John Prine may well be one of the greatest songwriters to ever live. Bob Dylan sang songs from Prine’s unreleased debut back to him when they first met, later raving to the Huffington Post in 2009, “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree.…”
But long before Steve Goodman dragged Kris Kristofferson to see his good friend perform, there was a buzz around the postal worker raised on Appalachian music, his older brother’s guitar lessons, and what he’d picked up at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Having jumped onstage on a dare at the Fifth Peg’s weekly hoot night, where anyone could get up and play, the shaggy-haired kid from Maywood, Illinois, shocked the crowd silent with “Sam Stone.”
When the crowd went wild, the owner offered Prine a weekly slot. It paid better than carrying the mail, let him sleep in; Prine didn’t have a plan, but this felt okay. Back from West Germany, he didn’t need a plan just yet.
But when the Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert went on the lam from a truly dreadful movie, it was as if fate went looking for a beer. The storied newspaper man ducked into the very gin joint where Prine was playing—and taking in the songs, Ebert opted to write a full feature about what he heard in Prine’s music instead of panning a garbage movie. Once that happened, the momentum built—and the shows were packed. Suddenly, John Prine was in play.
As he told the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot in 2010, Prine turned down an offer from Delmark’s Bob Koester to make an album. Prine didn’t have any notion of what he wanted, but knew, “By me saying no, that’s when it clicked: I must have something in mind that I’m not telling myself.”
Beyond putting the country/folk songwriter in play, Ebert would remain a friend through both men’s lives. Not only would Ebert show up and visit when Prine faced his neck cancer, the internationally renowned film critic would also encourage Prine through his physical therapy and process finding his way back after treatment.
Survivors as well as writers, the two men and their wives would see each other for dinner whenever they were in the same city.
For a man who invested such poignant humanity in his songs, the idea that his career began with a “meet cute” is hard to fathom. Yet for an artist who could sing, “How lucky can one man get,” sometimes destiny is a bad movie that requires a cold beer to wash the taste out of one’s mouth. —Ed.
Through no wisdom of my own but out of sheer blind luck, I walked into the Fifth Peg, a folk club on West Armitage, one night in 1970 and heard a mailman from Westchester singing. This was John Prine.
He sang his own songs. That night I heard “Sam Stone,” one of the great songs of the century. And “Angel from Montgomery.” And others. I wasn’t the music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but I went to the office and wrote an article. And that, as fate decreed, was the first review Prine ever received.
While ‘digesting Reader’s Digest” in a dirty book store, John Prine tells us in one of his songs, a patriotic citizen came across one of those little American flag decals. He stuck it on his windshield and liked it so much he added flags from the gas station, the bank and the supermarket, until one day he blindly drove off the road and killed himself. St. Peter broke the news: “Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore; It’s already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”
Lyrics like this are earning John Prine one of the hottest underground reputations in Chicago these days. He’s only been performing professionally since July, he sings at the out-of-the-way Fifth Peg, 858 W. Armitage, and country-folk singers aren’t exactly putting rock out of business. But Prine is good.
He appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.
He does a song called The Great Society Conflict Veteran’s Blues, for example, that says more about the last 20 years in America than any dozen adolescent acid-rock peace dirges. It’s about a guy named Sam Stone who fought in Korea and got some shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased the pain, and Sam Stone came home “with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back.” That’s Sam Stone’s story, but the tragedy doesn’t end there. In the chorus, Prine reverses the point of view with an image of stunning power:
There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm
Where all the money goes…
You hear lyrics like these, perfectly fitted to Prine’s quietly confident style and his ghost of a Kentucky accent, and you wonder how anyone could have so much empathy and still be looking forward to his 24th birthday on Saturday.
So you talk to him, and you find out that Prine has been carrying mail in Westchester since he got out of the Army three years ago. That he was born in Maywood, and that his parents come from Paradise, Ky. That his grandfather was a miner, a part-time preacher, and used to play guitar with Merle Travis and Ike Everly (the Everly brothers’ father). And that his brother Dave plays banjo, guitar and fiddle, and got John started on the guitar about 10 years ago.
