[msb-alumni] John Prine; American Roots Musician and Award-Winning Songwriter, dies at 73 due to Coronavirus Complications on April 7, 2020

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 23:12:29 -0400

BlankJohn Prine; American Roots Musician and Award-Winning Songwriter, dies at
73 due
to Coronavirus Complications on April 7, 2020

John Prine, One of America’s Greatest Songwriters, Dead at 73

Grammy-winning singer who combined literary genius with a common touch succumbs
to
coronavirus complications

By
Stephen L. Betts
&
Patrick Doyle
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John Prine, the Grammy-winning singer who combined literary genius with a
common
touch, has died at 73 from coronavirus complications.

Charlie Gillett Collection/Getty Images

John Prine, who for five decades wrote rich, plain-spoken songs that chronicled
the
struggles and stories of everyday working people and changed the face of modern
American roots music, died Tuesday at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical
Center. He was 73. The cause was complications related to COVID-19, his family
confirmed to Rolling Stone.

Related: 25 Essential Songs

Prine, who left behind an extraordinary body of folk-country classics, was
hospitalized last month after the sudden onset of COVID-19 symptoms, and was
placed
in intensive care for 13 days. Prine’s wife and manager, Fiona, announced on
March
17th that she had tested positive for the virus after they had returned from a
European tour.

As a songwriter, Prine was admired by Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and
others,
known for his ability to mine seemingly ordinary experiences  — he wrote many
of his
classics as a mailman in Maywood, Illinois — for revelatory songs that covered
the
full spectrum of the human experience. There’s “Hello in There,” about the
devastating loneliness of an elderly couple; “Sam Stone,” a portrait of a
drug-addicted Vietnam soldier suffering from PTSD; and “Paradise,” an ode to
his
parents’ strip-mined hometown of Paradise, Kentucky, which became an
environmental
anthem. Prine tackled these subjects with empathy and humor, with an eye for
“the
in-between spaces,” the moments people don’t talk about, he told Rolling Stone
in
2017.  “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan said in 2009.
“Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”

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Prine was also an author, actor, record-label owner, two-time Grammy winner, a
member
of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and
the
recipient of the 2016 PEN New England Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award,
a
honor previously given to Leonard Cohen and Chuck Berry. Prine helped shape the
Americana genre that has gained popularity in recent years, with the success of
Prine
fans such as Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Brandi Carilie, to name a few. His
music
was covered by Bonnie Raitt (who popularized “Angel From Montgomery,” his
soulful
ballad about a woman stuck in a hopeless marriage), George Strait, Carly Simon,
Johnny Cash, Don Williams, Maura O’Connell, the Everly Brothers, Joan Baez,
Todd
Snider, Carl Perkins, Bette Midler, Gail Davies, and dozens of others.

Though he was an underground singer-songwriter for most of his career, Prine
had a
remarkable final act. In 2018, he released The Tree of Forgiveness, his first
album
of original material in 13 years. The album went to Number Five on the
Billboard 200,
the highest debut of his career, and he played some of his biggest shows ever,
including a sold-out tour kickoff at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The
album was
released on Oh Boy Records, the independent label Prine started with his
longtime
manager, business partner, and friend Al Bunetta. In recent years, Prine, his
wife,
and son Jody ran the label out of a small Nashville home office.

Prine’s string of acclaimed solo albums began with his self-titled 1971 debut
on
Atlantic Records, featuring a tracklist that reads like a greatest-hits
compilation:
“Illegal Smile,” “Spanish Pipedream,” “Hello in There,” “Sam Stone,”
“Paradise,”
“Donald and Lydia,” “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” and
“Angel
From Montgomery” among them. Throughout his career, Prine explored a wide
variety of
musical styles, from hard country to rockabilly to bluegrass; he liked to say
that he
tried to live in a space somewhere between his heroes Johnny Cash and Dylan.

Prine was born in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. His father was a
tool and
die maker and the president of the local steelworkers union, and raised John
and his
three brothers on the music of Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Hank
Williams, and
other heroes of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Though he was a poor student, Prine
was a
natural songwriter; two songs he wrote when he was 14, “Sour Grapes” and “The
Frying
Pan,” ended up on his LP Diamonds in the Rough, more than 10 years later. Prine
had a
restless imagination — “I would go to class and just stare at something like a
button
on the teacher’s shirt,” he said — but he excelled at hobbies he focused on,
like
gymnastics, which he was inspired to take up by his older brother, Doug. “Here
was
something I had no natural ability in, and I could do it well,” Prine said.

