The singer and songwriter John Prine died on Tuesday, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, of complications from COVID-19. Early in April, Prine and his wife, Fiona, both tested positive for the virus. Fiona recovered, but Prine was hospitalized and eventually placed on a ventilator. In the late nineties, Prine survived squamous-cell cancer—he underwent extensive surgery to excise diseased tissue, including a sizable chunk of his neck—and, in 2013, he was diagnosed with lung cancer but again recovered following surgery. The virus got him at seventy-three. He was unilaterally and instantly mourned.
Prine sang so often and so generously about death that it almost feels as if he were preëmptively soothing and reassuring his fans—saying, “Hey, please, don’t worry after me when I’m gone.” On “When I Get to Heaven,” the final song on “The Tree of Forgiveness,” his most recent album, from 2018, Prine talks about the afterlife as a kind of gentle bacchanal, in which all blunders and slights are forgiven, cocktails are strong, smokes are “nine miles long,” time is meaningless, and family is waiting. It’s a fantasy of absolution—of total relief—sung in Prine’s coarse, crusty voice, over a strummed guitar. During the chorus, a whole band pipes up: piano, backing vocals, more guitar, handclaps. I’m certain I’m not the only Prine fan who played it upon hearing the news, shortly after letting out a defeated little “Come on.” I was grasping about for consolation, and I found it. Even from beyond, Prine knew how to take care of us.
Prine was born on October 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois, and started playing guitar as a teen-ager. He eventually joined the Army, served in West Germany, came home, and took a job as a mailman. The story of Prine’s discovery feels apocryphal. In 1970, when he was just twenty-three, he was playing a show at the Fifth Peg, a small folk club in Chicago. Roger Ebert, the film critic at the Chicago Sun Times, wandered in. (Prine later told Terry Gross that it was because the popcorn was too salty in the movie theatre, and Ebert had needed a beer.) Ebert was crushed by Prine’s precision and warmth. He forewent the film review. “Prine is good,” he wrote, in a concert review published the next day. “I never had an empty seat after that,” Prine said. He released his first album, “John Prine,” in 1971, on Atlantic Records. Seventeen more albums followed.
Writing requires discipline, practice, and hard work, but there’s a little bit of the sublime in it, too. You’ll hear poets talk, sometimes, about how a body can briefly become a medium—the language arrives quickly, as if it were being beamed in from the Big Elsewhere. It is hard to say where Prine’s best songs originated, though a person gets the sense that he was something of a savant when it came to observing and understanding the people around him, even—especially—the ones he didn’t know intimately. Calling Prine empathetic feels too easy, but he had an extraordinary ability to survey other people’s lives and to understand, without judgment, the sorts of choices they’d made. “Angel from Montgomery,” one of Prine’s most famous songs, begins with the line, “I am an old woman, named after my mother.” Prine was just twenty-four when he recorded it—what did he know about being an old woman? Everything, somehow. The song’s chorus is so rich and sodden with meaning, a person can chew it over for decades and still find it startling:
For his entire career, Prine was beloved by other rough-and-tumble songwriters—Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen. Men with angst and gravitas. But I’ve always been stunned by how well Prine wrote for and about women. In 1974, Bonnie Raitt recorded “Angel from Montgomery” for her fourth album, “Streetlights,” and imbued the song with so much pathos and tenderness that it quickly became one of her signature tracks. In 1972, Bette Midler sang “Hello in There,” for her début album, “The Divine Miss M.” It’s a song about getting old, and giving up, and not giving up. Midler’s rendition is so spare and spooky that I find it hard to listen to very often, though, each time I do, I’m a little bit changed afterward. In 1983, Prine wrote “Unwed Fathers” for Tammy Wynette. It’s a song about an unplanned pregnancy in which no one is absolved, exactly, but no one is blamed. That’s one of Prine’s most extraordinary moves. He is not uninterested in accountability (people make mistakes, and of course those missteps should be recognized), but he is not sold on punishment, either. In 1973, he released a record called “Sweet Revenge.” The title felt like a little joke he was telling himself. Revenge is never really sweet, after all—“the black wind still moans.”
Prine had one of those faces that doesn’t come along very often—beautiful, rutted, expressive. He always looked just a little bemused, in part because his eyes were narrowed and slightly arched, curled into a sort of permanent smile. It takes an exceptionally kind-hearted person to sing the whole messy, stupid story of what it means to be human—the cruel and indulgent things we do, the way that we love—and make it sound so logical. I don’t know if there’s a word for what people felt when they saw him play; it’s the kind of soft gratitude that wells up when you look at someone and feel only thankful that they exist, and that you got to breathe the same air for a little while. Those losses are the hardest to metabolize. But it helps to think of Prine in the heaven he imagined, which is the heaven he deserves.
