From a New York Times story by Rob Tannenbaum headlined “John Prine’s 15 Essential Songs”—here are five of the best:
John Prine was an Army veteran walking a U.S. Postal Service beat in Chicago and writing songs on the side when Kris Kristofferson heard him and helped spread the word about Prine’s gifts. Pretty soon, he resigned as a letter carrier; his supervisor snickered, “You’ll be back.” Nearly 50 years later, this January, he was given a lifetime achievement Grammy for his contributions to songwriting. The singing mailman almost always had the last laugh.
Prine, who died on Tuesday from complications of the coronavirus, was legitimately unique. He took familiar blues themes — my baby left me — but filled them with whimsy and kindness. He liked a saucy lyric, and wrote movingly, in character, of the quiet lives and loneliness of humdrum people. He seemed like a Zen sage and offered an uncynical live-and-let-live morality in his songs, writing in a colloquial voice that revealed a love of the way Americans speak. He showed how much humor you could put in a song and still be taken seriously. He had less in common with any other songwriter than he did with Mark Twain. . . .
“Angel From Montgomery,” his best-known song, begins with a little declarative startle: “I am an old woman, named after my mother.” It’s an incisive and terrifying look at the dissatisfactions of a bad marriage and a woman’s sense of being economically trapped in her misery. Bonnie Raitt recorded it three years later and uncovered some of the song’s dormant melodies.
“Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”: Prine’s self-titled 1971 debut album is a playlist all its own; it has more great songs than a lot of respected songwriters have in their entire careers. The moral stance of this sprightly folk-rock ditty is a response to what he saw as sham patriotism during the Nixon years, and it remains relevant: “Jesus don’t like killing/No matter what the reason’s for.” Prine, a former altar boy, stopped playing it live for a number of years, but when George W. Bush became president, Prine said, “I thought I’d bring it back.”
“Iron Ore Betty”: A lot of Prine songs celebrate physical pleasure: food, dancing and sex, which he gallantly prefers to call “making love.” The working-class singer in this soulful, up-tempo shuffle feels unreserved delight at having a girlfriend (“We receive our mail in the same mailbox/And we watch the same TV”), and wants us to know he and Betty aren’t just friends (“I got rug burns on my elbows/She’s got ’em on her knees”). OK guy, we get it.
“All the Best”: After five years away, Prine returned with “The Missing Years,” a Grammy-winning album produced by Howie Epstein, Tom Petty’s bass player. The singer in this gentle, masterly miniature claims to want good things for an ex-lover, but feelings aren’t simple: “I wish you don’t do like I do/And never fall in love with someone like you” twists the knife. Now recording for his own label, Oh Boy Records, Prine was about to hit a hot streak.
“When I Get to Heaven”: In 2013, doctors removed the cancerous part of Prine’s left lung, which sidelined and weakened him. It’s hard now to listen to his final album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” which was nominated for three Grammys, and not think that Prine heard the clock ticking louder. There’s so much tenderness in “Knockin’ on Your Screen Door,” about a man whose family left him with only an 8-track tape of George Jones, and in the elegiac, reassuring parental entreaty “Summer’s End.” In the last song, “When I Get to Heaven,” Prine describes his ideal afterlife: a rock band, a cushy hotel, a girl, a cocktail (“vodka and ginger ale”) and “a cigarette that’s nine miles long.” He removes his watch, and asks, “What are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?”
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The lyrics of “When I Get to Heaven”When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand
Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel; ain’t the afterlife grand?And then 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 townThen as God as my witness, I’m gettin’ back into showbusiness
I’m gonna open up a nightclub called “The Tree of Forgiveness”
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm
Well, I might even invite a few choice critics, those syph’litic parasitics
Buy ’em a pint of [?] and smother ’em with my charm‘Cause then 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
Yeah this old man is goin’ to townYeah 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?
And them I’m gonna go find my mom and dad, and good old brother Doug
Well I bet him and cousin Jackie are still cuttin’ up a rug
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
And I always will remember these words my daddy said
He said, “Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead pecker-head”
I hope to prove him wrong, that is, when I get to heaven‘Cause I’m gonna have 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
Yeah this old man is goin’ to town
Yeah this old man is goin’ to town
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