After graduating high school in 1964, Prine took the advice of his oldest
brother,
Dave, and became a mailman. Wandering around the Chicago suburbs, Prine wrote
many of
his classic early songs. During his postman years, he wrote “Donald and Lydia,”
about
a couple who “make love from 10 miles away,” and “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You
Into
Heaven Anymore,” a humorous indictment of misguided patriotism, after he
noticed that
locals were posting American flag decals that were included in an issue of
Reader’s
Digest around the neighborhood.

Prine was forced to take a hiatus from his postal career 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 lucked out and was sent to 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,” as he told
Rolling
Stone. But the experience did bring him to write maybe his greatest song: “Sam
Stone.” The ballad is about a soldier who comes home from the war mentally
shattered, turning to morphine to ease the pain. “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm
where
all the money goes,” Prine sings in the chorus, “Jesus Christ died for nothin’,
I
suppose.”

“I was trying to say something about our soldiers who’d go over to Vietnam,
killing
people and not knowing why you were there,” Prine told Rolling Stone in 2018.
“And
then a lot of soldiers came home and got hooked on drugs and never could get
off of
it. I was just trying to think of something as hopeless as that. My mind went
right
to ‘Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.’ I said, ‘That’s pretty
hopeless.’ ”
When Johnny Cash covered the song, he rewrote the chorus, changing “Jesus
Christ died
for nothin’, I suppose,” to “Daddy must have hurt a lot back then, I suppose.”
(“If
it hadn’t have been Johnny Cash,” Prine said, “I would’ve said, ‘Are you
nuts?’”)

Prine became an immediate sensation on the Chicago folk scene. On the day
before his
24th birthday, he was performing at Chicago’s Fifth Peg when the now-iconic
Chicago
Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert walked in. Ebert’s headline, ‘Singing Mailman
Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words,’ led to sold-out rooms. Soon,
Prine’s
friend and musical partner Steve Goodman convinced Kris Kristofferson and Paul
Anka
to drop by to see Prine play at the Earl of Old Town in the summer of 1971.

“It was too damned late, and we had an early wake-up ahead of us, and by the
time we
got there, Old Town was nothing but empty streets and dark windows,”
Kristofferson
later wrote in the liner notes for Prine’s first album. “And the club was
closing.
But the owner let us come in, pulled some chairs off a couple of tables, and
John
unpacked his guitar and got back up to sing. … By the end of the first line we
knew
we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when
he
first busted onto the Village scene.”

Kristofferson invited Prine onstage at New York’s legendary Bottom Line. The
next
day, Atlantic Records President Jerry Wexler offered Prine a $25,000 deal with
the
label. 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, Bobby Womack, and
others.
Though Prine lamented how nervous he sounded on the recording, and it did not
make a
major dent on the charts, it is now considered a classic, a touchstone for
everyone
from Bonnie Raitt to Steve Earle to Sturgill Simpson. In January 1973, Prine
was
nominated for a Grammy as Best New Artist, and Bette Midler included “Hello in
There”
on her debut LP, The Divine Miss M. Midler recently called Prine “one of the
loveliest people I was ever lucky enough to know. He is a genius and a huge
soul.”

“He was incredibly endearing and witty,” Raitt told Rolling Stone in 2016. She
met
Prine in the early Seventies and first covered “Angel From Montgomery” in 1974.
“The
combination of being that tender and that wise and that astute, mixed with his
homespun sense of humor — it was probably the closest thing for those of us
that didn’t
get the blessing of seeing Mark Twain in person.”

While Prine may have been signed to Atlantic Records, he did not conform to pop
music’s
rules. His follow-up to his self-titled album, 1972’s Diamonds in the Rough,
was a
stripped-down acoustic album that paid homage to his Appalachian bluegrass
roots,
which he recorded with his brother Dave for around “$7,200 including beer.”
Prine
likened the major-label system to a bank “for high-finance loans. You could go
to a
bank and do the same thing for less money and put a loan behind your career
instead
of a major label throwing parties for you and charging you, and giving you the
ticket
and not asking what you want to eat.”

Feeling that the label could have done more to promote the hard-edged 1975
album
Common Sense, he asked co-founder Ahmet Ertegun to let him out of his contract.
Ertegun agreed, and Prine moved to David Geffen’s smaller Asylum label for
1978’s
excellent Bruised Orange, which was produced by Goodman, with classics like
“That’s
the Way That the World Goes Round” (later covered by Miranda Lambert) and the
heartbreaking “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” a meditation on loneliness
from
the point of view of 1930s film star Sabu Dastagir. “When I wrote that one and
‘Jesus
the Missing Years,’ ” Prine recently told Rolling Stone, “I was afraid to sing
them
for somebody else. I thought they were going to look at me and say, ‘You’ve
done it.
You’ve crossed the line. You need the straitjacket.’ But if I let it sit for a
couple
weeks and it still affects me, it’s something I would like to hear somebody
say, then
I figure, my instinct is as good as a normal person. I would like to hear that
somebody do that, so I just go ahead and jump into it.”

