John Prine
He was a down-to-earth genius who wrote with humor and kindness, and inspired everyone from Dylan to Kacey Musgraves
The down-to-earth genius wrote with humor and kindness. Inside the life of an American original.
On John Prine’s final tour, he played everywhere from Radio City Music Hall to Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where his parents are from. But as he planned the itinerary for the last leg, there was one place he knew he still needed to hit: Paris. The city had never seemed to care for Prine. His down-toearth folk songs had spread to Ireland, England, and even Scandinavia, but a promoter told his touring manager Mitchell Drosin that there was no point in booking France; he’d lose money if he brought his band. “John said, ‘I don’t give a shit. I want to play Paris and stay at the George V,’ which is one of the most expensive hotels in the world,” says Drosin.
Drosin booked a show for February 13th at Paris’ 500-person Café de La Danse, much smaller than other venues on the tour. Prine cared about Paris in ways that even Fiona, his wife and manager, couldn’t fully explain. “He always loved that [Parisians] treated him with disdain, you know?” she says. “He just loved the people and the food and the idea he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He didn’t have much of an ego.”
At the show, Prine was in serious pain due to a collapsed hip, forcing him to sit in a chair onstage, something he never did. But he delivered. Fiona had seen hundreds of John’s shows since they met in 1988, but this one was special. The energy from the sold-out crowd overwhelmed him. He raised his hands at one point: “Viva la France!” he said. “He was so proud that he did that show, and it was sold out and they loved him,” Fiona says. “It felt like a victory lap.”
The entire tour had felt like a victory lap, in fact. His most recent album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, was Prine’s first LP of new material in 13 years, proving that even in his seventies he could write just as deeply as ever. For a half-century, Prine had covered subjects few others touched — the loneliness of the elderly, serial murders, a monkey lost in space — in songs that mixed folksy simplicity with sharp storytelling and a touch of the surreal. Artists like Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt had long been huge fans. But in the 2010s, Prine had become something of a national treasure. His songs had become a key reference point for a new generation of songwriters. Dan Auerbach, Jason Isbell, and Amanda Shires lost money on the road so they could open for him. Kacey Musgraves wrote a song where she fantasized about smoking a joint with him. Prine won lifetime achievement awards from the Grammys and the Americana Music Association. (“I’m getting Americana life achievement awards, and I never knew what Americana was,” he said. “But let ’em call me what they want, as long as they call me.”) He was excited to keep it going. By the time he went to Europe this year, he had written a half-dozen songs for his next album, and started work on an autobiography.
After the Paris show, Prine splurged on a French cheese platter (he usually opted for $12 deli trays). His hip pain was so bad that he decided to cancel the rest of the tour, but before returning home, he and
Fiona hung out in Paris for a few more days. They ordered room service every day, drank expensive wine, watched movies like Joker. “I just felt really tender towards him,”
Fiona says. Prine had had a series of health problems, dating back to the cancer he beat in the late Nineties. “Part of me knew that maybe I wasn’t going to have a whole lot of time left,” Fiona says. “But I believed we’d have a couple of more years.”
Prine and Fiona flew back to their home in Nashville, where he had successful emergency surgery on his hip. But in the days that followed, he developed a cough, which he assumed was related to his COPD. A doctor tested him and Fiona for COVID-19. A couple of days later, they stood in their home, the doctor on speakerphone, listening to the results. John’s result was “indeterminate”; Fiona’s was positive. Shocked, she self-quarantined, leaving the house for a few days and enduring a fairly mild case, all the time worrying about John.
Fiona returned home after getting cleared by the Health Department. Prine was subdued. He stayed glued to the news; he had a habit of taping all three network broadcasts each night. “He felt sorry for America,” Fiona says. “He’d tell me about how when he was a kid, nobody cared whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. It broke his heart when the country became this divided, and now, the political distancing was a physical distancing.”
Fiona and John needed to stay separated, so she would talk to him from the top of the stairs. “He would tell me, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fine.’ Then one day when I asked him how he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just exhausted. I can’t stay awake.’” She took him to a hospital, where his condition worsened. He died 12 days later due to complications from the virus.
The outpouring of love and grief around the world was huge and effusive. “John and I were ‘New Dylans’ together in the early Seventies,” said Bruce Springsteen. “He was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. He wrote music of towering compassion with an almost unheard-of precision and creativity when it came to observing the fine details of ordinary lives. He was a writer of great humor, funny, with wry sensitivity. It has marked him as a complete original.”
In interviews, Prine gave the impression that his success was dumb luck — bringing it all back to the moment when Paul Anka and Kris Kristofferson walked into an empty Chicago club in 1971 and saw him play, which led quickly to a record deal. But deep down, Fiona says, “He knew that all his songs were good songs, because they came from a place of sincerity. You know, divinely inspired. He had no doubt that he had a gift. And he respected it — even though he spent so many years, and so much of his career in the shadows.”
Prine was born in 1946, in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. His father, Bill, was a tool and die maker, an ardent Roosevelt Democrat and president of the local steelworkers union. Bill considered the family’s true home Muhlenberg County, the coal-mining town where Prine’s parents grew up before moving north so that Bill could find work.
Every summer, they would drive there for huge family reunions. The region gave birth to bluegrass heroes like Bill and Charlie Monroe and the Everly Brothers. When his parents’ hometown was strip-mined, he wrote a classic song about it: “Paradise,” which ended up on his first album.
Prine was a poor student with a restless imagination. He said his grades were “too ugly” for college. After graduating high
school in 1964, he took the advice of his oldest brother, Dave, and became a mailman. The pay was good, and so were the benefits. That life was upended when he was drafted into the Army in late 1966, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. But instead of being sent to Vietnam, Prine ended up in Stuttgart, West Germany, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. Prine played down his military service, describing his contribution as “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks.”
