John Prine
Bard of the Midwest who wrote about human frailty and laid bare the struggles of life in America
JOHN PRINE, who has died of Covid-19 complications aged 73, was a singer and songwriter whose folksy songs cut to the quick of quotidian American life with their themes of human frailty, loneliness and foolishness.
Combining humour and beady perception, his work was praised by Bob Dylan as “pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” Prine’s songs more often resembled short stories, sometimes spoken as much as sung, which mined the same seam of “dirty realism” as writers such as Richard Ford and Raymond Carver.
Sam Stone, written at the height of the Vietnam War, told the story of a soldier returning home “With a purple heart and a monkey on his back” who dies of a drug overdose, trading “his house that he bought on the GI bill/ For a flag-draped casket on a local hero’s hill”.
Quirky humour and clever wordplay were essential elements of a Stone performance. His duet with Iris Dement, In Spite of Ourselves, was a rambunctious dialogue of complaints between a man and woman (“He ain’t too sharp but he gets things done / Drinks his beer like it’s oxygen / She likes ketchup on her scrambled eggs / Swears like a sailor when she shaves her legs”) culminating in the joyous declaration: “In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up a-sittin’ on a rainbow.”
Prine’s stage performance, with his homespun wisdom and gentle wisecracks in the tall stories he told between songs, led the singer Bonnie Raitt (who recorded his song Angel From Montgomery) to describe him as “probably the closest thing for those of us that didn’t get the blessing of seeing Mark Twain in person”.
John Prine was born on October 10 1946 and grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago, the son of William Prine, a tool-and-die maker, and Verna née Hamm. His parents had migrated from Kentucky, and his father’s love of country music had a powerful influence on Prine, who was taught to play the guitar by an older brother.
He worked as a postman, and in
1966 he was drafted into the US Army, but escaped Vietnam by being sent to Germany to work as a mechanic, “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks”.
On his discharge he returned to his postal job, composing songs in his head as he completed his rounds. In 1969 he was at a club called the Fifth Peg in Chicago, which hosted openmic nights when, acting on a dare, he got up and performed his Vietnam ode
Sam Stone.
Prine would later remember how when he finished the last verse, with the lines, “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes / Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose …” the audience remained unnervingly silent. He went on to sing Paradise, about the calamitous effect of stripmining in the Kentucky coal town where his father had grown up. “The coal company came with the world’s largest shovel / And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land / Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken / Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
The audience burst into applause, and later he wrote: “It was like I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate deep feelings and emotions.” After the show, the owner offered him a residency.
One night the Chicago Sun-times film critic Roger Ebert was in the audience and in a review for the paper he lionised Prine as a true original, and Sam Stone as one of the great songs of the century. “He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight,” Ebert wrote, “but after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics.”
Soon Prine was performing regularly at Chicago’s leading folk club, Earl of Old Town, making $1,000 a week – three times what he was earning as a postman. With the help of Kris Kristofferson, who had seen him performing, Prine signed to Atlantic, and in 1971 released his eponymous debut album, with songs that would remain central to his repertoire. In the liner notes Kristofferson wrote that Prine was “Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s 220.”
Initially, Prine’s drawling vocals and folksy songs led to him labouring under the thankless sobriquet of “the new Dylan”. Certainly Dylan was an influence, as was Johnny Cash.
But Prine was very much his own man, and no one recognised it more than Dylan himself. Prine enjoyed telling the story of how, before his first album had been released, he was invited to Carly Simon’s apartment with Kristofferson and Steve Goodman. Suddenly there was a knock at the door and Dylan walked in.
“You could have sent a Martian down and that wouldn’t have surprised us as much,” Prine recalled, and his astonishment grew when Dylan began singing along on a number of Prine’s songs. Dylan, it transpired, had been listening to an advance copy of the album, and was unstinting in his admiration. “Nobody but Prine could write like that,” he said.
Prine commanded a respect among his peers that far exceeded his popular recognition. Angelo Varias, a drummer who worked with Prine, recalled his surprise when they performed at the Roxy in Los Angeles to find Phil Spector paying court. (They went on to collaborate on a song, God Only Knows). Between 1971 and 1980 Prine released seven albums, firstly on
Atlantic and then on Asylum records. In 1981, feeling that the traditional relationship between artist and label weighed unfairly against the artist, Prine founded his own label, Oh Boy, which carried all his recordings for the next 35 years.
In 1991 he released his first album in five years, The Missing Years, on which he was joined by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Bonnie Raitt on backing vocals. The title song was a humorous account of the unrecorded years between Jesus’s childhood and his ministry, beginning: “It was raining, it was cold, West Bethlehem was no place for a 12-year-old …” and going on to tell a rambling tale of the Messiah partying in Rome, discovering the Beatles and recording with the Rolling Stones. The album went on to win a Grammy Award.
A genial, laconic man who liked fishing, drinking and smoking, in 1998 Prine was diagnosed with cancer on the right side of his neck. He told The New York Times that his surgeon had fashioned a shield for his vocal cords; Prine joked that it was as if he were Pavarotti. “He was going to all this trouble, and I finally said: ‘Have you ever heard me sing?’”
The resulting operation left his head permanently slumped and changed his voice to a gravelly growl. In 2013 he underwent further surgery, for lung cancer.
In 2018, he released his 18th and final album, The Tree of Forgiveness, in which he brooded on the subjects of ageing, mortality and death. Prine was nominated for 12 Grammy awards, and was a three-time winner; shortly before his death he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
He was married three times, lastly to Fiona Whelan, whom he wed in 1996. The couple had a home in Galway, Ireland, where they spent part of each year, and where Prine was often to be found drinking and playing in Green’s pub or The Travellers Inn.
He is survived by his wife and three sons, Jody, Jack and Tommy.