Prine’s offbeat odyssey continued with Pink Cadillac, a rockabilly album he
made with
Sam Phillips and Phillips’ sons Jerry and Knox. By 1982, Prine decided to
follow the
path of his friend Goodman and start his own label, Oh Boy Records, with
Bunetta.
Following a Christmas single, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”/”Silver Bells,”
Prine’s
first LP release was 1984’s Aimless Love. The business model, with fans sending
in
checks by mail, was a success, and early proof that singer-songwriters could
survive
without the support of a major label. “He created the job I have,” said
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.”

In 1989, Sony offered to buy Oh Boy, an offer Prine turned down. Two years
later, he
scored one of the biggest successes of his career with 1991’s The Missing
Years.
Produced by Howie Epstein of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, it featured guest
appearances
by Petty, Springsteen, and Raitt. The title track, “Jesus the Missing Years” is
one
of Prine’s most ambitious songs, attempting to fill in the 18-year gap (from
age 12
to 29) in Jesus Christ’s life unaccounted for in the Bible. It won a Grammy for
Best
Contemporary Folk Album.

Prine was married three times. He married his high school sweetheart, Ann
Carole, in
1966, and they stayed together until the late Seventies. He wed songwriter and
bassist Rachel Peer, who he met at Cowboy Jack Clement’s Nashville studio, in
1984.
In 1988, Prine was in Ireland when he met Fiona Whelan, a Dublin
recording-studio
business manager. She soon moved to Nashville and they married in April 1996.
By
then, she had given birth to their two sons, Jack and Tommy. “It brought me
right
down to earth,” Prine said. “I was a dreamer. I learned real fast I don’t know
anything except songwriting.” Prine also adopted Jody Whelan, Fiona’s son from
a
previous relationship. Jody and Fiona would eventually become Prine’s
co-managers,
overseeing the most commercially successful moment in his career.

This idyllic chapter of Prine’s life was complicated in 1997 when, during the
sessions for In Spite of Ourselves — a successful duets album with women,
including
Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Patty Loveless — Prine
discovered a
cancerous growth on his neck. It was stage 4 cancer. “I felt fine,” Prine said
later.
“It doesn’t hit you until you pull up to the hospital and you see ‘cancer’ in
big
letters, and you’re the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.”

In January 1998, doctors removed a small tumor, taking a portion of the
singer’s neck
with it, altering his physical appearance. Prine thought he might never sing
again.
However, after a year and a half, he returned to performing, with a small show
in
Bristol, Tennessee. “The crowd was with me. Boy, were they with me,” he said.
“And I
think I shook everybody’s hand afterward. I knew right then and there that I
could do
it.”

The next decade brought Prine another Grammy for 2005’s Fair & Square. That
year,
Prine joined Ted Kooser, 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, becoming the
first
artist to read and play at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Prine
saw his
already formidable influence reach another generation of artists, including
Jason
Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, and Kacey Musgraves.

In 2013, Prine was again sidelined briefly, diagnosed with a spot on his left
lung.
Six months after the cancer was removed, he was back on the road. Following
Buntta’s
2015 death, Prine became sole owner and president of Oh Boy Records, which has
also
been home to recordings by Snider, Dan Reeder, R.B. Morris, and Heather Eatman,
among
others.

His last studio album, The Tree of Forgiveness, was released in April 2018,
just six
months after he was named the Americana Music Association’s Artist of the Year.
Rolling Stone said the album had “all the qualities that have defined him as
one of
America’s greatest songwriters.”

Prine attended the Grammys in January, where he received a Lifetime Achievement
Award. The singer could be seen on television with his family, grinning and
wearing
sunglasses, as Bonnie Raitt sang “Angel From Montgomery.” Last year, Prine was
inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Onstage, he summed up why he chose
a life
as a songwriter: “I gotta say, there’s no better feeling than having a killer
song in
your pocket, and you’re the only one in the world who’s heard it.”

Follow-Ups:
- [msb-alumni] Re: John Prine; American Roots Musician and Award-Winning Songwriter, dies at 73 due to Coronavirus Complications on April 7, 2020
  - From: Fred Olver

[msb-alumni] John Prine; American Roots Musician and Award-Winning Songwriter, dies at 73 due to Coronavirus Complications on April 7, 2020

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