After the war, Prine returned to his mail route, which, it turned out, was great for writing songs. Wandering the Chicago suburbs, he wrote classics like “Donald and Lydia,” about two people who “made love from 10 miles away,” and “Sam Stone,” about a veteran who comes home from war and gets addicted to morphine. “A lot of stuff I was writing about were things I saw and felt and didn’t hear them in songs,” he said. “It was about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.”
Prine became an immediate sensation on the Chicago folk scene. Two days before his 24th birthday, he was performing at Chicago’s Fifth Peg when the Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert walked in. Ebert’s headline, “Singing Mailman Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words” led to sold-out rooms. Soon after that, the unlikely duo of
Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka dropped by to see Prine play at Chicago’s Earl of Old Town. Kristofferson would compare it to “stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene.”
Kristofferson invited Prine onstage at New York’s Bitter End. The next day, Atlantic Records President Jerry Wexler offered Prine a $25,000 deal with the label. “It was like a Cinderella sort of thing,” Prine said. With Anka serving as his manager, Prine cut the majority of his self-titled album at American Sound in Memphis, with the studio’s house band, the Memphis Boys, famed for their work with Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, and others. (Prine was nervous: “As soon as I finished the last note of every song I wanted to run out the door.”) The album barely dented the charts, but it’s now a touchstone for everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Steve Earle.
Raitt remembers first hearing “Angel From Montgomery,” about a housewife trapped in a dreary marriage. Raitt’s version in 1974 made it a hit. “The fact this very young man could inhabit this middle-aged woman,” she says, “and make it so real and so cinematic, it just touched me so deeply.”
Prine found a home in Nashville in 1977, when Cowboy Jack Clement invited him there to make a rockabilly album. “Cowboy’s motto was, ‘If we’re not having fun, we’re in the wrong business,’ ” Prine said. “We were high as dogs and playing some really good stuff.” They had so much fun that they never finished the album, but Prine fell in love with Nashville anyway.
In 1981, Prine decided to start his own label, Oh Boy Records, with his manager Al Bunetta. They sold his 1984 album, Aimless Love, via mail-order, with fans sending in checks. “He created the job I have,” said Americana songwriter Todd Snider, who released his early albums on Oh Boy. “Especially when he went to his own label, and started doing it with his own family and team. Before him, there was nothing for someone like Jason Isbell to aspire to, besides maybe Springsteen.”
Sony offered to buy Oh Boy, but Prine turned them down. He was comfortable with obscurity: “People thought I was their private family thing. They’d play me on car trips, and the kids, they’d learn my songs and they’d sing along in the car. It’s kind of like the way that original folk music was learned and passed on.”
In 1988, Prine was playing a show in Dublin, when he met Fiona. “There was a little bit of a danger about him, but he was gentle,” she says. “That was my first impression of John, just how gentle he was.” Fiona and her son Jody soon moved to Nashville. At 48, Prine had been married twice. “I was a high risk,” he later said. He became a father for the first time when their son Jack was born. Tommy followed the next year, and Prine adopted Jody. “All of a sudden I felt normal with a capital ‘N,’ ” he said. “I didn’t realize it, but it was something I was striving for after years and years of being a total daydreamer.”
In 1996, Prine noticed a lump on his neck. He’d thought it was a blood vessel; it was actually stage-4 neck cancer. He would recover, but when surgeons removed a tumor, they took a chunk of Prine’s neck with it. When a doctor told Prine he may never be able to sing again, Prine replied, “Have you ever heard me sing?”
Fiona got used to Prine’s rhythms. He’d get going around noon, then go eat at a meat-and-three, like Arnold’s, which was a favorite. When she was working around the house, she’d hear him in his den, reciting dialogue to old movies in real time. “John’s biggest thrill every day was when we figured out what we were having for dinner,” she says.
Tom Hanks, a huge fan, heard that Prine wrote his songs on a typewriter, so the actor sent him one. “He was excited like a little kid, that his favorite movie star had sent him a gift in the mail,” Fiona says. “He was blown away.”
While their marriage “was by no means perfect, we really knew each other on a really deep, cellular level,” she says. “There were things he found hard to articulate in conversations, things that scared him, maybe things he regretted. But he found a way to say it in his songs.” Fiona took over Oh Boy after the death of Prine’s manager and convinced John to write new songs. He came up with Tree of Forgiveness, stringing together the songs in a week.
Because Fiona had had coronavirus and was likely immune, doctors allowed her to sit with John in the ICU at Vanderbilt hospital. “I talked to him for 14, 15 hours a day and played music, played him other people doing his songs, played messages from all the kids and from his brothers and my family. I told him things that I wanted to tell him. He couldn’t communicate with me, but I just assumed that he could hear me.”
Half of Prine’s ashes will be buried in Chicago; the other half will be spread in the Green River in Paradise, Kentucky, just like he asked for in “Paradise.” Because of the COVID-19 crisis, the family can’t have a public funeral. “This weekend,” Fiona says, “I’m going to wash all of his Cadillacs, park them all in the driveway. I would never let him do that.”
The last song on Prine’s last album is “When I Get to Heaven.” He sings about checking into a “swell hotel” and opening a bar called the Tree of Forgiveness, where he’ll hang out with his family, drink and smoke, and even invite “a few choice critics.” “It came as the biggest surprise when I learned about how deep and yet uncomplicated John’s faith was in God and the afterlife,” Fiona says. “We always talked about how God pops up in so many of his songs. But he really did believe with no doubt that he would die and he would be in heaven.”