Prine has been writing songs just as long, and these days he works on new ones while delivering mail. His wife, Ann Carole, says she finds scraps of paper around the house with maybe a word or a sentence on them and a month later the phrase will turn up in a new song.
Prine’s songs are all original, and he only sings his own. They’re nothing like the work of most young composers these days, who seem to specialize in narcissistic tributes to themselves. He’s closer to Hank Williams than to Roger Williams, closer to Dylan than to Ochs. “In my songs,” he says, “I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.”
That’s what happens in Prine’s Old Folks, one of the most moving songs I’ve heard. It’s about an elderly retired couple sitting at home alone all day, looking out the screen door on the back porch, marking time until death. They lost a son in Korea: Don’t know what for; guess it doesn’t matter anymore. The chorus asks you, the next time you see a pair of “ancient empty eyes,” to say “Hello in there…hello.”
Prine’s lyrics work with poetic economy to sketch a character in just a few words. In Angel From Montgomery, for example, he tells of a few minutes in the thoughts of a woman who is doing the housework and thinking of her husband: How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come back in the evening, and have nothing to say?
Prine can be funny, too, and about half his songs are. He does one about getting up in the morning. A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare him down, and won. But “If you see me tonight with an illegal smile—It don’t cost very much, and it lasts a long while—Won’t you please tell the Man I didn’t kill anyone—Just trying to have me some fun.”
Prine’s first public appearance was at the 1969 Maywood Folk Music Festival: “It’s a hell of a festival, but nobody cares about folk music.” He turned up at the Old Town School of Folk Music in early 1970 after hearing Ray Tate on TV. He did a lot of hootenannies at the Fifth Peg and at the Saddle Club on North Ave., and the Fifth Peg booked him for Sunday nights in July and August.
In those two months, the word got around somehow that here was an extraordinary new composer and performer. His crowds grew so large that the Fifth Peg is now presenting him on Friday and Saturday nights; his opening last weekend was a full house by word-of-mouth. He had a lot of new material, written while he was on reserve duty with the Army in September.
There’s one, for example, called The Great Compromise, about a girl he once dated who was named America. One night at the drive-in movie, while he was going for popcorn, she jumped into a foreign sports car and he began to suspect his girl was no lady. “I could of beat up that fellow,” he reflects in his song, “but it was her that hopped into his car.”
Studs Terkel was a well-established voice of culture, politics, and social issues when a young folk singer on the verge of his debut album went to the studios of WFMT-FM, where the one-hour The Studs Terkel Show was broadcasted daily since 1952. Martin Luther King Jr., Tennessee Williams, Frank Zappa, Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein, Big Bill Broonzy, and another folk singer named Bob Dylan had preceded the former mailman creating a local sensation.
Nicknamed “Studs” after the character Studs Lonigan, from a trilogy of novels by James T. Farrell about a young Irish Catholic from Chicago’s rough South Side, Terkel came by his affinity for real life honest. When he was young, his parents ran a boarding house across from Bughouse Square, the nickname granted to Chicago’s Washington Square Park for its role as an unofficial forum where people from all walks of life could speak their minds.
With Prine’s father being both a diemaker and “ward healer” in politically charged Chicago, Terkel recognized the depth of Prine’s working-class bona fides and was intrigued by the gravitas and humanity of the young postal worker’s songs. For all the local heat Prine had generated at the Fifth Peg and the Earl of Old Town—as well as the buzz on his upcoming Atlantic debut release—Terkel’s hunger for headier topics like where art comes from, how empathy is formed, and the truest meaning of home guided their conversation.
At this point, the twenty-three-year-old songwriter was many things. An ex-soldier; a postal worker; a grandson of a carpenter and part-time preacher from Paradise, Kentucky; the apple of his mother and grandmother’s eyes; husband to his high school sweetheart Ann Carole Menaloscino; and a kid who learned to play guitar from his older brother, love bluegrass from summers in Kentucky, and listen to “The Opry” from his dad, Prine embodied the blue-collar truth of the Southern expats who migrated to the Midwest for work.
