Country folk singer Prine, 73, dead from virus complications
LOS ANGELES — Grammy-winning singer John Prine, who wrote his early songs in his head while delivering mail and later emerged from Chicago’s folk revival scene in the 1970s to become one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, died on Tuesday, the New York Times reported. He was 73.
Prine was hospitalized on March 26 suffering from symptoms of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, according to his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine, who was also his manager.
The Times reported that Prine’s death was caused by complications of COVID-19.
Born in Chicago on Oct. 10, 1946, to William Prine and Verna Hamm, both originally of Kentucky, Prine was taught by his older brother David to play guitar at 14 and attended music classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
After graduating from high school in suburban Maywood, Ill., Prine worked as a mail carrier for five years, performing in Chicago clubs in the evenings at occasional “open-mike” nights.
He would say later that some of his best-known early songs were written while he walked the streets of Chicago delivering mail.
“I likened the mail route to being in a library without any books. You just had time to be quiet and think, and that’s where I would come up with a lot of songs. If the song was any good I could remember it later and write it down,” Prine told the Chicago Tribune in a 2010 interview.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1966, stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War, before returning home to dedicate himself to music and establishing himself as a leading member of Chicago’s folk revival scene.
Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson fatefully saw Prine performing at the Earl of Old Town club, leading to Prine’s signing with Atlantic Records and self-titled debut album, released in 1971.
That album, widely praised by critics, contained several songs that would become staples of Prine’s catalogue.
They included Angel from Montgomery, about a woman wishing for deliverance from her unfulfilling life, Paradise, about a Kentucky town devastated by strip mining, and Sam Stone, chronicling the downward spiral of a drug-addicted Vietnam War veteran and containing the oft-quoted refrain: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose.”
The songs have since each been covered dozens of times by other artists.
His early songwriting style earned comparisons with no less than folk great Bob Dylan, who later called Prine one of his favourites.