I was introduced to John Prine back in the late 1970s by my high school English teacher Bob Foshee. A Kentucky native and longtime advocate for local artists and writers, Mr. Foshee was only a few years out of college, and doubtless attracted as much by Prine‘s antiwar and anti-establishment lyrics as by his Kentucky roots—although a Chicago kid, both of Prine’s parents were natives of Muhlenberg County in western Kentucky’s coal country. Most of all, I expect, he had fallen, like I would, for Prine’s songwriting, an unparalleled blend of downhome storytelling, thumbnail portraiture, skewed perspective, deep compassion, bitter cynicism, absurdist humor, and a talent for offbeat rhymes that at times makes even Bob Dylan’s couplets seem predictable.
For most of his career, John Prine was a cult figure, a classic songwriter’s songwriter known more, if at all, for what others had done with his compositions (especially Bonnie Raitt’s “Angel From Montgomery”) than for his own albums and performances. Over the last decade of his life (he died in 2020 of complications from COVID-19), Prine began receiving mainstream recognition, winning some major awards; his swansong album, Tree of Forgiveness (2018), was his first to crack the Billboard top 50, rising all the way to #5, and reaching #1 on the Americana/Folk list.
The accolades that followed his death, amplified by pandemic lockdown attention spans, might mislead younger listeners into imagining he had always experienced this level of success. Until 2005, only Prine’s fourth—and most poorly reviewed—album had charted in the top 100. After his death, his eponymous debut, which had peaked at 148 in 1972, would spike to #1 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk list. The posthumously released track “I Remember Everything”) would become his first #1 single.
Back in the early 1970s, John Prine’s first album did receive some airplay in Kentucky, where I grew up, but barely dented the national airwaves, not to mention internationally. Nevertheless, when Prine first met his idol in Carly Simon‘s New York City apartment in the summer of 1971, Bob Dylan already knew most of the songs—Atlantic had sent him an advance copy. Kris Kristofferson, who had “discovered” Prine on the urging of his friend Steve Goodman, half-seriously informed Rolling Stone that “John Prine is so good, we just may have to break his thumbs.”
For Tom Piazza, a novelist and nonfiction writer who worked closely with the artist on a memoir project just before the pandemic, the genius of Prine’s songwriting came from “his uniqueness of perspective … His mind worked allusively, made connections through images and rhythms.” [1] He could capture a character, even an entire generation of characters, in a seemingly offhand phrase: “He voted for Eisenhower because Lincoln won the war” (“Grandpa Was a Carpenter”). He could nonchalantly dismiss an entire worldview in a single scene-setting opener: “While digesting Reader’s Digest / In the back of a dirty book store” (“Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore”).
John Prine delighted in wordplay, like the verb choice “digesting” that mocked readers of easily digested condensed books while indulging in the rhythmic repetition with the magazine’s title. He would often expand the wordplay into surrealist absurdism. In “Please Don’t Bury Me”, his own fluke of a death (“Woke up this morning / Put on my slippers / Walked into the kitchen and died”) spirals out into a fanciful list of where he wants his body parts to go: “Venus de Milo can have my arms / Look out! I’ve got your nose / Sell my heart to the junkman / And give my love to Rose / … Send my mouth way down south / And kiss my ass goodbye.” According to Elvis Presley’s bass player, the king loved “Please Don’t Bury Me” so much when he first heard it that he made Duke Bardwell play it over and over it for him into the night after a 1974 concert in Lake Tahoe.[2]
Prine’s absurdism could dig deeply. His second, stripped-down album, Diamonds in the Rough, opens with “Everybody,” a jaunty tune recounting a maritime encounter with “the Saviour”. “I said, ‘Jesus, you look tired.’ / He said, ‘Jesus, so do you.’” Unable to get a word in edgewise, Prine turns out to be as good a listener as he is a storyteller: “Let ‘im talk / Hell, it’s been a long long time.”
The scene conjured is unforgettable. By leaving out so much despite the fine-grained detail, Prine opens a wide field of meaning for the listener. Jesus is neither embraced nor dismissed. We feel the weight of a millennia-old belief system, the endurance of an oppressive cultural institution, a persistent need for some kind of faith or spiritual answer, and a rejection of calcified categories, all wrought up in three minutes of country pop. Like the best stories, these songs are vividly realized dream parables without a fixed moral at the end.
Other times, John Prine pushes his absurdism into dark social critique, most famously in the stark refrain of “Sam Stone”, his ode to an opioid-addicted Vietnam veteran, “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where the money goes / Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.” The devastating shift from the singer’s objective reportage to the single verse in a child’s eye view limns the social cost of the war while grabbing the listener’s empathy in an iron grip. As in many of his best songs, Prine deftly balances a deep emotional earnestness with social cynicism and a deep understanding of the absurdity of life on the margins.
