No.48 - March 2021
Songwriter John Prine, who died of the Covid-19 virus on April 7th of 2020, was a remarkably beloved figure, not only among his
countless fans but also by his peers in the musical community. Todd Snider, one of many younger songwriters he mentored and championed,
wrote in a suitably quirky obituary for Rolling Stone: “Nobody’s ever deserved there to be a heaven more than John Prine. And if there’s
not a heaven, they oughta get one together pretty quick, because John’s coming.” Likewise, fellow songwriter Iris DeMent, a good friend of
Prine’s for thirty years, told Rolling Stone:
In the wake of his passing, I also noticed how often longtime fans felt the urge to claim a more than casual connection, and to share their tales of being introduced to Prine’s music. I’m no different. I first heard of him my freshman year in college, when my mother scribbled on the bottom of a postcard the gnomic question, “Have you heard ‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’ “? She loved to be mysterious, and as I recall I didn’t know immediately what she was talking about. But who could resist that title, especially in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War? As it happens, Mom was an early fan of Kris Kristofferson, who, as all Prine lovers know, “discovered” and helped Prine land his first record contract. She had probably heard Kristofferson praise him to the skies.
Soon enough I had listened to his eponymous debut record (no doubt Mom’s copy)—which was surely one of the greatest debuts in the history of popular music. Now fifty years after its 1971 release, John Prine hasn’t dated a bit. Every song is solid as an oak, and a good handful are universally considered classics of American songwriting, including “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” “Sam Stone,” “Hello In There,” and my personal favorite, “Far From Me,” about which I’ll say more later. I heard folksinger Chris Smither not long ago in concert, talking about what he termed “sturdy songs,” which not only stand the test of time but also can withstand almost any treatment and interpretation. I like to believe that a song like “Paradise” can even withstand my own ragged voice, singing along at a bluegrass concert or belting it out in the car with my wife on a long drive. Musically, most of his songs are easy to sing and—I’m told—not too complicated to play.
But of course I want to talk about their poetry. Prine was a stunningly good lyricist, adept at everything from a breakup song to a bar room sing-along. Around the time of his debut American popular music was rich with songwriting genius. So it was hard to stand out amid the likes of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Dolly Parton, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Jesse Winchester, Carole King, and of course Bob Dylan, among many others. But Prine managed it. And for half a century now his lyrics are the ones I have most consistently loved; and if I am honest, I must admit him as an early influence at least as strong as Yeats or Dickinson—who mostly came later, after I was hooked on Prine and the others. Really it’s difficult to see a great deal of difference in quality, I would argue, between the best of Prine et al. and most of the classic poems of the literary tradition.
To be sure, poetry on the page is not identical with lyrics meant for singing, with or without instrumentation. Prine himself dismissed loose talk of his songs as poems. In an interview in 2016 with The Guardian he noted, “If I wanted to be a poet, I’d write poetry. I know what poetry is. Whatever the subject is, I’m trying to write as well about that subject as I possibly can but still within the confines of a song. I’m not writing poetry, I’m writing song lyrics.” Still, the occasion for this declaration was his receiving the PEN Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence award, which he was happy to accept. He had no trouble agreeing that song lyrics could display literary excellence. As he noted in the same interview, “I’m not trying to put my words down as a poem set to music. To me, that’s a different thing. But I like the idea of it being accepted.” As he no doubt enjoyed it when then U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser invited him to the Library of Congress in 2005 for what was billed as A Literary Evening, two distinguished wordsmiths talking about song lyrics, the creative process, art and life, and the parallels between poetry and song. (Prine also sang and played some of his songs, of course.)
The argument about whether song lyrics are “really” poems is an old and quite tired one, and I’m not inclined to further beat that dead horse. The key differences between page poetry and song lyrics may be examined at length—by someone else. As a poet I’ve always been more interested in their common traits, which are obvious and numerous. A partial list would include figurative language of all sorts; attention to rhythmic and metrical matters; economy of expression; imagery; diction; rhyme, assonance, consonance, and the rest of the sonic arsenal available to language; understatement; symbolism; tonal markers; narrative and dramatic elements; all varieties of irony; and so forth.
