Essential John Prine

In 1971, Kris Kristofferson was playing at the folk club the Quiet Knight. One night, his friend, Chicago folk musician Steve Goodman, took Kristofferson over to the Earl of Old Town because Goodman insisted Kristofferson hear Goodman’s pal John Prine. The rest is the stuff of legend, of course. The club had closed, but Prine played seven songs—including “Sam Stone” and “Hello In There”—for Kristofferson, who later observed that by the end of the first line of the first song Prine sang “we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene.” Indeed, several weeks later Prine himself busted onto the Village scene when Kristofferson invited him and Goodman to open for him at the Bitter End. Label executives filled the club that night and within the same year, Prine had a record deal and had released his eponymous debut album.

If Prine had released only one album, John Prine would have easily carved a niche for him in music history and in listeners’ and critics’ hearts. The album contains those songs he played that night for Kristofferson, as well as “Paradise,” “Angel from Montgomery,” “Illegal Smile,” “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore,” and “Donald and Lydia,” among six others.

Over the next forty plus years, of course, before his untimely Covid-related death on April 7, 2020, Prine released 18 studio albums and six live albums, every song on every album revealing his ingenious knack of telling stories about people whom society often ignored—older adults, veterans struggling with addiction—and about places where longing for home and certainty too often collides with cultural forces more focused on steamrolling the future than preserving the past (“Paradise,” “Lake Marie”).

When he wrote “Jesus Was a Capricorn (Owed to John Prine),” Kris Kristofferson summed up John Prine’s influence on his own songwriting and Prine’s enduring contributions to music: “If God’s got a favorite songwriter, I think’s it’s John Prine.”

On October 10, John Prine would have turned 78. Although we miss him greatly, we celebrate his birthday with some of our favorite John Prine songs.

“Angel from Montgomery”