Angel from Montgomery

Prine had just written Hello in There when his Chicago friend Eddie Holstein proposed they write a song together. Prine said he had nothing more to say about old people, and suggested a middle-aged woman who feels older than she is. Holstein lost interest after the first verse, and Prine finished it alone a week later. He told Paul Zollo he had a vivid picture of a woman standing over the dishwater with soap on her hands, wanting an angel to take her out of her house and her marriage. Once the character exists, he said, you let her write the song and just take dictation. In his own notes he guessed she would keep cooking dinner and stay married, a portrait of many people living that way. He was never sure where the title came from: he guessed at an angel on Michigan Boulevard or Hank Williams's ties to Montgomery, while Holstein said it was the angel on the Montgomery Ward building.

It appeared on his 1971 debut, recorded in Memphis with Arif Mardin. Bonnie Raitt's 1974 version on Streetlights made it widely known, and in 2000 she said it had meant more to her fans than any other song she sings. John Denver, Carly Simon and Susan Tedeschi also recorded it. Rolling Stone ranked it 350th among the greatest songs of all time in 2021, and it is sung in Into the Wild and heard in the finale of Ozark.

Live

Prine played it 475 times in the setlists logged by fans, second only to Sam Stone, from the Fifth Peg in August 1970 to Paris in February 2020. Raitt has played it even more often. They sang it together at Goodman's memorial in 1985 and on Austin City Limits in 2002, and at the 2020 Grammys she sang it to him as he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, ending with a declaration of love. The two uploads in the hypersongs web are different recordings: one is the 1971 studio original, the other the January 1985 live duet with Raitt from the Goodman memorial in Chicago, as released on John Prine Live.