12/28/20

One friend had a Spanish teacher in high school who sang and played John Prine songs on her guitar after class. Another learned about Prine as an exchange student in Canada when a guy sang “Hello in There” between slugs from a whiskey bottle. One sang “Paradise” a capella with his buddies as they backpacked across Guatemala. COVID-19 killed John Prine, but his death Tuesday pushed pandemic news – and almost everything else – off my social media feeds. Decades after Prine’s music spread turntable to turntable, guitarist to guitarist, the people who loved him honored him with fond memories and favorite songs. Keenly observed character sketches like “Angel from Montgomery” and “The Oldest Baby in the World.” Raucous novelty tunes like “Dear Abby” and “The Bottomless Lake.” Songs of hard-won romance like “Unlonely” and “Boundless Love.” Meditations on death both somber (“Sam Stone”) and serene (“When I Get to Heaven”). Eight years ago, when I started researching the book that would become John Prine: In Spite of Himself, the protagonist seemed well past his prime. He was a beloved cult figure meandering to the finish line after years of hard living, pushing through divorces and bouts with cancer. He toured regularly, but his years as a vital songwriter seemed far behind him. Or so I thought. Prine got his start at the dawn of the 1970s, when the music business was a star-making colossus overflowing with cash. That business model did little for Prine, though. His songs captured the small-but-telling details of life, from the chain-smoked Camel cigarettes in “Grandpa Was a Carpenter” to the melting snowmen in “All the Best.” Appropriately, his music rippled out into the world via similar moments in the lives of ordinary people, in dorm rooms and coffeehouses, on porches and beaches. So Prine left Atlantic and Asylum behind, started his own little record label, and kept right on doing what he had always done. He had his biggest hit album to date in 1991 at the unlikely age of 45. That was thanks in small part to contributions from friends and admirers like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. But the real stars of The Missing Years were the brilliant songs inspired by his second divorce and new romance with Fiona Whelan, the Irishwoman who would become the mother of his sons, his third wife, and his final manager. He ended the millennium with a bang, a delightful album of duets, In Spite of Ourselves, that inspired the title of my book. He went through his first bout with cancer while making that album. After he quit smoking and had part of his neck cut out, he emerged with a clean bill of health and a voice even more ragged than before. Prine released a second album of charming duets in 2016, For Better, or Worse. Otherwise he mostly marked time and toured, delighting audiences with his classic songs and bone-dry sense of humor. His family did the world a huge favor when they ordered him to write material for a new album. He checked into a hotel in downtown Nashville and checked out a week later with the songs that would make up 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness. Prine hit the studio with a hot modern producer, Dave Cobb, and created a mordant reflection on death and dying that’s great fun to listen to. If the success of The Missing Years when Prine was 45 seemed implausible, the success of The Tree of Forgiveness at 71 seemed inconceivable. But the record put Prine in the Top 10 of the Billboard album chart for the first time in his career, and he began an extended victory lap that included launching his own festival in the Dominican Republic, signing new artists to Oh Boy Records for the first time in years, and winning a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Daffodils and wisteria have exploded across my part of North Carolina recently, pandemic or no pandemic. Since 1988 their colors have signaled the approach of MerleFest. Organizers announced in December that Prine would make his fourth appearance in 2020, joining Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss, Billy Strings, and the usual horde of pickers and fiddlers. But COVID-19 canceled MerleFest and everything else in sight before it started cutting down beloved musicians, from Ellis Marsalis and Manu Dibango to Adam Schlesinger and Joe Diffie. The first red flag for Prine went up three weeks ago when Fiona Whelan Prine announced that she had coronavirus. By March 28 her husband had pneumonia in both lungs and a ventilator to help him breathe. Fiona recovered. John did not. He died at Vanderbilt Medical Center on Tuesday, April 7. He was 73. Nashville will undoubtedly throw a hell of a party in Prine’s honor when the pandemic that took him from us finally subsides. In the meantime, tributes have poured in from people in self-isolation around the world. Like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash before them, a generation of younger artists loves Prine’s music, including Sturgill Simpson, Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, and Brandi Carlile. On Thursday Stephen Colbert posted a video from home where he spoke fondly of Prine before introducing Carlile, who delivered the most gorgeous version of “Hello in There” I’ve ever heard. Last night my partner and research assistant, Gwen Gosney Erickson, said there seemed to be no middle ground with Prine: People had either never heard of him or loved him. She was shocked to find her Facebook feed as flooded as mine with tributes from people she had no idea even knew Prine existed. There are dozens of good reasons for that, songs and performances that boil life down to its essentials. Prine may have used up all nine of his lives, at long last, but his music will live as long as people strum guitars and sing about love, loss, and all the funny little things that make us human.

3/31/20

4/28/20

https://music.mxdwn.com/2025/12/09/news/merlefest-announces-2026-lineup-featuring-old-crow-medicine-show-alison-krauss-the-infamous-stringdusters-more/

5/24/24

https://music.mxdwn.com/2022/11/15/news/merlefest-announces-initial-2023-lineup-featuring-the-avett-brothers-maren-morris-black-opry-revue-more/