Nothin’ But Big Old Hearts Dancin’ In Our Eyes: John Prine Reflection

written by Maggie Jackson, special to City Arts

So, I saw John Prine at the Paramount on April 17, back at the start of Spring, when it actually felt like Spring. Spring was in the air, and by Spring, I mean love, and nobody knows more about love than Prine. In a career that’s spanned four decades, and produced over twenty albums, Prine has met love, left love, given love, lost love, ridiculed love, and all-in-all hunted love down and named it from every angle you can imagine. The album he’s on tour for, John Prine: In Person & On Stage, features the best of the best of the best of Prine’s love.

One of these kinds of love is nostalgia, something most artists are rightfully wary of, but Prine goes headlong into it and that’s part of what makes it work. It’s honest. And a beautiful thing about Prine’s long career is that this nostalgia has had a chance to double.

A quick personal segue: I’ve been working on an independent film project about Kentucky’s bourbon industry and all its intersections with the community, history and landscape. One of these crossroads runs through my family’s farm in Danville, Kentucky, where I grew up. This is Central Kentucky, not exactly the same coal mining region of Muhlenberg County that’s referred to in Prine’s “Paradise,” but an impossible-to-return-to paradise just the same.

“Paradise,” written for his father, was on Prine’s self-titled debut album released in 1971. He often encores with this song, which allows his body of work to come full circle. It was the same this time at the Paramount. I was there, wrestling with my own intersections — considering love and a move back to the south, and there was Prine, whose voice has accompanied me through a thousand other such changes, when at the end of the show, that showcased nearly every brilliant song he’s ever written, came the familiar opening stanza:

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there’s a backward old town that’s often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

I can’t imagine the world without John Prine.

To say his voice is authentic is to under-appreciate the legacy. His unparalleled songwriting has inspired musicians across all genres. Prine is a lover, a friend, an ex, a drinking buddy, a grandfather and a rhyme-making guru. “You Got Gold,” for example, offers this little jewel:

Life is a blessing, it’s a delicatessen
Of all the little favors you do.

Or, from the end of, “The Sins of Memphisto:”  

Esmeralda and the Hunchback of Notre Dame
They humped each other like they had no shame
They paused as they posed for a Polaroid photo
She whispered in his ear “Exactly Odo Quasimoto."

I mean, c’mon, that is awesome.

On a cross-country road trip, a friend of mine once smirked that Prine must be an acquired taste. I fumed silently for a few minutes and then retaliated by insisting we listen to every Prine CD that I had in the car. That friend ultimately went to see a Prine show later the same year.

As for you: if “Angel from Montgomery” isn’t already a personal anthem, take it for a spin this weekend. Whatever season you’re going through, I promise there is a Prine song for it.

Photo by Jim Shea