Grammy winner John Prine dies
The revered singersongwriter, 73, who was known for his keen observations and mordant humor, suffered complications from COVID-19.
John Prine, who traded his job as a Chicago mail carrier to become one of the most revered singer-songwriters of the last halfcentury, died on Tuesday of COVID-19 complications, after surviving multiple bouts with cancer. He was 73.
Prine died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. His family announced his death.
Since he broke through onto the folk scene with his 1971 self-titled debut album, Prine was hailed by critics and his musical peers for his keen observational powers, mordant sense of humor and finely wrought portraits of the human condition, from his trenchant tale of a Vietnam vet’s downward spiral upon his unceremonious homecoming (“Sam Stone”) to his empathetic expressions of the loneliness of old age (“Angel From Montgomery” and “Hello in There”).
He had been hospitalized on March 26 with coronavirus symptoms, on the heels of previous hospitalizations for heart issues, in addition to treatments for throat cancer in 1998 and lung cancer in 2013. Both affected his singing voice, but he continued touring regularly up through last year.
“This is hard news for us to share,” his family said in a statement March 29. “But so many of you have loved and supported John over the years, we wanted to let you know, and give you the chance to send on more of that love and support now. And know that we love you, and John loves you.”
The statement said his symptoms came on suddenly and he was intubated on March 29, at which time he was listed in critical condition.
Earlier this year Prine was given the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the 62nd Grammy Awards ceremony. Over the years he was nominated for 11 Grammys and won twice. In 2005, at the request of U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Prine became the first singersongwriter to read and perform at the Library of Congress. In 2019, he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Bob Dylan counted Prine among his favorite songwriters, telling an interviewer in 2009: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind-trips to the Nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone,’ the soldier-junkiedaddy and ‘Donald and Lydia,’ where people make love from 10 miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.”
Prine’s eponymous debut album included songs that Bette Midler and Bonnie Raitt would soon bring to much broader audiences through hit versions of “Hello in There” and “Angel From Montgomery.”
That album, and those songs, set the tone for much of his career: gently rolling ballads of striking depth, often set to his own fingerpicked acoustic guitar accompaniment.
Another song from that debut album, “Paradise,” lamented the devastation of the natural beauty of Kentucky by the coal mining companies and has become a modern-day bluegrass standard:
Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay / Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
“Since the rise of Kris Kristofferson, there must have been 150 albums by new artists in roughly the same folk/country tradition,” Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn wrote upon that album’s release almost 50 years ago, “but I don’t recall any of them being as exciting as the debut album from 25-year-old John Prine.” The album earned him a Grammy nomination for best new artist in 1973.
That album was no fluke — in the ensuing half-century, Prine wrote hundreds of songs and released more than a dozen studio albums, earning himself a place as one of the esteemed practitioners of Americana music.
A new generation of Americana and progressive country singer-songwriters regularly sang his praises, among them Kacey Musgraves (who wrote and recorded a song about her fantasy meeting with him, “Burn One With John Prine”), Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price and Brandy Clark.
His songs have been recorded by country, folk and rock stars, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to John Denver and Carly Simon to 10,000 Maniacs and the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg.
Prine spun out some of the most haunting sketches of compelling characters since Mark Twain, to whom both his humor and insights into the human condition were often compared.
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” from 1971’s “Sam Stone,” was the way Prine powerfully crystallized so many military vets’ experience upon returning home from Vietnam.
He focused an unsentimental eye on everything he wrote, including his own mortality in the wake of his brushes with death from cancer. On his most recent album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” released in 2018, he included “When I Get to Heaven,” a song in which he imagined reaching the Pearly Gates, hoisting a cocktail and firing up “a cigarette nine miles long.”
As he explained to The Times in an interview when the album was released, “Surely they don’t have ‘No Smoking’ signs in heaven. I really miss smoking cigarettes. I gave them up the night before I had my neck surgery…. But I never stopped thinking about it. I thought, ‘Where in the hell can I smoke cigarettes? It’s not going to be anywhere down here.’ So I thought, maybe when I get to heaven I can smoke cigarettes.”
Four decades earlier, he’d recorded “Illegal Smile,” an ode to the joys of recreational pot smoking.
Prine also was a maverick businessman, who walked away from the major record labels to start a mail-order business of his own, Oh Boy! Records, an early model for the coming independent label boom of the 1990s and 21st century.
John Prine was born Oct. 10, 1946, in Maywood, Ill., to William Prine and Verna Hamm, and picked up the guitar as a teenager, with some lessons from his brother, David.
After graduating from high school, he spent two years in the Army and found work with the U.S. Postal Service when he came home.
He soon discovered motivation for pursuing a music career: He quipped that he’d much prefer scraping together a living playing for tips and the occasional free beer in bars to carting mail around Chicago in the winter.
He befriended another promising young singer and songwriter, Steve Goodman, and the two often performed together over the years, and collaborated occasionally on songs, including “Souvenirs,” which was recorded by both men. Goodman’s manager, Al Bunetta, quickly added Prine to his management roster and remained in that role for more than four decades.
One of Prine’s biggestselling recordings was “In Spite of Ourselves,” a 1999 collection of duets on old country songs with several of his favorite female singers, including Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless and others. The title track, an original sung with Iris DeMent, is his most-streamed song on Spotify.
Prine assembled a sequel in “For Better, or Worse,” another group of vintage country songs with vocal partners including DeMent, Lambert, Lee Ann Womack, Alison Krauss and, as he had done before, one track with his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine. It brought him to the country charts for the first time in more than a decade.
That served as a prelude to his first album of new songs in more than a decade, “The Tree of Forgiveness.”
Upon hearing that the album had landed him three Grammy nominations in December, he told The Times: “The attention the record’s gotten has really knocked me out. That wasn’t something that was totally expected .... It’s a good feeling to have when you’re 72.
“My first Grammy nomination? I was 24,” he said. “To still be in the game now is just great.”
In addition to his wife, who had also previously tested positive for the novel coronavirus but has since recovered, Prine’s survivors include sons Jody, Tommy and Jack.