John prine biography book
John Prine: In Spite of Himself
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One time a few years back, I was in a weird mood and googled “what is the best sad song”. I came across “Sam Stone” by John Prine, and man, that was an experience. That was my introduction to John Prine. As it turns out, I’m not even sure that is his best sad song. “Six O’Clock News” or “Far From Me” are at least equally incredible to me. Not that you should think of John Prine as just a specialist in writing sad songs. Listen to “Sweet Revenge” or “Saddle in the Rain” for something more upbeat, or “Dear Abby” for something hilarious.
I’ve been going back and listening to all John Prine’s albums, by order of release, from his 1971 debut album, John Prine to his final album, Tree of Forgiveness, released in 2018. Eddie Huffman’s book has been a great accompaniment.
It’s not super deep at penetrating into the mind of John Prine, which can’t be helped because Prine decided not to cooperate with the author (he was going to write his own memoir, which sadly never happened). But it is great at giving a concise history of his career, with interesting notes about each album. It was never boring, and I’d much rather read a book that left me wishing for more detail, than a book that bored me.
It’s interesting that John Prine never had a hit song. It seems like most singers that hang around for as long as he did, with such a level of admiration from music insiders, and such a loyal cult following, luck into at least one hit. But Prine always stayed on the margins of popular culture.
Huffman shares this quote from Kris Kristofferson about John Prine “Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s about two-hundred and twenty”. This was when he released his debut album, which still might be my f
Music Critic Curates Biography of Great American Singer Songwriter John Prine
Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters with John Prine by Holly Gleason
Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters with John Prine is the next best thing for dedicated fans and curious music lovers to experience the impossible: sitting down to an intimate conversation with one of the Kings of American Roots Music. We are told that reportedly John Prine flat-out hated interviews, thus this collection is a gem which includes some of the earliest and best conversations and articles gathered together in a single treasured volume.
Nashville writer, producer, critic and music industry consultant Holly Gleason has assembled and edited a series of interviews with the self-effacing singer/songwriter/record company founder beginning in 1970 and concluding with the final interview conducted in late November, 2019 and published shortly before John Prine’s unanticipated passing on April 7, 2020. He had conquered cancer three times in the previous decades but was unable to vanquish Covid.
He was dubbed “the singing mailman” for his six years as a postman and hailed as “the new Dylan”, which he eschewed. His influences included Merle Travis and Ike Everly, both friends of his father, as well as Hank Williams and Roger Miller.
John Prine established his reputation early as a man of the people: a songwriter first and singer who wrote storytelling songs with pathos, poignancy, humor and heart. Bonnie Raitt instantly adopted Angel from Montgomery as one of her signature set pieces; Bette Midler took and ran with Hello in There and Tammy Wynette may have sung the most widely known version of Unwed Fathers. The number of performers who have sung and continue to sing his covers would fill several pages.
This Chicago native bled Ken With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans. In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation. For the millions who loved him, John Prine was an angel from Illinois. The singer-songwriter had a 50-year career trajectory that went the full distance from being part of the “next Dylan” brigade in the early ’70s to inspiring Next-John-Prines by the thousands before his death in April 2020. He would have turned 77 on Oct. 10, and the phrase “would have” isn’t just a figure of speech here; for all his health issues over the years, his being cut down by COVID at the beginning of that epidemic felt like seeing an oak unfairly felled in its prime. But “John Prine” as a lingering presence, as a brand and as an aspiration isn’t going to slip away in the culture any year soon. There’s a fresh way to revisit Prine apart from the catalog of records he left behind. Five decades’ worth of stories about and conversations with the artist have been collected by Holly Gleason in “Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters With John Prine,” newly out as a 360-page trade paperback from Chicago Review Press. Gleason grew up on him before she became a close observer as a bicoastal music journalist and confidante as a Tennessee friend (and, in passing at a key point, his publicist). Digging through materials that sometimes never made it online, she’s included seminal Prine encounters with Cameron Crowe, Studs Terkel and the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn, on up through some of the wealth of press he attracted in his last years (including a short Variety piece about an abortion-rights charity single) and the final extensive interview he ever gave. To know him is to love him, and to love and know Prine is to spend a lot of hours in his presence via Gleason’s essential compendium, which finds his observational candor, fierce intelligence John Prine
Encountering ‘Prine on Prine’: Holly Gleason on Assembling a Book of Conversations With the Irreplaceable John Prine