The deft storytelling makes us see the world through the hopelessly damaged addict’s eyes, feel the weight of his addiction on his collapsing family, and understand the underlying social and cultural contexts. A veteran himself who worked as a mailman before switching full-time to music, Prine was born and raised in the integrated, blue-collar Chicago community of Maywood, spending summers throughout his and his brothers’ childhood with Kentucky family.
Prine never left those roots behind and never lost his affinity either with the lost souls he encountered in his youth and on his rounds, or the grassroots, outlaw side of the counterculture. Refusing the trappings of fame while enjoying its benefits, he seemed to straddle musical and social divides effortlessly that many of his contemporaries struggled to reconcile.
Prime Prine is a best-of collection culled in 1976 by Atlantic Records after the artist left the label he felt had neglected him in favor of more commercial acts. The album is a curio, and a surprising choice for rerelease by Rhino, which had done a Black Vinyl pressing of Prine’s mind-blowing debut back in 2017. Compiled with no input from the artist, Prime Prine is a hodgepodge of twelve cuts that testifies mostly to the high quality of Prine’s songwriting; it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that any twelve songs from those first four albums would have been worth including.
Perhaps the target audience is the sizeable number of online fans who cite buying this collection on a whim as their first exposure to Prine was buying this collection on a whim. Once the artist had moved on, Atlantic decided actually to do some marketing in a final attempt to recoup something from what they otherwise had written off as sunk cost.
“Sam Stone” and “Hello in There”, two of Prine’s bleakest and most heartfelt compositions, open and close Prime Prine, framing the artist in terms of high seriousness. In contrast, the debut album had opened with a pair of Prine’s most playfully countercultural songs: the outsider stoner’s anthem “Illegal Smile” and the hippie romance “Spanish Pipedream,” with its tongue-in-cheek chorus painting an idiosyncratic vision of the good life: “Blow up your TV, throw away your paper / Go to the country, build you a home / Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches / Try and find Jesus on your own.”
Only after this pair do we get to “Hello in There”, Prine’s miniature first-person portraits of abandoned seniors, so warmly personalized they make Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends” seem superficial in comparison, and the organ-drenched despair of “Sam Stone.” That balance is essential to both Prine’s charm and his approach to the world.
Prime Prine won’t offer much to the novice fan who has already spun the immortal debut record or streamed one of the more recent, more capacious collections. Despite four classics from the first album, it’s missing “Spanish Pipedream”, “Flag Decal”, “Paradise”—Prine’s oft-covered elegy to his roots in Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County, lost to strip mining—and “Angel from Montgomery”, immortalized in 1974 by his friend Bonnie Raitt.
That’s just for starters. There’s no “Everybody” from the second album, or “Frying Pan,” which Prine wrote at the age of 14 about a hapless loser whose wife runs off with the Fuller brush pan, leaving both everything and nothing for us to wonder about their marriage, and as much, or as little sympathy for the wife as for the husband: “And I miss the way she used to yell at me / The way she used to cuss and moan / And if I ever go out and get married again / I’ll never leave my wife at home.”
We get four songs from the superlative Sweet Revenge, including the rocking title cut, but neither the sentimental “Christmas in Prison”, which PJohn rine says he began as an effort to write the worst song he could think of and ended up loving, nor the absurdist classics, “Often Is a Word I Seldom Use”, “Onomatopeia”, and “The Accident (Things Could Be Worse)”. Perhaps the most blaring omission is “Mexican Home”, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Dylan’s New Morning or Planet Waves, until we get to the fourth verse and discover it’s about the death of Prine’s beloved father. Dylan’s strength was always the sweep of his vision; Prine’s was always grounded in the emotional bedrock of his life.
Sure, there are a lot of great songs on Prime Prine, including a couple from the slick and overproduced fourth album, Common Sense. Or, you could just stream the first three albums complete in a couple of hours, then track down Rhino’s two-and-a-half-hour 1993 compilation Great Days, which well covers those albums and judiciously selects from the dozen or so others he released on Asylum and his own label, Oh Boy, up to his belated end-of-career rediscovery. Thank you, Mr. Foshee, for the gift of an illegal smile that, 40 years later, comes back every time I return to John Prine territory.
[1] Tom Piazza, Living in the Present with John Prine (New York: Norton, 2025), 9, xiii.
[2] Eddie Huffman, John Prine in Spite of Himself (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), 91-2.