John Prine, Who Chronicled The Lives Of The Everyman, Dies At 73

NASHVILLE, TN — Acclaimed singer-songwriter John Prine, whose keen empathy for the struggles and triumphs of everyday working people made him one of America’s most beloved storytellers, died Tuesday after contracting the new coronavirus, his family has confirmed. He was 73.

The gravel-voiced folk singer, whose songs ran the gamut from heartbreaking to hilarious, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He had been hospitalized since March 26 with what his family said was a sudden onset of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Admired for his ability to flip a phrase and touch listeners from their hearts to their funny bones, Prine was considered one of America's greatest songwriters. He fashioned a steady stream of songs that struck his fans' rawest emotions over a career that spanned nearly 50 years.

Never a big arena headliner, Prine's fans cherished their storyteller as a well-kept secret on the back porch. Still, his fame expanded over the past decade or so, particularly as more people discovered some of his best songs made famous by other musicians.

Prine poignantly captured the loneliness of the elderly with "Hello In There," covered by Bette Midler. The haunting chorus:

"So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, 'Hello in there, hello' "

"Angel from Montgomery," the story of a long-married couple bored with one another, was a profile-raising hit single for Bonnie Raitt.

“He’s a true folk singer in the best folk tradition, cutting right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain,” Raitt told Rolling Stone in 1992.

Kris Kristofferson, who discovered Prine at the small Chicago club called Fifth Peg in 1970, wrote on the liner notes of the artist's 1971 self-titled debut album that Prine is "twenty-four years old and he writes like he's two-hundred and twenty."

Singer-songwriter Steve Goodman, who wrote many of the songs Prine turned to gold, convinced Kristofferson he should hear him. Prine treated him to an after-hours revue of music that Kristofferson later said "was unlike anything I'd ever heard before," The New York Times reported.

Prine struck a nerve with his songs.

What made him so good wasn’t just his musical aptitude, but also his ability to tackle what he told Rolling Stone were the “in-between spaces” that people don’t talk about, which he then wove into his songs with humor and empathy. He often drew on his own and his friends' experiences.

“Sam Stone,” the gut-wrenching story of a soldier who came home from Vietnam with a Purple Heart and heroin habit and died of an overdose, was inspired by his experiences and those of his buddies who were drafted into the Army during the war.

It doesn’t explicitly mention the Vietnam War, but became an anthem for the peace movement.

Prine didn't write it for the demonstrators, though.

“There’s no one person who was the basis for Sam Stone — more like three or four people; like a couple of my buddies who came back from Vietnam and some of the guys I served with in the Army," he once told Performing Songwriter. "At that time, all the other Vietnam songs were basic protest songs, made up to slap each other on the back like, ‘Yeah, this is the right cause.’ I don't remember any other songs that talked about the soldiers at all.

"I came up with the chorus first and decided I really liked the part about the 'hole in daddy's arm.' I had this picture in my mind of a little girl, like Little Orphan Annie, shaking her head back and forth while a rainbow of money goes into her dad's arm," he continued. "I think I invented the character of Sam Stone as a storyline just to get around to that chorus."

Prine was drafted, too, but served his tour of duty as a mechanic stationed in Germany while his friends drew combat duty. When they came home, "they weren't the same," he told Performing Songwriter.

"I was trying to explain that to myself, and that's how I wrote 'Sam Stone.' I wasn't a protester or anything like that," he said. "I was trying to figure out why this crazy war was happening and what people were going through over there. We had been raised on John Wayne and World War II, but this was the opposite of that."

Other songs in the protest genre include “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” “The Great Compromise” and “Take the Star Out of the Window.” He often beat the drum of social justice in his songs and, in “Paradise,” environmental justice. The song, which Prine wrote for his father, details the devastating effect of strip mining in the coal area around the Green River in Kentucky.

Prine could also be delightfully whimsical with folk tunes such as “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” the story of a lovable old grandfather who was a “level on the level,” and “Please Don’t Bury Me,” which Prine once said was “the best organ donor campfire song I know."

The song includes these lines:

"Please don't bury me
Down in that cold, cold ground
No, I'd rather have 'em cut me up
And pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane
And the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears
If they don't mind the size"

Prine wove his 1950s blue-collar upbringing into his tunes, making him a favorite with the working class — a folk-hero Bob Dylan with dirt under his fingernails, some said.

Dylan was an admirer of Prine's, telling Rolling Stone in 2009: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”

Prine grew up in Maywood, Illinois, the son of Bill and Verna Prine, a tool-and-die maker and homemaker. He hated school, the artist once told Men’s Journal, and had a shining moment when his high school gymnastics team made it to the state finals, but then became disinterested and became “a juvenile delinquent guitar player."

Prine’s label, Nashville-based Oh Boy Records, launched with longtime manager, business partner and friend Al Bunetta in 1981, is the second-oldest artist-owned independent label in the country. Prine, wife Fiona and son Jody ran the label out of their small Nashville home office.

Prine, who won his first Grammy in 1991 for the album, “The Missing Years,” was honored at this year’s Grammy Awards with a lifetime achievement award. In 2015, the Grammy Hall of Fame inducted his 1971 self-titled album.

He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005. He was named the Artist of the Year by the American Music Association in 2017, and he also accepted the PEN New England’s Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award that year..

In his latest album, “The Tree of Forgiveness” released in 2018, Prine touches on familiar themes, such as loneliness and heartbreak, breaking them up with honor and wit. The album and the shows where he performed songs from it became his final act.

The album climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard 200, the highest of any in his career, and the audiences in The Tree of Forgiveness Tour were some of the largest he'd ever played, including a sold-out show to kick off the tour at New York's Radio Music Hall.

The tour took him to Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, which is known as the mother church of country music. New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl wrote under the headline “American Oracle”:

“The mother church of country music, where the seats are scratched-up pews and the windows are stained glass, is the place where the new John Prine — older now, scarred by cancer surgeries, his voice deeper and full of gravel — is most clearly still the old John Prine: mischievous, delighting in tomfoolery, but also worried about the world.”

Prine survived cancer twice. He had surgery in the 1990s to remove cancer from his neck. In 2013, he underwent surgery to remove cancer from his left lung.

Twice divorced, Prine is survived by his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine; three sons, Jody, Jack and Tommy; two brothers, Dave and Billy, and three grandchildren.