As is true with most songwriters, John Prine’s songs are not equally impressive when presented without the music. But just as with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and others, they quite frequently “read” quite well on the page. When I first heard this stanza from Prine’s classic “Paradise,” for instance, I was immediately smitten:
Early to late, Prine had an apparently inexhaustible supply of such turns of phrase and off-kilter metaphors. The opening tune of 2005’s Fair and Square, for example, is “Glory of True Love,” co-written with Roger Cook. For the most part it’s a conventional paean to romantic love, even including some fairly shopworn imagery (“You can climb the highest mountain / Touch the moon and stars above.”) As a whole this song may not contain his strongest lyrics. But what distinguishes it from the typical pop music love song is indicated by the way he concludes the quatrain whose opening I just quoted: “But old faithful's just a fountain / Compared to the glory of true love.” And there it is: “old faithful’s just a fountain” is the Prine touch: down to earth, slangy, utterly quotable.
Prine’s songs are rich with inventive, often oddball images and metaphors. In “Billy the Bum,” for instance, the disabled title character dreams of an adventurous life as a hobo, but in reality is a friendless figure tormented by local children. The chorus summarizes his character in a metaphor as weird as it is evocative: “And he was just a gentle boy / A real florescent light.”
Just his titles can bring a smile to my face, especially for some of his funnier songs: “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” (a great drunken sing-along), “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” (just as silly as it sounds), “The Oldest Baby in the World” (strangely touching), “Wedding Day in Funeralville” (some kind of warped love story), or “Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard” (one of his completely non-vicious satires). Always, Prine had the knack, in his down to earth way, for mixing pathos with humor and vice versa. In “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” for instance, he imagines the child actor from films of the Thirties or Forties, including The Thief of Baghdad and Elephant Boy, as his career hits a slump. The Hollywood moguls propose a solution:
Likewise, I smile every time I listen to “Everybody,” the goofball gospel tune that opens Diamonds in the Rough, his second record. Who but Prine could compose a non-satiric religious song opening like this:
Prine’s humor goes hand in hand with his humility. Who could forget his simile from “Christmas in Prison,” as the prisoner/narrator describes his beloved as “sweeter than saccharine / at a drug store sale”? Prine’s quirky analogies can be whimsical, but sometimes they strike a deep vein uncommon in most pop songs, as in this nearly Dylanesque sneer from “Often Is a Word I Seldom Use”:
As Prine developed, his songs gradually tended to evolve away from the compact realistic narratives that dominated his first recording, with their unforgettable characters like Sam Stone, Cathy in “Far from Me”, Loretta and her retired husband (“Hello in There”), and of course the achingly sad old woman who dreams of being an “angel from Montgomery” in one of Prine’s best songs. As the 1970s progressed, characters like Grandpa the carpenter, the Torch Singer, Iron Ore Betty, Billy the Bum, Barbara Lewis, and the inmate who narrates “Christmas in Prison,” continued to appear, but less and less frequently. Songs that were little short stories in the mode of his first record became rarer.
At the same time, he began more often to write songs in collaboration with other songwriters, which may have at times tamed some of his more anarchic instincts. Not that he didn’t continue composing songs solo, including one on every album that only Prine could write. But in conjunction with others, he could also turn out solid conventional lyrics. His 1984 record Aimless Love, for example, contains this gem of schmaltzy songcraft penned with co-writers Roger Cook and Sandy Mason, “Only Love”:
I don’t know about you, but listening to the recording makes me look back at the words to realize how well chosen, how perfectly timed, how effective they really are. They’re song lyrics, not poetry, as Prine would have been first to admit. Still, see how much mileage he and his fellow songwriters get out of simple diction and utterly conventional ideas. Prine as songwriter could be surrealistic, gritty, poignant, whimsical, and just about any other adjective you can think of. As he matured he also mastered the art of simplicity.