In Terkel’s studio, the conversation was brisk. The men talked over each other, excited to share details and insights. Prine played several songs and even stayed after the radio show to record several songs to capture this time in his life.
Honored to be recognized by a such an impactful force in social commentary, Prine told Terkel all about his father, Bill Prine, when the show wrapped. “He was really interested in speaking to my father, because of what he did for a living,” Prine told me once in a conversation about Terkel’s Working and My American Century. “We were going to try to make that happen, because of all the oral history work he did, and then my father died.…” —Ed.
Studs Terkel: Biting, biting commentary. John Prine, the singer/writer of that song. Somehow thinking of that song and think in the headlines too these days with the exposé now of the deceitfulness of the administration, the previous one the continuation of a New York Times exposé of a song you sing. How are you? First of all, we think of a lot of country western songs being very militarily inclined, you know, The Fighting Side of Me and others, you know. And yet, do you sense in that world of song, of which you’re so much the part, changes occurring there, too? Questionings?
John Prine: I’m kind of based in country music. I like Hank Williams a whole lot, and it’s just the subject I chose to write about. I wrote that one when I was a mailman. I was delivering Reader’s Digest, and they put out an issue one month that that gave everybody a free American flag decal. That was just about the same time there was all this talk going on about the silent majority and everything. I thought we’ve kind of cheated a lot of people out of being able to say, people that just hadn’t said anything yet, and they got their flag decals. Just about everybody was taking Reader’s Digest, and just about everybody stuck them right on their front door, right next to the mailbox. The next day when I come up, I saw them all sitting there, and I was kinda thinking of the Reverend Carl McIntyre, too, a little bit.
Terkel: Is that how you get the idea—you worked as a mailman for a while, right here in Chicago?
Prine: Oh, I was working in Maywood, but I was out in Westchester delivering mail.
Terkel: So the idea comes along. Who is John Prine, where are you from?
Prine: Well, I’m from Maywood, but my family is from western Kentucky. All my brothers are from up here.
Terkel: Western Kentucky.
Prine: Right.
Terkel: Is it a mining region?
Prine: Yeah. It’s down Muhlenberg County. I come from this little place called Paradise, sits down on the Green River. They had like those names. Paradise was, I like to go down there. There’s a whole lot of my relatives down there. It’s just a real small town. Just about everybody is somebody they could figure out some kind of relation they had to you.
It was out of the way, you had to go out of the way to get there. I mean, you couldn’t pass through the town. You had to be going to the town to get there.
Terkel: And it’s called Paradise, Kentucky?
Prine: Yeah. I guess what it was, I don’t know, but I guess around 150 years ago, somebody was coming down Green River; they were going someplace else. I don’t remember where, but they stopped there. There was a good place, I guess, to stop, and they just stayed there, you know, and they just named it Paradise.
Terkel: Did you find it like paradise when you were a little kid?
Prine: Oh, yeah, it was, in a way. There was always something different about the town. I could go to another town, maybe five miles away, and there’s just that much difference between Paradise. It was set aside from everything else.
Terkel: The mines run dry or?
Prine: They’ve been mining down here a long time. A lot of them. My grandfather was a miner for a while, and a whole lot of people down there, they worked the mines. I guess they found out they’d get more mining if they strip-mined the country.
So they bought up just about everybody, a little at the time, living in Paradise. It was mostly old people. The young ones didn’t stay in Paradise. And because all there was was two stores there, pretty soon they ended up buying everybody out. They tore the whole town down. There’s one house left standing, I’m told. I’m going to go down there in a couple of months, there’s a house they forgot about that’s off hidden behind the woods; some people moved into or were just passing through, some old woman and one of her sons moved into it. My father was down a couple months ago; he was gonna go on up and talk to ’em, but he said the young fellow looked real mean.
Terkel: It’s funny. This music that influenced you has been the music of the region then, too. Country music.
Prine: Yeah. My father always listened to country music, you used to listen to Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and sit in the kitchen, listening.
Terkel: Of course, just as when you were a mailman carrying Reader’s Digest gave you the idea for the flag decal song, so I supposed Paradise in Kentucky has given you the bases of so many songs. You mentioned Old People, too. There’s a song called Paradise, isn’t there?
