John Prine

• Born: October 10, 1946
• Birthplace: Maywood, Illinois
• Died: April 7, 2020
• Place of death: Nashville, Tennessee

American folksinger, guitarist, and songwriter

With his unusual voice, his deadpan humor, and his idiosyncratic wordplay, singer-songwriter John Prine defined the Americana music movement of the 1970s.

The Life

John Prine was born the third of four sons of Bill and Verna Prine, who migrated from rural western Kentucky to Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. His father was a machinist by trade. The family frequently visited Kentucky, and its music, language and lore made a lasting impression on Prine.

An indifferent student, Prine joined the US Army and then got a job with the US Postal Service. Though his older brother Dave had taught him rudimentary guitar fingerpicking at age fourteen, Prine later refined his guitar playing and songwriting in classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. Here he befriended fellow songwriter Steve Goodman, who introduced Prine to Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson helped Prine secure a recording contract with Atlantic Records.

The debut album John Prine (1971) contains a number of songs that remain among his most popular: “Hello in There,” “Sam Stone,” “Paradise,” “Illegal Smile,” and “Angel from Montgomery.” The album was lauded by critics, especially those seeking a “new Dylan” (at a time when some commentators considered iconic artist Bob Dylan to have lost his musical edge). Prine toured extensively, and he made several more albums for Atlantic Records. In 1978 Prine signed with David Geffen’s fledgling Asylum Records. With Goodman at the production helm Prine released Bruised Orange, one his most highly regarded albums. His follow-ups for Asylum were not as critically or commercially successful, however, and in 1980 Prine no longer had a recording label.

With the help of longtime manager Al Bunetta, Prine established his own label, Oh Boy Records. Though located in Nashville, Tennessee, Prine’s company did not operate like a mainstream corporate music label. Working with songwriter Roger Cook as producer, Prine released a series of albums in the 1980s that won general acclaim and helped reestablish his importance as a songwriter and as a performer to a new generation of alternative country musicians who seeking were an audience and selling a product outside the mainstream music industry.

Prine’s sound and his critical and commercial popularity improved when Howie Epstein, bass player for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, took over the role of producer for the Grammy Award-winning Folk Album of the Year The Missing Years (1991). The Americana radio format, arising out of the college and alternative-radio movement of the 1980s, was ideally suited to Prine, since his musical catalog ran the gamut from folk and blues to rock and country. Prine earned his second Grammy Award for Folk Album of the Year for Fair and Square (2005). In the meantime, he had won a battle with throat cancer, though he required lengthy therapy to be able to sing again. He married for the third time, and he had three children.

By the 2010s Prine was widely acknowledged as an elder statesman of folk and Americana music. He earned numerous honors, such as the PEN/Song Lyrics Award in 2016. Although health problems, including surgery for lung cancer in 2013, limited his output, he also continued to both tour and record. A collection of duets, For Better, or Worse, was released in 2016. It was followed by the widely praised album The Tree of Forgiveness (2018).

During the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020 Prine and his wife tested positive for COVID-19 and were quarantined. Prine was eventually hospitalized with symptoms from the viral infection, and on April 7, 2020, he died at the age of seventy-three. He was subsequently honored in a memorial segment at the Grammy Awards held in March 2021. He also posthumously won two Grammys at the event, with the track "I Remember Everything" (recorded in 2019 and released in June 2020) taking the awards for best American roots performance and best American roots song.

The Music

Prine’s songwriting is a deceptive blend of simplicity and complexity. His melodies and chord progressions can be remarkably simple, in a folk or traditional manner. However, his unusual vocal phrasing (modeled on Dylan, blues singers, and other folk music artists) compensate for what a song might lack in intricate structure. His lyrics are the basis for the acclaim of his songwriting. Prine operated lyrically in two modes: as a keen-eyed documentarian of the margins of society and as a social critic capable of mixing the personal and the populist, with surreal imagery and absurd wordplay.

Documentarian. Prine the documentarian was evident from his first album. “Hello in There” takes as its subject an aged couple who have drifted into uselessness at the end of life. In a single stanza, Prine’s narrator provides a family history that reveals its disconnectedness: One son is married and living in Omaha, another is a wanderer, and son Davy was killed senselessly in the Korean War. Similarly, on his second album, Diamonds in the Rough (1972), “The Torch Singer” captures the ambiance of a dive bar, with its catwalk that creaks when the bartender walks on it and the smoke “too heavy to rise.”

Social Critic. Prine the social critic found his voice in the much-covered “Paradise,” in which a coal company destroys the western Kentucky ecosystem. However, unlike the apocalyptic critical voice of Dylan (whose protest songs indict “Masters of War” and other powers), Prine takes a down-to-earth, even fatalistic, position in which the coal companies of the world always end up destroying the paradises. A sense of tragic loss predominates over a sense of indignation. Similarly, in “Picture Show” from The Missing Years, Prine lambastes American culture’s preoccupation with its own image: the song contrasts the young James Dean dreaming of being a film star with the Native American belief that taking one’s photograph steals a piece of one’s soul.

These two modes come together beautifully in the classic “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)” from Bruised Orange. The song’s narrator is haunted by an accidental death he witnesses as a youth (an anonymous altar boy run over by a commuter train). The details are masterly—from the train’s naked “howl” to the optical illusion of the speeding train seeming to approach slowly before hitting the boy. However, the narrator then broadens the scope of the song from an individual to a universal tragedy, in which the human heart becomes imprisoned in its own “chain of sorrow.”

Musical Legacy

Prine’s musical legacy is twofold. First, he helped to establish the role of the Americana singer-songwriter as quirky, personal, and accessible (as opposed to the distance between the artist and the audience typified by Dylan). Second, he helped establish the model of the artist as entrepreneur, creating his own label and using Americana radio as a means of connecting with an alternative music audience. He is remembered as one of the most influential songwriters of his day, earning admiration from contemporary icons such as Dylan and Johnny Cash as well as from countless later artists.

Principal Recordings

albums:John Prine, 1971; Diamonds in the Rough, 1972; Sweet Revenge, 1973; Common Sense, 1975; Bruised Orange, 1978; Pink Cadillac, 1979; Storm Windows, 1980; Aimless Love, 1984; German Afternoons, 1986; The Missing Years, 1991; A John Prine Christmas, 1994; Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, 1995; In Spite of Ourselves, 1999; Souvenirs, 2000; Fair and Square, 2005; Standard Songs for Average People, 2007 (with Mac Wiseman); For Better, or Worse, 2016; The Tree of Forgiveness, 2018

Bibliography

Fanning, Charles. “John Prine’s Lyrics.” American Music 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 48-73.

Fricke, David. Great Days: The John Prine Anthology. Rhino, 1993.

Grimes, William. "John Prine, Who Chronicled the Human Condition in Song, Dies at 73." The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/music/john-prine-dead-coronavirus.html. Accessed 31 Aug. 2020.

Kibby, Marjorie. “Home on the Page: A Virtual Place of Music Community.” Popular Music 19, no. 1 (January, 2000): 91-100.

Paulson, Dave, and Bryan Alexander. "John Prine's Final Song 'I Remember Everything' Earns Two Posthumous Grammys, Brandi Carlile Tribute." USA Today, 14 Mar. 2021, www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/03/14/john-prine-widow-celebrates-legendary-songwriters-two-grammy-wins/4695104001/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2021.

Poston, Frances, et al. “Our Readers Write: Who Is an Artist or Musician Whose Works Can Be Used Successfully in English Class?” The English Journal 74, no. 7 (November, 1985): 75-82.