America’s bard of broken hearts and dirty windows
John Prine, who has died from Covid-19 complications aged 73, was a raspy-voiced troubadour who wrote and performed songs about faded hopes, failing marriages, flies in the kitchen and the desperation of people just getting by. He was, as one of his songs put it, the bard of ‘‘broken hearts and dirty windows’’.
A former army mechanic and mail carrier who wrote songs rooted in the experiences of blue-collar life, Prine rose to prominence almost by accident. He was at a Chicago folk club one night in 1969, complaining about the performers, when someone challenged him to get onstage, saying, ‘‘You get up and try.’’
Emboldened by a few beers, he picked up his guitar and sang three of his original songs. Within a year, he released his first album and was hailed as one of the foremost lyricists of his time.
He went on to record more than 20 albums, win three Grammy Awards and help define a genre of music that came to be called Americana. He was a significant influence on a younger generation of singer-songwriters, including the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who called him ‘‘the closest thing I could imagine to ever being around Mark Twain’’.
The three tunes Prine sang at his debut performance in Chicago were written during his breaks while delivering mail. All became classics in the singersongwriter tradition: Sam Stone, about a Vietnam vet returning home with a drug habit; Hello in There, about the emotional loneliness of older people; and Paradise, an autobiographical lament about his family’s Kentucky hometown, ploughed under to make way for strip mines.
His songs about blue-collar woes and hard-luck lives soon attracted a devoted following, which included Bob Dylan, who described Prine’s work as ‘‘pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.’’
‘‘He is a truly original writer, unequalled, and a genuine poet of the American people,’’ Ted Kooser, the 2005 US poet laureate, said of Prine. ‘‘He did a better job of holding up the mirror of art to the 60s and 70s than any of our official literary poets. And none of our poets wrote anything better about Vietnam than Prine’s Sam Stone.’’
Sam Stone is a chilling ballad about a wounded veteran, with the gravity of a three-act play. Prine describes the vet coming home ‘‘with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back’’ and how ‘‘the morphine eased the pain’’ of his physical and psychic wounds.
A recurring chorus suggests the poignant view of a child growing up too soon: ‘‘There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes. Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.’’
Some listeners were offended by the invocation of Jesus in a song about drug addiction, but Prine said he was ‘‘just trying to think of something as hopeless’’ as a Vietnam vet succumbing to his private demons.
‘‘You write a song about something that you think might be taboo,’’ he told
Rolling Stone, ‘‘you sing it for other people and they immediately recognise themselves in it.’’
His 1971 debut album, titled simply
John Prine, received strong reviews, but modest sales. Other performers recognised his talent, however, and Bette Midler and Joan Baez both recorded Hello
in There. The Everly Brothers did a version of Paradise, and Johnny Cash sang Sam Stone (omitting the line about Jesus). Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty did background vocals for Prine’s 1992 album The Missing Years, and Bonnie Raitt had a memorable interpretation of
Angel From Montgomery, which Prine wrote from the perspective of a woman regretting her missed opportunities.
His unadorned melodies were effective vehicles for introspective lyrics drawn from everyday sources. When he wrote ‘‘Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring?’’ for the 1971 song Far From Me, Prine said he recalled an image from childhood of broken glass sparkling in the city dump near his house. ‘‘I don’t know of a better thing to follow as a writer than what your gut instinct tells you,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s where everything springs from.’’
John Prine was born in Maywood, Illinois, one of four sons. His father was a factory worker and a union official, his mother a homemaker. His grandfather had played guitar with the Everly Brothers’ father in Kentucky, and Prine’s own father enjoyed listening to the music of Hank Williams.
‘‘I used to just sit and watch how he would be so moved by the songs,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘I might have been more affected by the way they touched him than by the songs themselves – they seemed to have such power.’’
When he was 14, Prine learned to play guitar from his older brother Dave. Two of his brothers became musicians, and another was a police officer.
After high school, Prine was drafted into the army and served in Germany, where he said he spent his time ‘‘drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks’’. He returned to the Chicago suburbs and took a job with the Postal Service.
His music reflected his abiding connection to Kentucky, the birthplace of both of his parents. Paradise is about the town in western Kentucky ‘‘where all my relatives came from’’, uprooted in the 1960s by strip mines and a power plant.
Before moving to Nashville in 1980, Prine had recorded seven albums for major labels, both of which dropped him. He launched his own record company, Oh Boy, which allowed him to pursue a more casual approach. He drove himself to concerts, and his contract ‘‘riders’’ rejected expensive catering options in favour of supermarket deli platters, a bottle of vodka and Orange Crush soda.
Over the years, he experimented with musical styles, from raw country to hardcharging rockabilly, but his greatest gift was his ability to draw deep emotions from simple lyrics. ‘‘Broken hearts and dirty windows/ Make life difficult to see,’’ he wrote in one of his early songs,
Souvenirs. ‘‘That’s why last night and this mornin’/ Always look the same to me.’’
He framed one of his most complex songs, Lake Marie, from the 1995 album Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings ,asa virtual epic. In his 2017 book, Beyond
Words, he said he wanted the song to begin with a spoken verse, delivered as a history lesson, about two lakes named for baby girls found abandoned in the woods.
With casual but memorable lines – ‘‘the wind was blowing, especially through her hair’’ – the song shifts to became the story of a couple ‘‘trying to save our marriage and perhaps catch a few fish, whatever seemed easier’’.
Prine’s first two marriages, to Ann Carole Menaloscino and musician Rachel Peer, ended in divorce. (‘‘Divorces have a way of turning into memorable songs for me,’’ he said.) In 1993, he married Fiona Whelan, who became his manager. They had two sons, and he adopted her son from a previous relationship.
He won Grammy Awards for best contemporary folk album for The Missing
Years (1991) and Fair & Square (2005) and a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2015. He was named to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, and this year received the Grammy for lifetime achievement.
In the late 1990s, he had surgery and radiation treatment for cancer in his throat. He quit smoking, and the operation left his head tilted at a noticeable angle. His voice deepened into a growling baritone, as weathered and scarred as his music. Part of a lung was removed after further cancer in 2013.
In 2018, Prine released his first album of new music in 13 years. The 10 songs on The Tree of Forgiveness (some written with collaborators) showed the same blend of humour, sorrow and outrage that had long been his hallmark. The album reached No 2 on the Billboard country chart and No 5 on the pop chart, giving the 72-year-old Prine the biggest hit record of his career.
‘‘Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to describe the world the way I wished it would be,’’ he once told the Los Angeles
Times. ‘‘That’s why when I finish a song, I’ll sit back and look at it and think, ‘Now if you could only practise some of those things in your own life . . . you wouldn’t have to write all these damn songs.’ ’’ –