Prine: Yeah, this is about the—I got one about the town itself and what they did. It was Peabody Coal Company that strip-mined it all. Peabody’s the head of some sort of environmental commission now, or the head of Peabody. I don’t know if there’s any Peabodys left in Peabody Coal Company, but they were involved in an environmental commission.
They passed some state laws a couple years back down in Kentucky, concerning strip-mining. I guess they weren’t real rigid. Anyway, they didn’t do a whole lot about it; they said like within 20 years, maybe the land would be able to hold cattle without ’em sinking in the ground. So, that’s why there’s a line in a song about the air smelling like snakes down there.
I always felt like most of my songs explain themselves, but that particular line, I’d kinda like to explain it. When I was a little kid, there’s this old Civil War prison, and the only way you’d get to it was down the river. We’d go down there every once in a while. When we go down to Paradise, we go down to the prison and just knock around down there. It was just a nice place to go when you’re a little kid. We were going down there once, and this aunt of ours told us if we were going over there, we’d better take a pistol because there are snakes all over Adry Hill, she says, “and if you smell anything that smells like cantaloupe, you’d better start shooting.” She says that’s just exactly what they smell like. We wasn’t very old, maybe eight or nine. It took about 40 minutes to get over to the prison; by the time we got over there, just about everything up there smelt like cantaloupe to us. We was that scared, you know?
Terkel: That’s ironic. Here’s where Paradise becomes very ironic, indeed, the name. I’m thinking also, John Prine, why you’re so effective a song-writer, poet, really. Is your memory of childhood—says everything tasted, smelled like cantaloupe, you recall the color of the little, almost miniature-looking train of Peabody, too. It’s these childhood memories that are so strong, aren’t they?
Prine: Yeah. I don’t know. I could go to different places and just right away get different feelings. Paradise was always the same. I go back to a lot of other places and a lot of them never look like what you remembered them to be, but that’s what I always got a kick out of down in Paradise, ’cause it was always, as soon as I got there, it was just like I remembered
Terkel: It didn’t look smaller? Very often when you return after you reach young manhood, or manhood, and you remember the little kid, it looks so much smaller.
Prine: Maybe approaching the town, it looks smaller, but once I get in it and just the idea of being in there is like being in a big house, almost. Because it was just like one street with eight or nine houses lined one side and on the other side, too.
Terkel: I’m thinking about your eye, and your ear and your one other thing I’d call the understanding heart. You spoke of old people. You spoke of the older people leaving. You have a song about old—What made you write the song—It’s called Old People. We have the other name for it.
Terkel: What led you to write …
Prine: There’s a lot of reasons. When I was little, old people used to take to me real fast, for some reason. I used to take to them real fast. I always spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He’s a carpenter. For a while. I delivered papers in an old people’s home. It was just very depressing, and it was supposedly one of the better…
Terkel: One of the better homes.
Prine: Yeah.
Terkel: And that depressed you … the idea of the segregation of old people, the putting them away.
Prine: Yeah. They just sat around and I imagine they had recreation for ’em; some of them would, but most of them seemed like they were kind of just waiting around to die.
Terkel: Out of it came—
Prine: I very rarely write a tune before I write the lyrics to it. Usually they both just come at the same time, but I had this tune and I was going to write a love song. And I sat down and just wrote a song about old people.
Terkel: I don’t know what to say. I think that’s going to be a classic just in hearing it. You have everything in it, don’t you? A complete shutting out of old people, the feelings they undoubtedly have you were able to evoke an experience, quite remarkable.
Prine: I believe I’d hate to sing that song for old people.
Terkel: Oh, yeah
Prine: One of the first concerts I ever did was for some old people over at the YWCA on Dearborn. I wasn’t writing too much then. I just did it to help out my brother. It was kind of strange because they really enjoyed every song; they enjoyed the whole show. We did every kind of music you could think of. Five or six years ago, at least.
