A Troubador Is Enduring, With a Half-Smile and a Song
A man in search of a pint found one in an Irish establishment in Midtown Manhattan. He was short and everyday, save for his spikes of gray-white hair and a sizable indentation in his neck. Sipping his Guinness, he studied the surrounding circus with the half-smile of a child who had slipped under the tent flap to find a vacant ringside seat.
Another patron recognized him and approached to share a text message received the day before from his 17-year- old son in Virginia. Hey just wanted to tell you I had a lousy day and John Prine brought a smile to my face, the son had written. The pint-sipping man’s half-smile became whole. “Real nice,” said John Prine.
Many tough days have been made better by Mr. Prine, the influential singer and songwriter with a gift for articulating moments almost beyond words. His songs have won the respect of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Pink Floyd, you name it. One admirer, Bob Dylan, once described his canon as “pure Proustian existentialism.” And, just recently, PEN New England named Mr. Prine as a recipient of a Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award.
These accolades are all the sweeter given where Mr. Prine has been. In 1996, he found out he had cancer; the subsequent surgery removed a piece of his neck and severed a few nerves in his tongue, while the radiation damaged some salivary glands. A year of recuperation and intensive speech therapy followed before he was able to perform, only now with a voice that grumbled like the trucks that used to pass his roadside childhood home.
Then, Mr. Prine again learned he had cancer in 2013, this time with a spot on the left lung. Six months after lung surgery, Mr. Prine was back on the road, singing his distinctive American songbook: “Angel From Montgomery,” “Hello in There,” “Lake Marie,” “Souvenirs” and so many more. His concerts have people shouting his name and singing along to stories about endangered places and marginalized people.
The joy he finds in his continuing presence is evident, but Mr. Prine is too fine a writer to reduce his post- cancer worldview to sentimental clichés. He does allow, though, that his illnesses forced him to reckon with who he was, exactly. And what did he learn? “That I’m a pretty good guy to hang around with,” he said.
He grew up beside a highway in the blue- collar Chicago suburb of Maywood, a son of Bill and Verna, a tool- and- die maker and a homemaker, both from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He listened to Hank Williams, learned guitar from an older brother and was glad to land a civil-service job soon after high school: mailman. He composed lyrics as he delivered the mail.
Mr. Prine was at an open- mike night in Chicago, drinking beer and muttering about the lack of talent, when someone dared him to get up there. He began with a song about a damaged combat soldier, “Sam Stone,” that now ranks among the most searing ballads of the Vietnam War.
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose...”
As Mr. Prine remembers it, the audience remained silent; unnervingly so. He went on to sing “Hello in There,” about the loneliness of old age, and “Paradise,” about a disappearing Kentucky coal town. This trio of future classics won hearty applause, finally, and a deal to sing for $1,000 a weekend — three times his Civil Service pay. His first album came out in 1971.
Mr. Prine is revered by his peers. Bonnie Raitt, who has often toured with him, said: “He just has a unique ability to haiku it. It’s deceptively insightful. It’s at once playing on words and imagery, but expressing something deeper in such a succinct way, in such an exceptional way.”
Mr. Prine spent a good chunk of his adulthood on tour, earning a reputation as a solid performer who also liked to party and fish and just hang out. He got married and divorced a couple of times before meeting Fiona Whelan, from County Donegal, Ireland, in 1988. Within a few years, he was the married father of two boys and stepfather to his wife’s first son.
Mr. Prine rarely speaks in public about his encounters with cancer, and has not written about it, because, he said, “I just don’t think it would make for a good song.” But Mr. Prine’s relative fortune is never far from his thoughts. He has another studio project coming later this year, there’s a grandchild now, and he turns 70 in October. And he is still hitting the road with his band.
If his two reminders of his mortality have changed him any, beyond appearance, it is in how he experiences his songs — songs that have the power to improve a teenage boy’s lousy day in Virginia. “Before, I just sang them,” Mr. Prine said. “Now I hear them.”