{"id":28929,"date":"2020-04-09T16:06:44","date_gmt":"2020-04-09T21:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=28929"},"modified":"2020-04-10T20:34:16","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T01:34:16","slug":"john-prine-legendary-songwriter-dies-at-73-of-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/entertainment\/2020\/04\/09\/john-prine-legendary-songwriter-dies-at-73-of-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"John Prine, Legendary Songwriter, Dies at 73 of COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">\tJohn Prine, a folk and country music songwriter who wrote about genuinely painful subjects with a wry sense of humor and brilliant wordplay, died on Tuesday at age 73 in Nashville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> Prine, an army veteran during Vietnam who was drafted and served in Germany as an engineer, \u201cdrinking beer and pretending to fix trucks,\u201d grew to popularity after his debut self-titled album was released, which featured the track, \u201cSam Stone,\u201d a song about a morphine-addicted Vietnam Vet that was later covered by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=q_QVEv8JdJU\">Johnny Cash in concert<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/w5Rkm_dqm7A?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption>Prine performs a few of his classics along with songs from his last album, in the House of Strombo. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\tAt the 2020 Grammys, Prine was awarded a \u201cLifetime Achievement Award\u201d two years after his last album, 2018\u2019s \u201cTree of Forgiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\t\u201cTree of Forgiveness\u201d won Best Americana Album at the 2019 ceremony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> Working as a mailman in Chicago after he got out of the army, Prine wrote the songs for his debut album while on his mail route. Constructing songs that felt more like short stories akin to the work of some of America\u2019s greatest writers, Prine shot holes in the daily zeitgeist with songs like \u201cSam Stone\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sRCLHBhZPQ4\">Your American Flag Decal Won\u2019t Get You Into Heaven Anymore<\/a>.\u201d These songs highlighted the hypocrisy of the violence of American foreign politics and the toll it took on the people forced to fight in said conflicts. Others such as \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=AQd7nq4VI2c\">Unwed Fathers<\/a>\u201d pointed out double standards in gender in parenting at a time when nobody else would\u2019ve written about such topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OLVWEYUqGew?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption>Prine&#8217;s &#8220;Sam Stone&#8221; is widely considered his greatest song. It encapsulates for many, the experience of the American Vietnam Veteran, used up and left to rot, after being forced to experience the trauma of war. (Source: YouTube\/John Prine)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\t\u201cHe had a way of taking situations that were sad or things that made him angry and finding the dimension in them,\u201d wrote Max Castleman in a Facebook post, a Dayton, Ohio fan, about Prine\u2019s ability to write complex, dense songs with occasional flourishes of humor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\tPrine was hospitalized last week with COVID-19 and was placed in an intensive care unit. His wife, in a video from her home, confirmed Prine\u2019s hospitalization, urging people to take the virus seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\tPrine, who was 73, had dealt with health complications in the past. In \u201898 he was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer and underwent a series of surgeries and radiation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\tA year later, Prine released an all-female duet album and began churning out two decades of some of his best material. His final album, \u201cTree of Forgiveness,\u201d ended with a song about Prine going to Heaven, drinking ginger ale and vodka cocktails and flirting with girls on the tilt-a-whirl, displaying in it his ability to talk about the hard, painful parts about living in a way that\u2019s still humorous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\tSocial media was chocked full of tributes to the singer after his death, including Wilco\u2019s Jeff Tweedy, who recorded Prine\u2019s \u201cPlease Don\u2019t Bury Me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7HCN0DbPihE?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption>Jeff Tweedy of Wilco covered one of Prine&#8217;s songs on his wife&#8217;s Instagram in tribute to the late singer. (Source: YouTube\/Matt Nickel)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\tThe song, again, featured jokes regarding the songwriter\u2019s death. The song\u2019s final lines, featuring Prine\u2019s dark sense of humor, while simultaneously displaying his genuine kindness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBut please don&#8217;t bury me \/ Down in that cold, cold ground \/ No, I&#8217;d rather have &#8217;em cut me up \/ And pass me all around \/ Throw my brain in a hurricane \/ And the blind can have my eyes \/ And the deaf can take both of my ears \/ If they don&#8217;t mind the size,\u201d wrote Prine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prine described the song as, \u201c&#8230;the best organ donor campfire song I know of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prine wrote about the calamitous parts of life with genuine joy and humor. He wrote about normal, everyday people in a way that gave them dignity like few were capable of. He wrote country music for people who don\u2019t normally listen to country music; country music as it probably always should be, about normal people and their pain and how they get up every day and continue despite the hardships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As of the writing of this, there are over 430,000 people affected by the coronavirus in the U.S. and 15,000 have died from it. The passing of a \u201ccelebrity\u201d despite Prine\u2019s seeming anonymity isn\u2019t somehow sadder than all of those other deaths, but as a fan, as somebody who followed the man\u2019s career and who gained a great deal of joy in his unique worldview and cried alongside the depth of his truth, I can\u2019t help but feel a great loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like a great friend died. Let\u2019s just hope he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZmgDORhLkS8&amp;t=1s\">didn\u2019t die for nothing, I suppose<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Richard Foltz<br><\/strong>Executive Editor<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jar8wiaE0dw?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption>John Prine shared his home and his songwriting process just a year ago. (Source: YouTube\/CBS This Morning)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Prine, a folk and country music songwriter who wrote about genuinely painful subjects with a wry sense of humor and brilliant wordplay, died on Tuesday at age 73 in Nashville. Prine, an army veteran during Vietnam who was drafted and served in Germany as an engineer, \u201cdrinking beer and pretending to fix trucks,\u201d grew [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10416,"featured_media":28931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3613,2104,2144],"tags":[4079,1744,4168,4165,4167,2877,4166,2130],"class_list":["post-28929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-entertainment","category-music-entertainment","tag-covid-19","tag-grammys","tag-jeff-tweedy","tag-john-prine","tag-johnny-cash","tag-richard-foltz","tag-sam-stone","tag-vietnam-war"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/john-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-7wB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28929"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28936,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28929\/revisions\/28936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}