Amy Harris/Invision/AP
John Prine performs at Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee, 2019.
John Prine, who died last week, was a poet and a subversive. The son of working-class parents from Western Kentucky, he burst on the national scene in 1971. In a generation that produced virtuosos by the dozens, he was a magical and spare lyricist. With one part sly wit and one part pathos, he could evoke a whole world in a few words:
Small town, bright lights, Saturday night
Pinballs and pool halls flashing their lights
*
Me and Loretta, we don’t talk much more
*
And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile
*
There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.
Like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, and Buddy Holly, Prine was also category-defying. His category was his own.
Was he country? Folk? Bluegrass? Yes and no. He was Prine.
Interestingly, he was the very rare country singer who was also leftish. And that trait distanced him from much of the country audience that otherwise had so much in common with him.
“And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?”
“Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking,
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
Or
But your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore,
They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don’t like killin’,
No matter what the reason’s for.
Or
She was a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol,
And I was just a soldier, on my way to Montreal.
At times, in his tunes like “Angel From Montgomery” or “Hello in There,” Prine could sound like the best of nonpolitical country, only better. He created characters that he inhabited; his lyrics were unflinching; he never resorted to cheap sentimentality.
It’s hard to think of a more authentic tribune of the hardscrabble country life. But Prine’s political views, when he did turn to politics, were anathema. He was anti–Vietnam War and later scathingly anti-Iraq. He mocked opportunistic patriotism. He teased the cheap invocation of Jesus.
Among rural fundamentalists, that marked him as a member of a different tribe, more Country Joe and the Fish than country.
And though some apolitical country singers revered Prine and even performed with him, when the tributes poured in after Prine’s death from COVID-19, for the most part they were not from hardcore country radio stations.
Prine captured the lives of the rural poor as powerfully as any singer, not as a mimic or a tourist, but as a kid with roots in Kentucky. He authentically evoked the struggles of the very people who weirdly found a champion in the inauthentic Donald Trump. Yet the Trumpers were not buying Prine’s broader connecting of the dots—the personal to the cultural to the economic and the political.
Why not? The fundamentalist package is imbibed whole: The evangelical church; the unquestioning patriotism (often cheap but sometimes brutally earned); the gun culture; the right to life. Sinners are forgiven, but even partial dissenters are cast out.
Now you might say, this is depressing as hell. If even John Prine cannot crack the cultural monolith with its perverse reverence for Trump, who on earth can?
But maybe it’s not quite so monolithic. Categories of music, after all, are permeable and malleable.
Johnny Cash, as mainstream country as it gets, can also sing with Bob Dylan. Bruce Springsteen can compose the anthem “Born in the U.S.A.,” yet offer homage to Pete Seeger. One country artist after another can cover John Prine.
And maybe this permeability is partly true of politics. We are already witnessing the emergence of a new generation of Prinian progressives.
In West Virginia, which still has a legacy of progressive memory from the glory days of the United Mine Workers, down-home populists are making impressive gains. In 2018, two Democratic candidates for Congress, Richard Ojeda and Talley Sergent, beat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote in their districts by 36 and 25 points, respectively. This was the largest swing for non-incumbents in the country.
And after a brief blip in the polls, Trump is losing support across the board for his performance in the pandemic. Granted, Democrats have a long way to go before they can merge the cultural, the political, and the economic to reclaim the affections of voters they never should have lost. But this shift has begun.
The corona pandemic will pass. And Trump will pass. As John Prine sang:
Surely they can forgive us and find
That we must have been out of our minds.
