Before this gets lost in the avalanche of news to come. . . the folk singer John Prine died this week.
I didn’t learn the details of his death, but I heard he had been hospitalized with COVID-19. John Prine was a poet laureate disguised as a folk singer, who didn’t have a choir-hall voice, but knew how to stir an audience to tears or laughter with the turn of a phrase and the strumming of his guitar. His lyrics ran the gamut, from poignant to bawdy. In river parlance, he could soar with the eagles, but he could also wallow with the pigs.
“She don’t like her eggs all runny.
She thinks crossing her legs is funny,
She looks down her nose at money.
She gets it on like the Easter Bunny.
She’s my baby, I’m her honey.
Never gonna let her go.”
That’s from the song In Spite Of Ourselves. The quirkiest of quirky love ballads. I can write it from memory because it was something of a theme song on my last two Grand Canyon river trips. I won’t bore you with the remainder of the song but I encourage you to listen to John Prine and Iris Dement singing it with their usual gusto.
Angel From Montgomery is another favorite of river runners, campfire tenders and Bonnie Raitt fans. Bonnie Raitt made it come to life with her soulful, haunting voice, but John Prine was the author of the sentiment.
“Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery,
Make me a poster of an old rodeo.
Just give me one thing that I can hold onto,
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”
Many times along the shores of the Colorado River, I remember belting that song out after an adequate amount of box wine and, fortunately, being accompanied by a female companion who was endowed with a choir-hall voice. Angel From Montgomery is a musical lament for the ages written by an Everyman who could effortlessly tap into our common themes.
As an example, the final verse before the final chorus of Angel From Montgomery goes…
“How the hell can a person, go to work in the morning
Come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?”
But the John Prine song I loved the most when I first became aware of him in 1971, which would move me to tears even as a young buck, was Hello In There. Of course, these days, I’m moved to tears by Budweiser commercials, so the bar has been set very low. But give it a listen…
“You know that old trees just grow stronger,
Old rivers grow wilder every day,
But, old people, just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say,
Hello in there. Hello.”
John Prine was quoted as saying he never got tired of singing Hello In There and, as far as he could remember, it was featured in every live performance he did.
Now, due to the pandemic, that we are all sequestered in our personal spaces, homes, apartments and condos and now that we are advised to keep one another at arm’s length and then some, and now that many of us go out be-masked into the general public with only our eyes indicating our expression, it’s more important than ever to reach out and say, “Hello in there”.
Hello.
RIP John Prine (October 10, 1946 – April 7, 2020)
*If you aren’t familiar with his music, I strongly encourage you to - at minimum - spend 15 minutes watching the YouTube videos I linked for you. Maybe start with the tear-jerker and end with the bawdy love ballad.
I never gave much attention to John Prine until becoming a member of the Orion tribe. While I recall you and Charlie being fans the person I most associate Prine with is Gary Thompson, who quoted him often. I suspect like me you find associations like this to be a particularly enriching aspect of the arts in general and music in particular. Keep the faith old friend and wash your hands!
I don’t know the full contours of your fan pool but this is why I am at least a mosaic among them. Hello in there, James - and all the James we have always needed. We belong to each other, the resonance to these songs is proof.