The Human Touch
“JOHN Prine was so grounded that he had a way of sometimes fooling you into thinking that he wasn’t in show business,” says guitarist and co-writer Pat McLaughlin. “But he was deep in it. He had a big career. When people get really highly regarded by important figures like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, they just can’t handle it. John wasn’t like that.”
“24 YEARS OLD AND WRITES LIKE HE’S ABOUT 200”
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON
Prine’s low-key demeanour could be deceptive. The fact that his music never quite found a place in the mainstream didn’t lessen the immensity of his cultural impact. Fame was of no interest. Adored by his peers and fêted by subsequent generations of singer-songwriters, his empathic narrative ability – sharpened by a novelist’s eye for telling detail – was unmatched. “John just floored me,” recalls his great friend Bonnie Raitt. “His eye was just amazing. With just a few lines he could paint a whole picture.”
He was a product of industrial post-war America, but could just as easily have belonged in a more fluid age, his rich imagery aligned to the rural Arcadian otherness of Faulkner or Frost. John Prine songs existed outside of time and space. Dylan described them as “pure Proustian existentialism”. Prine himself couldn’t even explain where they came from – it was all he could do, he said, just to keep up with them.
In terms of his art, the Prine that first appeared on record hardly changed over