Once on a long cross country drive, my wife and I were listening to and singing along with his first record, which we hadn’t played for a while. After a time, we began talking about how sad so many of the songs were, and how striking it was that these old-soul tales were written by a very young man. We began debating which song was saddest: was it “Hello in There,” that aching story of elderly loneliness? “Sam Stone,” that famous tale of a Vietnam vet’s death by overdose? “Donald and Lydia,” those would-be lovers who can only love in their dreams? Or “Six O’Clock News” with its melodramatic suicide? As each familiar song came on, one of us would say, “This is the one! This is the saddest!” Even “Quiet Man,” a relatively neglected tune with a lush production masking its starkness, suddenly struck me as very bleak, as the departing lover tosses off lines like “Beauty and silence both run deep / And I’m running like crazy while you are asleep” and “don’t you think my tears get rusted.” And of course we can’t neglect “Angel from Montgomery,” which must be considered not only one of the saddest songs on that album, but one of the saddest ever written. “If dreams were lightning and thunder was desire,” the old woman reflects, “This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”—and the song gets no jauntier as it continues.
No doubt everyone knows the final verse, which perfectly captures the mood of someone, in old age, wondering if their whole life was a waste:
. . . John had a way of making even the most mundane seem special, any one of those memories would be justified in retelling, but for now,
the quality about John that keeps coming to the forefront of my mind might best be summed up by something Nelson Mandela once said: “It never
hurts to think too highly of a person; often they become ennobled and act better because of it.”
We all know that John ennobled the characters in his songs. Any of us lucky enough to have seen one of his shows knows he also did this for his audience. I, for one, happen to know he did it at truck stops and Dairy Queens, too. John was one of the all-time great ennoblers of others.
I only knew him through recordings, concerts, and interviews, yet I was hardly surprised at the tone of the many tributes that poured forth from
all directions at his death. DeMent puts her finger on one reason why. You got the feeling that here was a guy who was exactly the same offstage
as on; any number of fellow performers have testified that this was true. And his best songs do ennoble others. They accomplish this as all great
writing does, by paying close and loving attention, seeking truth and expressing what you find with honesty and, if possible, some humility. Prine
was extremely funny and could be silly, but I’ve yet to hear a song of his that I would call mean-spirited or self-righteous. This down to earth
quality no doubt accounts for the way he was not only admired as an artist but also widely loved.
We all know that John ennobled the characters in his songs. Any of us lucky enough to have seen one of his shows knows he also did this for his audience. I, for one, happen to know he did it at truck stops and Dairy Queens, too. John was one of the all-time great ennoblers of others.
In the wake of his passing, I also noticed how often longtime fans felt the urge to claim a more than casual connection, and to share their tales of being introduced to Prine’s music. I’m no different. I first heard of him my freshman year in college, when my mother scribbled on the bottom of a postcard the gnomic question, “Have you heard ‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’ “? She loved to be mysterious, and as I recall I didn’t know immediately what she was talking about. But who could resist that title, especially in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War? As it happens, Mom was an early fan of Kris Kristofferson, who, as all Prine lovers know, “discovered” and helped Prine land his first record contract. She had probably heard Kristofferson praise him to the skies.
Soon enough I had listened to his eponymous debut record (no doubt Mom’s copy)—which was surely one of the greatest debuts in the history of popular music. Now fifty years after its 1971 release, John Prine hasn’t dated a bit. Every song is solid as an oak, and a good handful are universally considered classics of American songwriting, including “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” “Sam Stone,” “Hello In There,” and my personal favorite, “Far From Me,” about which I’ll say more later. I heard folksinger Chris Smither not long ago in concert, talking about what he termed “sturdy songs,” which not only stand the test of time but also can withstand almost any treatment and interpretation. I like to believe that a song like “Paradise” can even withstand my own ragged voice, singing along at a bluegrass concert or belting it out in the car with my wife on a long drive. Musically, most of his songs are easy to sing and—I’m told—not too complicated to play.
