Ben Theyerl
I was standing in a farm field in Eau Claire a few years back when John Prine wandered back into my life. He'd first been there during childhood, when my Grandfather'd search the dial in the airwaves north of Milwaukee, and I'd listen closely as a man sang "Hello in there, hello" through the radio fuzz. And then he was standing there on stage, singing that song again and well, that was it.
Since then I've been processing life via John Prine. Heck, I've been processing this pandemic via John Prine, and if there's anything good to come out of his departure, it’s that it may make it so others have the comfort of his music as well. You could tap Prine as a master at every little thing he did with folk music—his storytelling, his wit—but you'd be better off to not delineate it. Prine's music has a way of registering with you about life on the terms that life is registered in real time. His brief thoughts were endless. He took the massive complex problems of the world, boiled them down, and showed them to be unabashedly human. And so, Prine's music sticks with you in intimate moments. His words are poetry not in the sense that they're so good they're poetry (though they are), but in that they cast shadows, and ultimately can be heard and misheard. His songs are stories of lives lead that you find yourself leading, even if you don't work with a guy named Rudy at the factory, or all your smiles are legal.
Every few weeks, there’s another Prine song ready for whatever moment arises. My school shut down and suddenly college was over a few weeks back. In the last few days, it was “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)”, off the album of the same name. The end was near, and my heart did feel "in the icehouse, come hill or come valley." It was the second verse that I kept on repeating in my head though: "I've been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there," and not least of which because in this particular instance I had "sat on the park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair," and my head "had shouted down to my heart, better look out below."
Looking back on Prine's life, it’s beautiful that he slipped into old age like he'd meant to be there his whole life. He was a caricature of the wisecracking relative you always had in your sepia vision of American life, though his jokes made you slap your soul instead of your knee. They reached deeper, were more generous, proved that if you mixed humor with life it equaled empathy. As a testament, "Hello, in there," "Sam Stone," and "Angel from Montgomery," all are celebrated for cueing into the nub of human existence, despite Prine himself never fully embodying that existence. On writing his songs through these characters Prine once said, "no one told me I couldn't," and so he did. And perhaps, that's his lasting lesson for us stuck down here. No one's told us we can't be there for each other, can't be kind, can't be human, so we may as well be. And God Bless John Prine, that lesson comes with forty-five years of mesmerizing, honest-to-goodness, soul-saving music for us to enjoy. Smoke that nine mile cigarette John, and take in the show.
Ben Theyerl is a student and writer from Altoona who currently resides in Maine.