The list of things the coronavirus has taken from us is growing longer each day. I try to make it a practice to count the things I am grateful for instead of what I have lost in its wake. John Prine makes the top of both lists. He passed away on April 6 due to complications from COVID-19, but he lives on in his songs—songs we all know how to sing.
His first album, the self-titled John Prine, entered the world the same year I did, 1971. It is loaded with signature hits like “Angel from Montgomery” and “Paradise,” as well as the heartbreaking parable of “Sam Stone,” a drug-addicted veteran, and the portrait of loneliness told in “Hello in There.” Prine wrote these tunes while delivering mail as a young man in a Chicago suburb. “Angel from Montgomery” was one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar some 25 years ago and had the courage to sing in mixed company. My debut around the campfire was well received, which eventually encouraged me to perform at an open mic. At the Mogollon Brewery in Flagstaff, I summoned the moxie of Bonnie Raitt and the desperation of the woman in that song wishing to be delivered from her mundane existence. At that moment and many others, I have seen again and again how that song moves people to want to jump up to the microphone and declare boldly, “I am an old woman named after my mother/ My old man is another child that’s grown old.”
I can just picture the young John whistling along on his mail route with a notebook and a pen. He reminded us that songs live inside all of us; they can be jostled into existence by any repetitive, monotonous task. This inspired me to write my first songs while moving endless shovel loads of dirt as part of a trail crew in the Grand Canyon.
I only saw John Prine perform live once in my life, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2012. I will never forget the power of his presence on that stage. Even though he looked shrunken and small in his two-piece suit and his voice bore scars from bouts with cancer, he still sang his heart out. There was a moment when he surprised us by setting down his guitar and dancing around the stage with a wry smile on his face. I felt a sense of communion in that crowd of 12,000 people, as if we were all kneeling together and receiving a precious morsel of profound truth and almighty love. He didn’t so much perform as he did testify about the dark side of the human experience—we are lonely, in pain, addicted, in and out of love, growing old and bored. Yet, we are getting through it, even laughing it off and, in some cases, as he sang with Iris Dement in “In Spite of Ourselves,” “We’ll end up a-sittin’ on a rainbow.”
That night in Telluride it was as if he’d blown fairy dust on the crowd, given us all guitars and fishing poles and a nudge out into the cool Colorado mountain night. The campground music circles were on fire like I had never experienced. At any good summer music festival the recipe is the same: one part watch your heroes play music to three parts sit around at your camp and play music with your friends, and invite anyone passing by to join in, then wander to other camps to sing with strangers—or the semi-strangers you only see every year like summer camp. The campground jam circles that night were sparked by Prine’s set list. His immense catalog reverberated through the wee hours and into sunrise. Everyone took turns belting out their version of “Paradise” and we all sang harmony, never once tiring of it, rather, all the more inspired by its repetition.
It’s been like that this week in the wake of his passing. The heavy cloud cover of fear and uncertainty we now live under each day broke open and the sunshine came through as we reached across the divide through song in tribute to John Prine. In our former lives, we surely would have gathered together in a circle and sang to one another. I miss the physical connection with my music friends desperately. Yet through the internet, one by one, everyone took turns honoring him by singing their favorite song from the tiny stage in their living room, some even making up new songs about him being in heaven schooling the angels. I broke down in tears watching Brandi Carlile pour her heart into a version of “Hello in There.” She dedicated it to the people most at risk from this virus—our elders.
“So if you’re walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare
As if you didn’t care, say, ‘Hello in there, hello.’”
We don’t know how we will survive this global pandemic, and what the world will look like when we get to the other side. Certainly there will be plenty more devastating losses following our dear John Prine.
However, we can be grateful for all the songs he gave us. His legacy lives on in all the future songwriters and musicians who will be inspired to write their own version of the human condition. Yet he will always be the authority in regard to our humaneness. Thank you, John, for giving us these gifts. Thank you for showing us again and again the great leveling ground of human pain and suffering, and the resilience to keep on living. Thank you for penning it down for us so perfectly, with such easy chord progressions so we can sing it back to each other in harmony, over and over again until we begin to feel better.
Kate Watters is a farmer, floral designer, writer and musician. She has led a colorful plant-centered life from various angles and now makes her livelihood from a farm oasis in Rimrock, next to Beaver Creek. She grows flowers, medicinal herbs, pollinator and fairy habitat and hosts plant gatherings. To follow her entrepreneurial and artistic adventures arising from the soil visit: www.agavemariabotanicals.comand www.katewattersart.com