But of course I want to talk about their poetry. Prine was a stunningly good lyricist, adept at everything from a breakup song to a bar room sing-along. Around the time of his debut American popular music was rich with songwriting genius. So it was hard to stand out amid the likes of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Dolly Parton, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Jesse Winchester, Carole King, and of course Bob Dylan, among many others. But Prine managed it. And for half a century now his lyrics are the ones I have most consistently loved; and if I am honest, I must admit him as an early influence at least as strong as Yeats or Dickinson—who mostly came later, after I was hooked on Prine and the others. Really it’s difficult to see a great deal of difference in quality, I would argue, between the best of Prine et al. and most of the classic poems of the literary tradition.
To be sure, poetry on the page is not identical with lyrics meant for singing, with or without instrumentation. Prine himself dismissed loose talk of his songs as poems. In an interview in 2016 with The Guardian he noted, “If I wanted to be a poet, I’d write poetry. I know what poetry is. Whatever the subject is, I’m trying to write as well about that subject as I possibly can but still within the confines of a song. I’m not writing poetry, I’m writing song lyrics.” Still, the occasion for this declaration was his receiving the PEN Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence award, which he was happy to accept. He had no trouble agreeing that song lyrics could display literary excellence. As he noted in the same interview, “I’m not trying to put my words down as a poem set to music. To me, that’s a different thing. But I like the idea of it being accepted.” As he no doubt enjoyed it when then U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser invited him to the Library of Congress in 2005 for what was billed as A Literary Evening, two distinguished wordsmiths talking about song lyrics, the creative process, art and life, and the parallels between poetry and song. (Prine also sang and played some of his songs, of course.)
The argument about whether song lyrics are “really” poems is an old and quite tired one, and I’m not inclined to further beat that dead horse. The key differences between page poetry and song lyrics may be examined at length—by someone else. As a poet I’ve always been more interested in their common traits, which are obvious and numerous. A partial list would include figurative language of all sorts; attention to rhythmic and metrical matters; economy of expression; imagery; diction; rhyme, assonance, consonance, and the rest of the sonic arsenal available to language; understatement; symbolism; tonal markers; narrative and dramatic elements; all varieties of irony; and so forth.
As is true with most songwriters, John Prine’s songs are not equally impressive when presented without the music. But just as with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and others, they quite frequently “read” quite well on the page. When I first heard this stanza from Prine’s classic “Paradise,” for instance, I was immediately smitten:
Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
Hard to imagine setting a scene and a mood more evocatively or economically. Note also how the inherent nostalgia involved in recalling idyllic childhood memories is
immediately put in tension with something else. There is something very Prine-like in setting such memories in an abandoned prison “where the air smelled like snakes”
and the usual boyish hijinks are rendered with clear-eyed realism. “But empty pop bottles was all we would kill” is hardly a Walt Disney vision of boyhood. Turns out
Adrie Hill is no “Fern Hill.” But most of all, that simile! “Where the air smelled like snakes” is the essential Prine touch, something a bit quirky, memorable, evocative,
and boyish all at once.
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
Early to late, Prine had an apparently inexhaustible supply of such turns of phrase and off-kilter metaphors. The opening tune of 2005’s Fair and Square, for example, is “Glory of True Love,” co-written with Roger Cook. For the most part it’s a conventional paean to romantic love, even including some fairly shopworn imagery (“You can climb the highest mountain / Touch the moon and stars above.”) As a whole this song may not contain his strongest lyrics. But what distinguishes it from the typical pop music love song is indicated by the way he concludes the quatrain whose opening I just quoted: “But old faithful's just a fountain / Compared to the glory of true love.” And there it is: “old faithful’s just a fountain” is the Prine touch: down to earth, slangy, utterly quotable.
Prine’s songs are rich with inventive, often oddball images and metaphors. In “Billy the Bum,” for instance, the disabled title character dreams of an adventurous life as a hobo, but in reality is a friendless figure tormented by local children. The chorus summarizes his character in a metaphor as weird as it is evocative: “And he was just a gentle boy / A real florescent light.”
