The songwriter who saw poetry in everyday lives
In his five-decade career, John Prine never had a hit record. But the country-folk singer earned reverence from fellow troubadours—Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and Bruce Springsteen were among his fans—and a reputation as one of America’s most keeneyed songsmiths. With simple language and sparse lines, Prine could etch memorable characters and speak to universal emotions. Among the former were the drug-addicted Vietnam War vet in “Sam Stone,” the unfulfilled housewife in “Angel From Montgomery,” and the forgotten old couple in “Hello in There”— acknowledged classics Prine wrote by his early 20s. Dylan called the musician’s work “pure Proustian existentialism,” though the freewheeling Prine was more often compared to Mark Twain for his mordant humor and homespun profundity. “What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn’t sure was going to be interesting to other people,” said Prine, who died of complications from Covid-19. “But I guess it was.”
He was born in a Chicago suburb, where his father, William, “was a tool and die maker and the president of the local steelworkers union,” said Rolling Stone. William was also a transplanted Kentuckian who raised his four sons on
John Prine
Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. A poor student with a “restless imagination,” Prine started writing songs as a teenager. After serving as an Army mechanic in Germany, Prine became a postman, dreaming up lyrics while delivering letters in the Chicago suburbs. He built a following in folk clubs, getting boosts from movie critic Roger Ebert, who wrote an admiring column (“After a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics”), and Kristofferson, who helped Prine land a deal with Atlantic Records. Prine “turned out records at a brisk pace” throughout the 1970s, said NPR.com. After moving to Nashville, he slowed his output in later years, especially after being operated on for stage 4 neck cancer in 1998—surgery that changed both his appearance and his voice. Formerly “something of a hellraiser,” he settled down after marrying for the third time and becoming a father at age 48, said The Guardian (U.K.). In a late-career twist, Prine achieved the biggest success of his career with the 2018 album The Tree of Forgiveness, which reached No. 5 on the pop chart. “I gotta say, there’s no better feeling than having a killer song in your pocket,” he said last year, “and you’re the only one in the world who’s heard it.”