TAKEN FROM US FAR TOO SOON
Coronavirus has not been kind to the music industry, James Hohmann writes.
There’s a hole in our hearts where the music goes, sweet songs never last too long on broken radios and John Prine died for nothin’, I suppose.
The coronavirus has taken another of our greatest singer-songwriters too soon.
Prine, 73, beat throat cancer in the 1990s and lung cancer in 2013 but succumbed on Tuesday in Nashville to complications from the contagion known as COVID-19. He was supposed to go on tour next month. I had hoped to see him perform on June 26.
Prine wrote his first classics, like Sam Stone, about a Vietnam vet who came home with a drug habit, during his breaks as a mail carrier in the Chicago suburbs, a job he took after serving overseas as an army mechanic.
Johnny Cash would later record the song, omitting the lyric that Jesus died for nothing. Prine recorded more than 20 albums, won three Grammy Awards and defined the genre of music that we now know as Americana.
Prine’s daddy won’t take him back to Muhlenberg County in Kentucky, but his body will now float down the proverbial Green River to Paradise. Or maybe he’ll reappear as an angel who flies from Montgomery. Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see. That’s why last night and this mornin’ always look the same to me.
Hal Willner, a respected music producer who worked with Lou Reed and was the longtime music supervisor for Saturday Night Live, also died Tuesday at 64 with symptoms consistent with the coronavirus, though he had not been diagnosed.
Several talented musicians have been felled by this invisible enemy that attacks the lungs. Adam Schlesinger, the singer-songwriter who co-founded the rock band Fountains of Wayne, died April 1 at age 52 after being hospitalized for a week. He wrote the catchy Stacy’s Mom and the title track of the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do!
Alan Merrill, the singer-songwriter who co-wrote I Love Rock ’N Roll, which Joan Jett made famous, died on March 29 at 69 from the coronavirus. His daughter Laura wrote on Facebook that her father had been in good spirits, performing a few weeks before he died and posing for a photograph to appear on his new album. “He played down the ‘cold’ he thought he had,” she wrote. “I’ve made a million jokes about the ‘Rona’ and how it’ll ‘getcha’ ... boy do I feel stupid.”
Joe Diffie, the honky-tonk singer who topped the country charts in the 1990s with songs like Pickup Man, Third Rock From The Sun, Bigger Than the Beatles and Home, died March 29 at 61. Other hits included Honky Tonk Attitude, Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die) and If the Devil Danced (In Empty Pockets). He shared a Grammy with Merle Haggard for Same Old Train. Diffie also had writing credits for There Goes My Heart Again and My Give a Damn’s Busted.
“Diffie made hits that played well as background music, but had hooks that sent you grabbing for the volume knob,” wrote Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle.
Ellis Marsalis, the jazz pianist and musical patriarch, died April 1 in New Orleans at 85. And Wallace Roney, a Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter and composer who performed with Miles Davis, died March 31 in New Jersey at 59. Other musicians in this genre who have reportedly been killed by the coronavirus include saxophonist Marcelo Peralta, 59; Manu Dibango, 86, a Cameroonian afro-jazz saxophonist; Mike Longo, 83, a pianist and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie; and jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, 94.
The Washington Post’s Matt Schudel observed in his obituary of Prine that he had a significant influence on a younger generation of singer-songwriters, including Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who called him “the closest thing I could imagine to ever being around Mark Twain.”
Last week, as Prine fought for his life, late-night host Stephen Colbert shared a clip from 2016 of the two singing a duet of Prine’s 1978 song That’s the Way the World Goes Round.
Colbert remembered it as “one of the happiest moments” he has had as a television host. In the original clip, Colbert said they were not planning to broadcast it on CBS.
“Unless something terrible happens,” he added, “and we have to cheer up the world on the TV show.”