Just his titles can bring a smile to my face, especially for some of his funnier songs: “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” (a great drunken sing-along), “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” (just as silly as it sounds), “The Oldest Baby in the World” (strangely touching), “Wedding Day in Funeralville” (some kind of warped love story), or “Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard” (one of his completely non-vicious satires). Always, Prine had the knack, in his down to earth way, for mixing pathos with humor and vice versa. In “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” for instance, he imagines the child actor from films of the Thirties or Forties, including The Thief of Baghdad and Elephant Boy, as his career hits a slump. The Hollywood moguls propose a solution:
The movie wasn't really doing so hot
said the new producer to the old big shot
its dying on the edge of the great Midwest
Sabu must tour or forever rest.
And so it goes:
said the new producer to the old big shot
its dying on the edge of the great Midwest
Sabu must tour or forever rest.
Chorus:
Hey look ma
here comes the elephant boy
bundled all up in his corduroy
headed down south towards Illinois
from the jungles of East St. Paul.
His manager sat in the office alone
staring at the numbers on the telephone
wondering how a man could send a child actor
to visit in the land of the wind chill factor.
Sabu was sad the whole tour stunk
the airlines lost the elephant's trunk
the roadie got the rabies and the scabies and the flu
they was low on morale but they was high on...
Chorus:
Is that a funny song or not? That’s John Prine.
Hey look ma
here comes the elephant boy
bundled all up in his corduroy
headed down south towards Illinois
from the jungles of East St. Paul.
His manager sat in the office alone
staring at the numbers on the telephone
wondering how a man could send a child actor
to visit in the land of the wind chill factor.
Sabu was sad the whole tour stunk
the airlines lost the elephant's trunk
the roadie got the rabies and the scabies and the flu
they was low on morale but they was high on...
Chorus:
Likewise, I smile every time I listen to “Everybody,” the goofball gospel tune that opens Diamonds in the Rough, his second record. Who but Prine could compose a non-satiric religious song opening like this:
While out sailing on the ocean
While out sailing on the sea
I bumped into the Savior
And He said pardon me
I said "Jesus you look tired"
He said "Jesus so do you,
Sit down son
'Cause I got some fat to chew"
And he proceeds to have a serious talk with Jesus, sketched in the most unpretentious manner possible:
While out sailing on the sea
I bumped into the Savior
And He said pardon me
I said "Jesus you look tired"
He said "Jesus so do you,
Sit down son
'Cause I got some fat to chew"
Well he spoke to me of morality
Starvation, pain and sin
Matter of fact the whole dang time
I only got a few words in
But I won't squawk
Let 'em talk
Hell it's been a long long time
And any friend that's been turned down
Is bound to be a friend of mine
I’d call that a funny tune, but also serious. It’s neither unduly preachy nor truly irreverent, utterly unpretentious, and all John Prine. The essential
Prine tone can be easily seen if you compare this song to Kristofferson’s homage, released in 1972, “Jesus Was a Capricorn,” on the same theme with a similar
melody and chorus, and subtitled “Owed to John Prine.” But Kristofferson adds a more acid bite to the lyrics, e.g.: “Reckon we’d just nail Him up if He
come down again.” And Prine’s chorus (“Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to”) morphs, in Kristofferson’s version, to “Cos everybody’s got to have
somebody to look down on,” which flips Prine’s meaning entirely.
Starvation, pain and sin
Matter of fact the whole dang time
I only got a few words in
But I won't squawk
Let 'em talk
Hell it's been a long long time
And any friend that's been turned down
Is bound to be a friend of mine
Prine’s humor goes hand in hand with his humility. Who could forget his simile from “Christmas in Prison,” as the prisoner/narrator describes his beloved as “sweeter than saccharine / at a drug store sale”? Prine’s quirky analogies can be whimsical, but sometimes they strike a deep vein uncommon in most pop songs, as in this nearly Dylanesque sneer from “Often Is a Word I Seldom Use”:
You must think my life's a circus
watching me laughing
and slapping my thighs
how'd ya like to die
in the house of mirrors
with nobody around to close your eyes.
