs.”

Record executive Jerry Wexler, who was in the audience, signed Mr. Prine to a contract with Atlantic Records the next day.

Music writers at the time were eager to crown a successor to Mr. Dylan, and Mr. Prine, with his nasal, sandpapery voice and literate way with a song, came ready to order. His debut album, called simply John Prine and released in 1971, included songs that became his signatures. Some gained wider fame after being recorded by other artists.

They included Sam Stone, about a drugaddicted war veteran (with the unforgettable refrain “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes”); Hello in There, a heartrending evocation of old age and loneliness; and Angel From Montgomery, the hard-luck lament of a middleaged woman dreaming about a better life, later made famous by Bonnie Raitt.

“He’s a true folk singer in the best folk tradition, cutting right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain,” Ms. Raitt told Rolling Stone in 1992.

Mr. Dylan, listing his favourite songwriters in a 2009 interview, put Mr. Prine front and centre. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” he said. “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”

John Prine was born Oct. 10, 1946, in Maywood, Ill., a working-class suburb of Chicago, to William and Verna (Hamm) Prine. His father, a tool-and-die maker at American Can Co., and his mother had moved from the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky, in the 1930s.

Mr. Prine later wrote a ruefully bitter song titled Paradise, in which he sang:

John grew up in a country music-loving family. He learned guitar as a young teenager from his grandfather and brother and began writing songs.

After graduating from high school, he worked for the post office for two years before being drafted into the army, which sent him to West Germany in charge of the motor pool at his base. After being discharged, he resumed his mail route, in and around his hometown, composing songs in his head.

“I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,” he wrote on his website. “I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”

Reluctantly, he took the stage for the first time at an open-mic night at the Fifth Peg, where his performance of Hello in There and Angel From Montgomery met with profound silence from the audience. “They just sat there,” Mr. Prine wrote. “They didn’t even applaud; they just looked at me.”

Then the clapping began. “It was like I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate deep feelings and emotions,” he wrote. “And to find that out all at once was amazing.”

Not long after, Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, wandered into the club while Mr. Prine was performing. He liked what he heard and wrote Mr. Prine’s first review, under the headline Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words.

“He appears onstage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight,” Mr. Ebert wrote. “He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.”

Mr. Prine had a particular gift for offbeat humour, reflected in songs such as Jesus, the Missing Years, Some Humans Ain’t Human, Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone and the anti-war screed Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.

“I guess what I always found funny was the human condition,” he told British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2013. “There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents.”

After recording several albums for Atlantic and Asylum, he started his own label, Oh Boy Records, in 1984. He never had a hit record, but he commanded a loyal audience that ensured steady if modest sales for his albums and a durable concert career.

In 1992, his album The Missing Years, with guest appearances by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and other artists, won a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk recording. He received a second Grammy in the same category in 2006 for the album Fair and Square.

Mr. Prine, who lived in Nashville, was divorced twice. He leaves his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine, a native of Ireland whom he married in 1996; three sons, Jody, Jack and Tommy; two brothers, Dave and Billy; and three grandchildren. In 2017, Mr. Prine published John Prine Beyond Words, a collection of lyrics, guitar chords, commentary and photographs from his own archive.

In 2019, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and his album Tree of Forgiveness was nominated for a Grammy, for best Americana album. It was his 19th album and his first of original material in more than a decade. (The award went to Brandi Carlile, for By the Way, I Forgive You.)

Mr. Prine went on tour in 2018 to promote Tree of Forgiveness, and after a two-night stand at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville – known there as the mother church of country music – Margaret Renkl, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, wrote, under the headline American Oracle:

“The mother church of country music, where the seats are scratched-up pews and the windows are stained glass, is the place where the new John Prine – older now, scarred by cancer surgeries, his voice deeper and full of gravel – is most clearly still the old John Prine: mischievous, delighting in tomfoolery, but also worried about the world.”

In December, he was chosen to receive a 2020 Grammy for lifetime achievement.

As a songwriter, Mr. Prine was prolific and quick. In the early days, he would sometimes dash off a song while driving to a club.

“Sometimes, the best ones come together at the exact same time, and it takes about as long to write it as it does to sing it,” he told poet Ted Kooser in an interview at the Library of Congress in 2005. “They 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.”