John Prine dies of complications from COVID-19,
John Prine, the raspy-voiced country-folk singer whose ingenious lyrics to songs by turns poignant, angry and comic made him a favourite of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and others, died Tuesday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. He was 73.
The cause was complications from COVID-19, his family said.
Prine underwent cancer surgery in 1998 to remove a tumour in his neck identified as squamous cell cancer, which had damaged his vocal cords. In 2013, he had part of one lung removed to treat lung cancer.
Prine was a relative unknown in 1970 when Kristofferson heard him play one night at a small Chicago club called the Fifth Peg, dragged there by singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. Kristofferson was performing in Chicago at the time. Prine treated him to a brief after-hours performance of material that, Kristofferson later wrote, “was unlike anything I’d heard before.”
A few weeks later, when Prine was in New York, Kristofferson invited him onstage at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where he was appearing with Carly Simon, and introduced him to the audience.
“No way somebody this young can be writing so heavy,” he said. “John Prine is so good, we may have to break his thumbs.”
Record executive Jerry Wexler, who was in the audience, signed Prine to a contract with Atlantic Records the next day.
Music writers at the time were eager to crown a successor to Dylan, and Prine, with his nasal, sandpapery voice and literate way with a song, came ready to order.
His debut album, called simply “John Prine” and released in 1971, included songs that became his signatures. Some gained wider fame after being recorded by other artists.
They included “Sam Stone,” about a drug-addicted war veteran (with the unforgettable refrain “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes”); “Hello in There,” a heart-rending evocation of old age and loneliness; and “Angel From Montgomery,” the hardluck lament of a middle-aged woman dreaming about a better life, later made famous by Bonnie Raitt.
“He’s a true folk singer in the best folk tradition, cutting right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain,” Raitt told Rolling Stone in 1992.
Dylan, listing his favourite songwriters for the Huffington Post in 2009, put Prine front and centre.
“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” he said. “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”
Prine had a particular gift for offbeat humour, reflected in songs like “Jesus, the Lost Years,” “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” and the anti-war screed “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.”
“I guess what I always found funny was the human condition,” he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London in 2013. “There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents.”
In 2019, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and his album “Tree of Forgiveness” was nominated for a Grammy, for best Americana album. It was his 19th album and his first of original material in more than a decade. (The award went to Brandi Carlile, for “By the Way, I Forgive You.”)
In December, he was chosen to receive a 2020 Grammy for lifetime achievement.