On the Music of John Prine

John Prine was one of the first prominent performing artists to die of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). I recall hoping, praying that somehow he would make it through, and he did hang on for a while, but he was at that age I suppose where the virus, particularly in the early days, hit one the hardest. And eventually he left us on April 7, 2020. His wife, Fiona, wrote shortly thereafter: “The outpouring of love is a comfort to me and my boys. Thank you for loving [John] so well. We can feel that love today. Keep listening and sharing his songs as we all find a way to be in the world without him.”

From the time he first came onto the scene, as they say, with the help of Kris Kristofferson and Roger Ebert (the subject of one of my previous essays) in 1971, it was clear that Prine’s music told a story. He wrote his earliest songs while delivering mail after leaving the Army. (William Faulkner worked too as a postman as a young man.) But as Ebert noted, something that always impressed me, Prine wrote many of his best songs before “his 24th birthday.” Songwriters, unlike authors, can come of age early and farm their best in younger years, but there was a certain empathy beyond his years that allowed the young Prine to put himself in the shoes of an elderly couple increasingly isolated and mourning a son lost in Korea (“Me and Loretta, we don’t talk much more/She sits and stares through the backdoor screen/And all the news just repeats itself”); a Vietnam veteran addicted to drugs and struggling to adjust to being home (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose”); or a troubled young man estranged from his father and struggling with his sexuality who resorted to suicide (“‘God bless this kitchen’ said the knick-knack shelf/’The dinner’s almost ready, go and wash yourself’/Well Jimmy’s growing up now, Wanda’s growing old”). (1)

I do not like to compare, but I doubt Prine ever did better work than with these songs, which appeared on his first album John Prine, released right around the time of his 25th birthday. Even Robert Christgau gave the album an A. And who can forget that opening riff of “Angel from Montgomery,” my favorite version of it being a live duet sung by Prine and Bonnie Raitt? It was an introduction made more powerful by a call and response between the guitar and Hammond organ. There is that distinct gospel feel, the opening of Sunday worship, and then it comes in:

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child who’s grown old