John Prine born October 10 1946

John Prine, (October 10 1946 - April 7, 2020) 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.

John Prine was born and grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago, the son of William Prine, a tool-and-die maker at the American Can Company, and Verna née Hamm, a homemaker. His parents had migrated north to Chicago from Kentucky, and his father’s love of country music was to have a powerful influence on Prine. At home, the radio was tuned to a local country station and with a favourable wind could pick up WSM in Nashville, the home of the Grand Ole Opry. Prine grew up with the songs of Roy Acuff and Hank Williams, and as a teenager was taught to play the guitar by an elder brother. Leaving high school, he worked as a postman.

In 1966 he was drafted into the US Army, but escaped Vietnam by being sent to Germany to work as a mechanic. 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 open-mic nights when, acting on a dare, he got up and performed. His first song was his Vietnam ode Sam Stone. He went on to sing Hello in There and Paradise, about the calamitous effect of strip-mining in the Kentucky coal town where his father had grown up. 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. And to find that out all at once was amazing.” After the show, the owner offered him a residency.

One night the Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert was in the audience. Ebert did not usually write about music, but 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.Soon Prine was performing regularly at Chicago’s leading folk club, Earl of Old Town, earning $1,000 a week – three times what he was earning as a postman. When he told the postmaster that he was quitting to follow a singing career, the supervisor advised him not to cash out his pension, warning: “You’ll be back.” Prine cashed out his pension. 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 for the rest of his career.

                                   

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. Prine admitted he could see no future for himself as a singer-songwriter until Dylan and Cash paired up on the album Nashville Skyline in 1969. 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 Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman. Suddenly there was a knock at the door and Dylan walked in and to his astonishment 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. Prine commanded a respect among his peers that far exceeded his popular recognition. Angelo Varias, a drummer who worked with Prine in the 1970s would recall his surprise when they performed at the Roxy in Los Angeles to find Phil Spector paying court. (Prine and Spector went on to collaborate on a song, God Only Knows).

Between 1971 and 1980 Prine released seven albums, firstly on Atlantic and then Asylum records. In 1981, feeling that the traditional relationship between artist and label weighed unfairly against the artist, Prine founded his own record label, Oh Boy, on which he would release all his recordings for the next 35 years. He toured constantly, usually preferring to drive himself between shows, building a loyal audience, lauded among his peers, but selling only a moderate amount of records. In 1991 he released his first album in five years, The Missing Years, where 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 and going on to tell a rambling tale of the Messiah partying in Rome, discovering the Beatles and recording with the Rolling Stones, ending on a sobering note: “I’m a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood.” The album went on to win a Grammy Award as Best Contemporary Folk Album.

A genial, laconic man who liked fishing, drinking and smoking, in 1998 Prine was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer on the right side of his neck. He later told The New York Times that his surgeon had fashioned a shield for his vocal cords, joking that it was as if he were Pavarotti, instead of a performer who talked more than he sang. The surgeon removed a piece of his neck and severed nerves in his tongue, while the radiation damaged some salivary glands. He spent a year recuperating and undergoing speech therapy before he was able to perform again, but the operation left his head permanently slumped and would change his voice to a gravelly growl. In 2013, Prine’s health suffered a further setback when he underwent surgery for lung cancer. As part of his recuperation, an imaginative physical therapist had Prine running up and down the stairs in his home, then grabbing his guitar while still out of breath and singing two songs.

In 2017, Rolling Stone proclaimed him "The Mark Twain of American songwriting." 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. “Summer’s end came faster than we wanted” he sang in the song of that title, a meditation on the passing seasons as a metaphor for life. Prine was nominated for 12 Grammy awards, and was a three-time winner, twice for Best Contemporary Folk Album. 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.

John & Fiona

On March 19, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Prine's wife Fiona revealed that she had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and had been quarantined in their home apart from him. He was hospitalized at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 26 after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. On March 30, Fiona tweeted that she had recovered and that John was not improving. Prine died on April 7, 2020, of Covid-19 complications at the age of 73.

(Edited from The Telegraph obit & Wikipedia)