John Prine was born on October 10, 1946. Prine is a singer/songwriter, acclaimed for his lyrics, which mix sincere emotion, dry wit, and occasional flashes of cynicism.
Prine grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where his brother taught him to play the guitar as a teenager. In his early 20s, he began singing at open mike nights in Chicago clubs. He got his first newspaper review from Roger Ebert, working outside his usual beat of film criticism, who called Prine a great songwriter. Prine was working as an opening act for Kris Kristofferson when Jerry Wexler, from Atlantic Records, heard him perform in New York and signed him to a recording contract.
Prine’s self-titled first album was released in 1971. Prine was used to performing on stage with only his guitar, recording with a band was a new challenge. And the Memphis studio musicians were more accustomed to working with R&B singers than with the relatively square rhythms of Prine’s songs, which had (as one drummer put it) “no evidence of groove whatever.” Still, the album was well-received, and Prine’s songwriting talent was apparent; several of the songs almost instantly became folk standards, covered by many other singers.
What was particularly impressive was Prine’s gift for writing in the voices of people completely unlike himself. “Sam Stone” was the story of a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran; ‘Angel from Montgomery” centered on a desperately bored housewife; and “Hello in There” was a call for sympathy for the elderly.
Prine’s performing skills caught up to his songwriting, and on 1973’s Sweet Revenge, he was more comfortable with the band, and his singing felt looser and more relaxed. The biggest challenge was the comic song “Dear Abby,” in which Prine sings both the letters to the advice columnist and her responses (all made up by Prine). Recorded in the studio, it fell flat, so a live concert recording was used; the song worked better with the energy of an audience response.
In addition to his own recordings, Prine was occasionally writing songs for other performers. One of his biggest successes came in 1974 with a song on which he’s not officially credited as a writer. With his friend Steve Goodman, another product of the Chicago folk scene, Prine wrote: “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” for country singer David Allan Coe. Coe was a Nashville outsider, and the song was a complaint about always being compared to more established singers. Prine worried that the Nashville community would be offended, and asked Goodman to leave his name off the song. He shouldn’t have worried; the song was a top ten country hit, and one of Coe’s biggest successes.
Prine’s own performing and recording career continued to grow, and his 1975 album Common Sense was his first to reach the top 100 on the Billboard album chart, an impressive feat for a folk singer who never got (or really tried for) much radio airplay.
By the end of the 1970s, Prine was feeling frustrated with the demands of recording for major labels. He recorded his last album for Asylum Records (1980’s Storm Windows), spent a few years in Nashville focusing mostly on writing for other singers, then founded his own independent record label.
The first Oh Boy Records release was 1984’s Aimless Love, and it reflected Prine’s time in Nashville. More than half of the songs were collaborations with Nashville veterans, including Bobby Braddock and Shel Silverstein. The Prine/Braddock song “Unwed Fathers” became popular, and was recorded by several country singers. Prine’s solo composition “People Puttin’ People Down” impressed Bob Dylan so much that Dylan began performing the song in his own concerts.
Prine recorded another album fairly quickly—German Afternoons, from which the standout is “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”—then took a break for a few years. When he returned in 1991, many fans took the title of his new album, The Missing Years, as a reference to his sabbatical. It wasn’t; it was the title of a song that wondered what exactly Jesus was up to in the years between his childhood and his ministry, years that the Bible skips over.
The Missing Years was recorded in Los Angeles, and featured more celebrity musicians than most of Prine’s work thus far. His band included members of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers—Petty’s bass player, Howie Epstein, produced the album—and the backing vocalists included Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, and Phil Everly. The album won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
In 1998, Prine was diagnosed with cancer on the right side of his neck, requiring surgery and radiation therapy. The treatment damaged his salivary glands and some of the nerves in his tongue. Prine went through a year of recuperation and speech therapy. When he was able to sing again, there was a new gravelly quality to his voice.
Fans didn’t seem to mind the change, and the 1999 album In Spite of Ourselves, was one of his most popular. There was only one original song on the album, a collection of classic country duets featuring Prine and a variety of female singers, including Patty Loveless, Melba Montgomery, Iris DeMent. Prine returned to this concept in 2016 with For Better, or Worse, a similar duets album with a new set of female partners.
Prine won his second Grammy in 2005 for Fair and Square. That was his first album of new material in a decade; and it was thirteen years more before his most recent album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness.
Prine is now at the age where career honors and retrospectives begin to appear. The 2010 tribute album Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows features performances of his songs by the current generation of folk and Americana artists, including Sara Watkins, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Josh Ritter. In 2015, Prine was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
In addition to the albums linked above, more of Prine’s music is available for streaming or download at Hoopla and Freegal.