Terkel: I don’t know how very old people feel, but I think somehow they’d find that song theirs. The idea is to be recognized; you’re saying, “Hello, in there,” you know? It’s that nonrecognition, being thrown away like a used orange rind as Willy Loman said in Death of a Salesman. Or as the old grandmother battled, in Edward Albee’s American Dream, the play. Remember that? She refused to be taken away, but they took her away in that cart. She fought it all the way, you know?
Prine: I watched that three times when they had it on recently. They had it on television last year.
Terkel: It’s a powerful song, oh, boy. Everything. They’re talking about also lost manhood. Meeting his friend from the factory, what’s new, the same old news, too. It’s almost a picture, it’s almost, almost a powerful short story that you have.
Prine: I didn’t want to pick strange names, I just wanted to pick names now that if you’re born long ago that you might be named, because names usually get popular.
Terkel: Fashions in names change.
Prine: But I didn’t want to make the names too strange.
Terkel: No, you got Fred, and you got daughter Loretta and son-in-law.
Prine: Rudy’s the dog, lives across the street.
Terkel: Yeah.
Terkel: My guest is, John Prine who is, as you can probably guess by now, about the most imaginative and moving of American songwriters and singers today. You say you had a melody all set, but you had a love song all set for it.
Prine: But I didn’t have any words. I figured that tune was pretty enough for a love song, and I sat down to write one and instead I wrote about old people.
Terkel: What else do the people like, when you sing for them? Because there’s so many of your songs—at least ten [laughs] … we’ll hear a bit of those; I want to save “Sam Stone” for a moment.
Prine: This is a short one I wrote when I was 14. I call it A Frying Pan. I liked Roger Miller a whole lot then; he was writing all that stuff. [Sings.]
Terkel: You were 14 when you wrote that, you say? So it’s the Roger Miller influence, but also was things you observed and saw, you know. The breaking up of homes, too, running away, and I suppose you may have seen that, too, as a kid? Here again, the combination of influences on you, I suppose.
Prine: Yeah. I don’t know where that went from. It’s that sometimes I write a little bit faster than I think, and I have to sit back and see what I wrote.
Terkel: You were 14. When did you start?
Prine: My brother taught me a couple of chords on the guitar, and I started writing right away. I wrote a song one night. My first song took me about three hours; I went downstairs and I told my mother I wrote a song. She sat down to listen to it, and I got about halfway through; I was picking it, and she started singing Will The Circle Be Unbroken. I got so embarrassed, I don’t even know a word to that song today! I just threw the lyrics away and didn’t write anything for a little while after that. I didn’t know, I thought I had my own tune.
Terkel: Oh, it was Will The Circle Be Unbroken? Your mother—Did your family sing?
Prine: Oh, my mother? Her father lived down in Paradise. He used to play guitar a lot. Merle Travis is from, you know, in Byrd County, and so is Ike Everly, the Everly Brothers’ father. A whole lot of people used to pick down around there.
Terkel: I’m talking to John Prine. You’ll soon be hearing his songs on Atlantic, and undoubtedly John will be known throughout the country, too, as rightfully he should be, as one of the most imaginative of America’s songwriters today and singers.
We take a slight pause, and we’ll return with John and of course, Sam Stone among other songs, how he came to write these songs, too.
Terkel: John, as we pick up the conversation, it’s quite a distance from Paradise, Kentucky—distance and time—yet not too many years ago to Chicago, where you’ve been living for some time now.
Prine: My family comes from Paradise. And we just used to always go back down there during the summer.
Terkel: Does your family still think, even though you were born here, your family, being Kentuckians, still think of that as home?
Prine: First thing my father used to tell everybody. He’s the last of a dying breed. Kentuckian. Pure Kentuckian.
Terkel: It’s funny, Appalachian people, mountain people, and black people from the Deep South invariably speak of home as where they came from, not where they are, at this moment in Chicago. So, we come to the Great Society.
Prine: Conflict Veteran’s Blues.
Terkel: “Veteran’s Blues,” or “Sam Stone.” We’ll talk about it after you do it.
Prine: [Sings.]
Terkel: That song really says it all. You wrote that song, how long ago now?
Prine: Three years ago.
