Oh no, John Prine. I’ve returned to him only occasionally over the past decade, but he's so deeply rooted in my history that the connection has required little tending in the normal span of time. His music operates somewhere outside of that.
It began like this: My mom got a sheaf of his CDs in my early teens, just before a summer of long car trips. They were the perfect thing to listen to while staring out the window at America lazing and struggling by, an increasingly rare point of alignment in taste between parent and surly, pretentious child. Having been raised on Garth and Shania, I was at that juncture headed down a dangerous path toward becoming someone who, in the words of Robbie Fulks, “liked every kind of music but country.”
Maybe Johnny Cash would’ve saved me from that fate in a year or so anyway, but Prine got there first, and it wasn’t because any aura of cool wafted from him. Cool was irrelevant to his storytelling—quick as a joke, heavy as a heart. There was a precision in those lines that hewed so close to the vernacular it sometimes took a beat to register that what had just hit you in the gut was art. There was a dogged curiosity about the full span of human experience, but especially the lives of the close-mouthed old.
A few years ago my friend Andrew texted me to talk about “Hello in There,” narrated by an old man with a son killed long ago by a war he can’t understand, whose recollection of brighter times, in its entirety, runs: “We had an apartment in the city. Me and Loretta liked living there.”
It occurred to me then to look up how old John Prine had been when he released this song, which appears on his self-titled debut album.
The answer was 25.
The same album includes “Angel from Montgomery,” and while Bonnie Raitt's version is more obviously beautiful, I love Prine's original for the weird power of in a young man in the country-rock scene of 1971 declaring without affectation, “I am an old woman, named after my mother.”
When I got home from that first road trip with John Prine I looked up the chords to “Paradise,” about the strip mining of a particular corner of Kentucky. There is almost nothing to it, musically—little enough that I felt confident not only learning it as a very new student of the guitar, but playing it at least once on the sidewalk outside the cool coffee shop where a poster of Johnny Cash held court on the other side of the wall. As a budding punk I was most taken by the middle verse (“They dug for their coal till the land was forsaken / Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man”) but now I think more of its power as an environmentalist anthem comes from lines like “the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill where the air smelled like snakes.” It’s that sort of thing that puts the place in irreplaceable.
