John Prine

Maywood and the Fifth Peg

John Edward Prine was born in Maywood, Illinois, on 10 October 1946. His parents came from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and his father worked at the American Can Company in Maywood. Summers were spent in Paradise, Kentucky, where John and his brother Dave listened to bluegrass and studied Doc Watson's guitar playing. Dave taught him guitar at fourteen and took him to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. After Proviso East High School he was drafted in 1966 and sent to West Germany as a vehicle mechanic, and he spent five years delivering mail, always in the suburbs.

At an open mic at the Fifth Peg on West Armitage in Chicago, unimpressed by the talent, he was dared to do better. His songs were met with silence and then applause, and the owners booked him every week. Late in 1970 the Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert walked out of a movie and into the club and wrote a full-page review of the singing mailman. Prine said he never played to an empty seat again. In 1971 his friend Steve Goodman persuaded Kris Kristofferson to hear him, Kristofferson brought him to the Bitter End in New York, and Jerry Wexler signed him to Atlantic.

Atlantic and Asylum

His debut, John Prine (1971), was cut in Memphis with the producer Arif Mardin and the house players of American Sound Studio. It held Sam Stone, Hello in There, Paradise and Angel from Montgomery, and Kristofferson remarked that Prine was twenty-four but wrote like a man of two hundred and twenty. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist but reached only number 154 on the Billboard pop albums chart. Three more Atlantic albums followed: Diamonds in the Rough (1972), Sweet Revenge (1973) and Common Sense (1975), which Steve Cropper produced with horns and electric guitars. On Asylum he made Bruised Orange (1978), Pink Cadillac (1979), with production work by Sam Phillips, and Storm Windows (1980).

Meanwhile his songs traveled. Bonnie Raitt's 1974 recording of Angel from Montgomery made it widely known, and she later said no song had meant more to her fans.

Oh Boy

When the Asylum contract ended he moved to Nashville and, rather than sign with another major, founded Oh Boy Records in 1981 with his manager Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein. Its first album, Aimless Love (1984), was paid for in advance by fans. Goodman died of leukemia in 1984. At his memorial concert in Chicago the next January, Prine sang Angel from Montgomery with Raitt, and that performance went onto John Prine Live (1988). The Missing Years (1991), produced by Howie Epstein, won him his first Grammy.

In 1988 he met Fiona Whelan in Ireland. She became his wife and, later, his manager and the president of Oh Boy. In the late 1990s cancer in the right side of his neck needed surgery and six weeks of radiation, and his voice dropped. In Spite of Ourselves (1999) paired him with Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and other singers, and only its title song was his own. Fair & Square (2005), his first album of new songs after the cancer and his first as a producer, won a second Grammy and included Blaze Foley's Clay Pigeons. In March 2005, at the invitation of the Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, he became the first singer-songwriter to read and perform at the Library of Congress.

Late years and legacy

He had surgery for lung cancer in 2013. Made with Dave Cobb, The Tree of Forgiveness (2018) reached number five on the Billboard 200, the highest chart placing of his career. Raitt inducted him into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, and in January 2020 she sang Angel from Montgomery at the Grammys as he received the Lifetime Achievement Award. He died of complications of COVID-19 in Nashville on 7 April 2020, aged 73. Some of his ashes were scattered in Kentucky's Green River, as in his song Paradise. His last recording, I Remember Everything, came out that June and won two Grammys.

Illinois named him its honorary Poet Laureate. Bob Dylan called his songs pure Proustian existentialism, Johnny Cash named him one of his Big Four songwriters, and Kacey Musgraves said that when a line is not working she asks what John Prine would do. His family set up the Hello in There Foundation in 2021, and Oh Boy keeps opening the archive, with Found Dogs and an unedited 2010 concert at the Old Town School released in 2026.

John Prine has taken ordinary people and made monuments of them.

Ted Kooser, 2005