Terkel: Three years and since then, information has come to our country, and to people about the … heroin, the addicts in Vietnam. That’s it, too, isn’t it? A certain kind of writer of songs, and a certain kind of poet, is also able to judge and prophesy, too. Can tell the feelings you heard, is that it?
Prine: Well, more or less. I didn’t sit down to write a song about a veteran on heroin. It was just the two things. Heroin usually doesn’t end any place, and there was kind of just a futile feeling when you’re in the service.
I wasn’t in Vietnam; they sent me to Germany for two years. Throughout the whole army, when you were over in Germany you didn’t feel like you’re doing too much there, like you had no business. And it was that, plus the image of somebody on heroin. That’s the only reason I combined the two, it was more than trying to write a song about a veteran on heroin. It was kind of strange it ended up. Now there’s a lot of heroin.
Terkel: It’s funny how it worked out. You had the image, the idea in mind, the symbol in mind. And the reality came into being. Irony. It’s funny, as I listen to “Sam Stone,” then to “Old People,” there’s a connecting thread here in which both are counting for nothing in the way, whether it’s the young soldier or whether it’s the old couple. In your songs you are, by implication, without any soapbox saying, you know, “look at me.”
This song, what a use of lines. Use of “little pitchers have big ears.” You using old homilies, too, and often they become very ironic.
Prine: I was surprised how many people had never heard that before, ’cause stuff we’d say. I just thought everybody used that.
Terkel: “Sweet old songs don’t sound the same on broken radios.”
Prine: “Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.”
Terkel: I love that line: “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where the money goes.”
Prine: I had those two lines, that’s what started the whole song off. I had that “sweet songs never last too long on broken radios” and “there’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” I was thinking like some political cartoon, like the humor they use. I had kind of a picture of a fellow shooting money into his arm, with like a rainbow of money falling down into his arm. And that’s where I got that line.
Terkel: That’s how it works then. There are a couple of images you have, and out of it, your observation, experience, hearing …
Prine: If the image is strong enough, then the rest of the song will develop out of it. If the first couple ideas of the song, then I don’t have as hard a time. Like that was one of the easiest songs I ever wrote.
Terkel: Really?
Prine: Because after I had that, those two lines, the rest [of] the song just poured out of me.
Terkel: That’s how it works sometimes, just flows sometimes; sometimes more difficult.
Prine: If the idea is kind of sketchy in the first place, then the song usually takes me a lot longer because every line after is a little sketchy—and I don’t want to get too far away from the original thought.
Terkel: You have the monkey on the back, too. I suggest, Nelson Algren, I remember who first used that Purple Heart in “The Man with the Golden Arm.”
John, so it’s the city. It’s the city plus the mountain country; both have had their impact on you. An observation, because the songs just flow. How many songs have you written? Have you kept track?
Prine: Somewhere between 25 and 30 … I use most all of them. I run into a lot of people, they say, they’ve written 500 songs or something. But you never hear more than about 40 of them at the most.
Terkel: Should point out that Kris Kristofferson, while visiting Chicago and playing at The Quiet Knight, heard John Prine and, as you probably could guess, flipped and urged he come to The Bitter End in New York where Kristofferson was playing, and during a couple of … nights.
Prine: Stevie Goodman … helped out, he was playing with Kris.
Terkel: And Steve Goodman, too.
Prine: He brought Kris over to see me over at The Earl, kept telling him to come over. He got him over there the last night he was in town.
Terkel: At The Earl of Old Town. And that was it. And of course, what happened in New York to you guys. Critics, others came to hear John. So you’ll be soon hearing and buying, I trust, his recordings on Atlantic. He’s going to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Prine: I hope so. It’s kind of a toss-up between there and New York. I hope to end up down in Muscle Shoals.
Terkel: This is an interesting development? In Muscle Shoals, Alabama where the dam is, as you point out, halfway.
Prine: There’s a big TVA dam.… And they’ve got one at Paradise, that was before they strip-mined it. They built a TVA dam. I was looking through my grandmother’s trunk about five or six years after she had passed away. I ran across a postcard between her and her cousin that was talking about this. Back in the late ’30s or so, talking about how they were going to ruin the whole—building this TVA dam, you know. It was really strange the way it was so up to date with the strip-mining they were doing, too.