The unforgettable title of that song might strike us as one of those clever but strained plays on words so common in mainstream country songs. But in this classic
Prine kiss-off song it is “earned,” as they say, in a set of lyrics as tart as they are clever, and (at least for me) oddly touching. The opening verse addresses
a lover with what initially might sound like tenderness:
watching me laughing
and slapping my thighs
how'd ya like to die
in the house of mirrors
with nobody around to close your eyes.
I know that you're sad
I know that you're lonely
you lie awake 'till way past when
But “I want you to know,” he continues, “that I'm leaving you only / 'cause I might not get the chance again.” Perhaps he’s dismissing a one-night-stand who’s looking too clingy:
I know that you're lonely
you lie awake 'till way past when
Tell me, where did the weekend go?
Tell me, where did the weekend go?
Went like thunder, felt like snow.
Went like thunder, felt like snow.
I take it that the thunder here represents the explosive power of the lovemaking itself, and “felt like snow” indicates the aftermath, when all that high voltage turns cold and just melts away. But whatever “went like thunder, felt like snow” might mean, it’s clearly not a very romantic image. Maybe this is not a one-night-stand, and he’s breaking off an affair rather brutally. In any case, he wants it known he’s leaving, and not regretfully:
Tell me, where did the weekend go?
Went like thunder, felt like snow.
Went like thunder, felt like snow.
Going down to the Greyhound station
going back home
and get what's mine
got me a date
with the ten o'clock special
gonna be there at a quarter to nine.
Each of the verses is surrounded by that chorus and its title phrase, which seems less and less humorous with each repetition:
going back home
and get what's mine
got me a date
with the ten o'clock special
gonna be there at a quarter to nine.
I'm cold and I'm tired
and I can't stop coughing
long enough to tell you all of the news
I'd like to tell you
that I'll see you more often
but often is a word I seldom use
often is a word I seldom use.
In his best lyrics, you can seldom predict where a given passage will end up. Look how he concludes this quatrain from “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)”:
and I can't stop coughing
long enough to tell you all of the news
I'd like to tell you
that I'll see you more often
but often is a word I seldom use
often is a word I seldom use.
I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there.
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart
"You better look out below!"
That final turn strikes me as a truly fresh way to express romantic infatuation—which always looks a bit absurd viewed from the outside, and sometimes even
from inside—but remains no less powerful for all that. You can listen to countless love songs on the radio without encountering something as unassumingly apt
as “my head shouted down to my heart / ‘You better look out below!’“
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart
"You better look out below!"
As Prine developed, his songs gradually tended to evolve away from the compact realistic narratives that dominated his first recording, with their unforgettable characters like Sam Stone, Cathy in “Far from Me”, Loretta and her retired husband (“Hello in There”), and of course the achingly sad old woman who dreams of being an “angel from Montgomery” in one of Prine’s best songs. As the 1970s progressed, characters like Grandpa the carpenter, the Torch Singer, Iron Ore Betty, Billy the Bum, Barbara Lewis, and the inmate who narrates “Christmas in Prison,” continued to appear, but less and less frequently. Songs that were little short stories in the mode of his first record became rarer.
At the same time, he began more often to write songs in collaboration with other songwriters, which may have at times tamed some of his more anarchic instincts. Not that he didn’t continue composing songs solo, including one on every album that only Prine could write. But in conjunction with others, he could also turn out solid conventional lyrics. His 1984 record Aimless Love, for example, contains this gem of schmaltzy songcraft penned with co-writers Roger Cook and Sandy Mason, “Only Love”:
You may live alone and close your eyes
Some folks do
You may dream a dream that's twice your size
All night through
When the morning comes who's to tell your dreams to
Only you
Chorus:
Only love, love only, only love
Will do
Only love, love only, only love
Comes true
Nothing else, you see, there nothing else
Only love, only love
I have known a love within my heart
One or two
Where one love would end and one would start
I never knew
If love should come your way you'll learn to say
I love you I love you
Clearly this is worlds away from Prine’s cleverest mode. But maybe one sign of a truly fine songwriter is how he can make the most ordinary language come
alive. The lyrics aren’t much on the page, of course. Simple to the point of simplistic, and definitely corny. But how it blossoms with the musical performance.
