When John Prine died last week in a Nashville hospital, a victim of coronavirus, I cried like the oldest baby in the world.
You might find it odd that an old man would cry at a musician’s death. But Prine was different from the other songwriters I most admire: Dylan, Davies, Cohen, Crowell, Chuck Berry, various Ramones. His songs are packed with wit, wisdom and warmth, compassion, folksy humor and plainspoken brilliance. You find yourself howling with laughter at one line, and before you know it you’re bawling your eyes out.
His songs spoke to me and millions of other hard-working Americans doing the best they can.
Prine’s debut album came out in 1971, one month after I graduated from high school. He was a 25-year-old mailman who sang his songs at open mics in Chicago, championed by Kris Kristofferson and others. It’s a classic, crammed with memorable songs. “Hello in There,” a hit for Bette Midler, tells the heartbreaking story of a lonely older couple (“We had an apartment in the city/Me and Loretta liked living there/Well, it’d been years since the kids had grown/A life of their own, left us alone/John and Linda live in Omaha/And Joe is somewhere on the road/We lost Davy in the Korean war/And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore”).
And there’s “Sam Stone,” about a drug-addicted veteran with a Purple Heart who returns home to his family and dies of an overdose (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes”). “Angel From Montgomery,” popularized by Bonnie Raitt, tells the story of a middle-aged woman who feels much older, stuck in a loveless, unexciting marriage, yearning for something better.
When Prine performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 2017, established stars (Jim James, Roger Waters) and a new generation of talented musicians (Margo Price, Nathaniel Rateliff) joined him on stage. All were clearly starstruck.
Prine’s eye for detail and love of the human spirit continued till the end. His last album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” came out in 2018. In “Boundless Love” he sings, “Sometimes my old heart is like a washing machine/It bounces around til my soul comes clean/And when I’m clean and hung out to dry/I’m gonna make you laugh until you cry.” That’s Prine in a nutshell.
At his last Boston concert at the Wang in 2018, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when he finished singing the new “Summer’s End.” I interpreted the song as an older man looking back at a relationship that ended; a couple who spent their entire lives together, and now that it was time to relax and reap the dividends of years of hard work, they were apart. “Come on home/You don’t have to be alone,” he sang. The video of “Summer’s End” will tear your heart out: A little girl and her grandpa go about their lives, and it’s soon evident her mom died of an opioid overdose. There’s a scene of the little girl, sitting at her desk in school, crying uncontrollably, trying not to draw attention to herself while a classmate looks on. You want to hug the dear child.
Let’s face it, sometimes we all need a good cry, to irrigate our brain and flush out the demons. When my mom died, I played a lot of John Prine songs. I put together a playlist of songs that were guaranteed to give my tear ducts a workout. I still play it every now and then.
It includes songs from Loudon Wainwright III’s album, “Last Man on Earth,” which was about the loneliness and helplessness he felt after his mom passed away. There’s Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Dimming of the Day,” Iris DeMent’s “No Time to Cry,” “My Life” and “Easy’s Getting Harder Every Day.” Patty Griffin’s “Long Ride Home,” about a spouse returning from her beloved’s funeral, brings me to tears just thinking about it. Priscilla Herdman’s version of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” which I first heard on the much-missed WCAS-AM, and the little-known Elton John-Bernie Taupin tune “The Last Song,” about an estranged father-son reconnecting while the young man’s in the hospital dying of AIDS, get the waterworks flowing. Slow versions of “Danny Boy,” and anything with a cello also do the trick.
John Prine closed that concert at the Wang with “When I Get to Heaven.” It evoked tears of laughter instead of sorrow. “When I get to heaven … I’m gonna get a cocktail: vodka and ginger ale/Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long/I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl/Cause this old man is goin’ to town. … Yeah when I get to heaven, I’m gonna take that wristwatch off my arm/What are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?/I wanna see all my mama’s sisters, ’cause that’s where all the love starts/I miss ’em all like crazy, bless their little hearts.” He then danced a little jig and left the stage to thunderous applause.
Aw jeez, I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