Terkel: The TVA, of course, had a wholly different purpose in mind, providing power for the …
Prine: There were a lot of people that lived right around there, didn’t want it at the time.
Terkel: Strip mining, of course, a wholly different purpose.
Prine: A lot of jobs came out of there for a lot of people.
Terkel: Come back to the songs. Go ahead, name your poison.
Prine: Well, this is a song about when I was in the Army. I was down in Louisiana most of the time. Just about every army camp in the States has a small town right near it where all the soldiers go. Usually the whole thing’s made up of saloons, maybe five or six saloons and a beauty parlor. That’s about it. The people in these towns always seemed just a little different. It seemed like they had to put up with almost like a tourist town, except offseason or something. The soldiers would come to town, but they never, none of them ever wanted to be there. They really raised hell, you know, all the time.
I got to thinking about the people living in these towns. So I wrote this as a love story. I usually say it’s about couple of lovers that never met, is what it is. It’s about two people I picked, and they don’t meet in this song at all. And it’s partially about masturbation, too, because I thought both these people were alone. I mean, mentally, too, they spend a lot of times just with themselves. [Sings “Donald and Lydia.”]
Terkel: John, more and more it appears your songs are so powerful, they really are dramas, too. This could easily be, this powerful, aching sort of short story of these two people, of loneliness, of course, and all of that unfulfilled, of dreaming and a fantasy. Lydia, Donald and love.
Prine: I tried a couple of times. I used to liked to write. I could never write anything longer than a short story. I just couldn’t, I want to get everything right away.
Terkel: Well, you do. That’s the point. The short story, so it’s also a poem. I suppose poetry and short stories get to things immediately, too. Also, you said it was just the Army town, the town near a barracks and the feeling you get. You capture middle America, smalltown America, yet also people in the big cities, too. Along with everything, Lydia and Donald also are here, too … what you capture in that one place.
So the song comes to you then, almost any source [can be] the basis of the song you write.
Prine: I’m getting to where now I almost like to pick some sort of theme and work around it, you know? Get some kind of foundation and work around it. Now, more or less to see what I can do with it. What’s that—“Blow up your TV, throw away your paper, if possible, play.”
Terkel: The sign there, yeah.
Prine: That’s one I added to these two lines I had, “She was a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol and I was just a soldier on my way to Montreal.” I wanted to mix politics and romance, up together, see what come out of it. It’s kind of like the American Dream is in a way what came out.
Terkel: Yeah, a soldier on the way to Montreal tells us quite a bit!
Prine: I call it a “Spanish Pipedream.” [Sings.]
Terkel: That’s not a bad recipe at all.
Prine: That song was a whole lot of fun to write.
Terkel: Now these are songs we get a great kick hearing, too; the humorous songs and the light at the same time making that point. How does that line go again, that “she was a dancing girl on the road to alcohol”?
Prine: “She’s a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol.…”
Terkel: “And I was a soldier.…”
Prine: “And I was just a soldier on the way to Montreal.” I figure if I can’t get a song out of that, I couldn’t write any more.
Terkel: That’s a beauty, though. And found Jesus on their own, too. That’s interesting, too. Well, you know, there’s so much to John Prine, that all we do is just hear a bit of him during an hour. We look forward, of course, to the album; no doubt there’ll be several albums. We’re just meeting today, at least I am, for the first full hour. I heard I think, someone who is a quite powerful and important songwriter in America today. And John, what’s a good way, aside from wishing you good luck down in Muscle Shoals, and Atlantic and the songs, what’s a good song to say goodbye with for the moment?
Prine: Oh, boy.
Terkel: So many. It need not be a farewell song, just a song. You have “Quiet Man,” “Far [from] Me,” and “Illegal Smile.”
Prine: I got one. It’s called “The Flashback Blues.”
Terkel: “Flashback Blues.” And so as John Brown sings—John Brown! I like that, too, it’s not …
Prine: Well, I might change it.
Terkel: Hey, John Brown, too, is a powerful man. John Prine sings that! I thank you very much indeed. Best of luck.