Can we say RIP to John Prine - one of the great American songwriters?

:(

SAD

Very sad. I have a friend who was following his case closely. I know she will be really upset about this. Her ex-boyfriend’s mom just died from COVID19 a few days ago also.

This is sad.

Bad news !

My band sings a couple of John Prine songs. Our favorite is Paradise.

I love a lot of his music, sad.

My heart is broken. I have loved his work for almost a half-century. When casual acquaintances asked me (rather insensitively, I thought) during my cancer treatments, what arrangements I had made in case I died, I would sing Please Don’t Bury Me at them.

I loved his humor and irreverence, his sweetness of spirit, and the wonderful influence he had on the entire industry.

This news makes me feel so sad. The real earnest deal. There isn’t an ounce of inauthenticity in John Prine.

He was just a working guy indulging his passion for music at folk clubs when people recognized his huge talent.

“In the late 1960s, while Prine was delivering mail in Maywood, Illinois, he began to sing at open mic evenings at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a “You think you can do better?” comment made to him by another performer. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert heard him there and wrote the first review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter.” Link

@Call_Me_Jay

Only bad thing about that album is its cover. Makes him look like a hick and doesn’t really reflect who John Prine was. He himself didn’t really like it (but had no control over it). He felt that, being a city boy, they should have photographed him on a bus or something.

One of my favorites. I’ve always had room for one or more of his stories in my repertoire.

When I first heard he had the virus, the first song if his that came to mind was Please Don’t Bury Me

From what I’ve read they did, in fact, scatter his ashes in the Green River, as per the line in his song ‘Paradise’.

-“When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam
I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waiting
Just five miles away from wherever I am”-