Songwriter John Prine dies at age 73
NASHVILLE – John Prine, a consummate storyteller who rose from the 1970s Chicago folk scene to become one of a generation’s most celebrated and prolific songwriters, died Tuesday at age 73.
Prine died from COVID-19 complications at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, nearly two weeks after being hospitalized for the virus, his family confirmed to The Tennessean.
The songwriter’s songwriter, Prine penned his five-decade legacy with gutwrenching honesty and a simple, timeless wit that drew comparisons to Mark Twain and praise from Bob Dylan.
Prine’s songbook transcended era and genre, earning him a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. His dedicated showmanship and candid humor drew audiences from Bonnaroo to the Library of Congress and back to the Grand Ole Opry House, where he often celebrated New Year’s Eve with a foot-stomping performance.
“If God’s got a favorite songwriter,” Kris Kristofferson shared in 2003, “I think it’s John Prine.”
John Edward Prine was born Oct. 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois, to workingclass parents William Prine and Verna Hamm, who escaped coal mining in rural Kentucky for unionized factory labor in suburban Chicago.
A self-described “terrible student in high school,” he began playing guitar around age 14, learning a few chords from his older brother, Dave Prine. A few years later, he’d study the instrument at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.
Prine spent his formative years in the Chicago area, working as a mailman before getting drafted in 1966 by the U.S. Army. He served two years as a mechanical engineer in West Germany before returning to delivering letters in the heartland.
While on his mail routes, Prine began crafting songs – early versions of “Hello in There” and “Sam Stone,” compositions that would impact decades to follow.
In 1969, he played his first show – an open mic night at the Fifth Peg in Chicago – on a dare.
“I made a remark about the people that were getting up to sing: ‘This is awful,’ “Prine told the Chicago Tribune in 2010. “So the people I was sitting with said, ‘You get up and try.’ And I did.”
He’d take up a regular shift at the Fifth Peg. At that short-lived nightclub, Prine said that Roger Ebert, a young local film critic for the Chicago Sun-times, stumbled into one of his sets after leaving a nearby cinema because the popcorn was too salty.
Ebert wasn’t a practicing music writer, but Prine’s songs moved him to publish an article. That story “busted things wide open,” Prine later said.
He became a rising talent in Chicago’s reviving folk-rock scene.
“He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight,” Ebert wrote in the 1970 story.