My acquaintance with John Prine’s music started fairly inauspiciously with the album Prime Prine: The Best of John Prine, an okay introduction to Prine’s music, but not the best. I inherited that used LP indirectly from one of my sister's college roommates in 1979, when I was fifteen. I liked it well enough, but I listened to it only infrequently because I hadn’t yet developed the empathy and patience that Prine’s music required. However, because of Prime Prine, I did become acquainted with Sam Stone and a plethora of other great Prine musical characters.
Sometime between 1979 and 1988 I became a genuine fan of John Prine’s music. I bought the album John Prine Live in the summer of ‘88, when I was working for the US Forest Service. It’s a great album - John Prine duets with Bonnie Raitt on the definitive version of “Angel From Montgomery,” and it also contains my favorite version of his classic, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I love John Prine Live. That summer my dad became gravely ill and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Fortunately he was with us another twenty-one years. Prine’s music was a part of that awful time.
For over a decade after that, whenever John Prine released an album, it became the soundtrack of whatever was going on in my life at the moment. The Missing Years reminds me of my last winter at USU in Logan in 1991-92 and my last summer of working for the USFS in 1992. I bought the two disc anthology Great Days in September 1993 and listened to it almost non-stop that fall, my second year of teaching. Great Days introduced me to Prine’s back catalog, especially the 1973 album, Sweet Revenge, which became my favorite John Prine album. From the cover photo – one of my favorite album covers ever – of Prine with a screw you cynical smile on his face and his cowboy boots propped up on the passenger door of his convertible, to the title song, to “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” to “A Good Time,” Sweet Revenge is classic John Prine.
Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings came out in the spring of 1995. I bought it at my favorite record store at the time, Rock’s, in American Fork, UT. The album – especially the song “Lake Marie,” one of Prine’s greatest – reminds me of teaching at Midway Elementary that year. In Spite of Ourselves came out fall of 1999, right after I got married. In Spite of Ourselves is an album of country duets between John and a variety of great female singers. The high points of the album were two songs that he did with Iris Dement, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Not The Jet Set” and Prine’s original “In Spite of Ourselves,” another of his greatest (and funniest) songs. It’s a paean to a couple who love each other in spite of their foibles. That was something I aspired to in my marriage, but wasn’t succeeding at very well.
In 2005, at the height of George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Prine released Fair and Square. I was working as a principal at a charter school in Midway, UT, and I was separated from my (now) ex-wife, not for the first or last time. That album contains the song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” probably Prine’s most overtly political anthem. In it Prine sings:
“Have you ever noticed?
When you're feeling really good
There's always a pigeon
That'll come shit on your hood
Or you're feeling your freedom
And the world's off your back
Some cowboy from Texas
Starts his own war in Iraq”
Prine said one of his reasons for writing the song was “Jeez, if I get hit by a bus I would sure like the world to know that I was not a Republican.” I could definitely relate to that.
John Prine died on Monday, April 6, 2020, from complications from COVID-19. I cried when I heard about it, because it felt like I’d lost a friend. But John Prine’s songs - sad, funny, and supremely humane - will always be there for me. Vince Gill best described how Prine’s music makes me feel in his 2006 song “Some Things Never Get Old”:
“Makin' sweet love to that gal of mine
My first taste of bluebird wine
Eatin' watermelon down to the rind
Any old song by brother John Prine”
That’s a pretty good legacy.