Have a listen, if you are able. Here’s one YouTube link that’ll take you to the original recording:
www.youtube.com
Some folks do
You may dream a dream that's twice your size
All night through
When the morning comes who's to tell your dreams to
Only you
Chorus:
Only love, love only, only love
Will do
Only love, love only, only love
Comes true
Nothing else, you see, there nothing else
Only love, only love
I have known a love within my heart
One or two
Where one love would end and one would start
I never knew
If love should come your way you'll learn to say
I love you I love you
I don’t know about you, but listening to the recording makes me look back at the words to realize how well chosen, how perfectly timed, how effective they really are. They’re song lyrics, not poetry, as Prine would have been first to admit. Still, see how much mileage he and his fellow songwriters get out of simple diction and utterly conventional ideas. Prine as songwriter could be surrealistic, gritty, poignant, whimsical, and just about any other adjective you can think of. As he matured he also mastered the art of simplicity.
Once on a long cross country drive, my wife and I were listening to and singing along with his first record, which we hadn’t played for a while. After a time, we began talking about how sad so many of the songs were, and how striking it was that these old-soul tales were written by a very young man. We began debating which song was saddest: was it “Hello in There,” that aching story of elderly loneliness? “Sam Stone,” that famous tale of a Vietnam vet’s death by overdose? “Donald and Lydia,” those would-be lovers who can only love in their dreams? Or “Six O’Clock News” with its melodramatic suicide? As each familiar song came on, one of us would say, “This is the one! This is the saddest!” Even “Quiet Man,” a relatively neglected tune with a lush production masking its starkness, suddenly struck me as very bleak, as the departing lover tosses off lines like “Beauty and silence both run deep / And I’m running like crazy while you are asleep” and “don’t you think my tears get rusted.” And of course we can’t neglect “Angel from Montgomery,” which must be considered not only one of the saddest songs on that album, but one of the saddest ever written. “If dreams were lightning and thunder was desire,” the old woman reflects, “This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”—and the song gets no jauntier as it continues.
No doubt everyone knows the final verse, which perfectly captures the mood of someone, in old age, wondering if their whole life was a waste:
There's flies in the kitchen I can hear 'em there buzzing
And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.
If you vote for that song as saddest, I won’t disagree. But the one I keep returning most to, after fifty years, is this one:
And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.
Far From Me
As the cafe was closing
on a warm summer night
And Cathy was cleaning the spoons
The radio played the hit parade
And I hummed along with the tune
She asked me to change the station
Said the song just drove her insane
But it weren't just the music playing
It was me that she was trying to blame.
Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
Well, I leaned on my left leg
in the parking lot dirt
And Cathy was closing the lights
A June bug flew from the warmth he once knew
And I wished for once I weren't right
Why we used to laugh together
And we'd dance to any old song.
Well, ya know, she still laughs with me
But she waits just a second too long.
Repeat Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
Well, I started the engine
and I gave it some gas
And Cathy was closing her purse
Well, we hadn't gone far in my beat up old car
And I was prepared for the worst.
"Will you still see me tomorrow?"
"No, I got too much to do."
Well, a question ain't really a question
If you know the answer too.
Repeat Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
As a bit of songcraft, that’s just amazing, beautifully bleak and spare, like one of Raymond Carver’s short stories. The narrator is about to be dumped by
his girlfriend, and senses it from the start:
As the cafe was closing
on a warm summer night
And Cathy was cleaning the spoons
The radio played the hit parade
And I hummed along with the tune
She asked me to change the station
Said the song just drove her insane
But it weren't just the music playing
It was me that she was trying to blame.
Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
Well, I leaned on my left leg
in the parking lot dirt
And Cathy was closing the lights
A June bug flew from the warmth he once knew
And I wished for once I weren't right
Why we used to laugh together
And we'd dance to any old song.
Well, ya know, she still laughs with me
But she waits just a second too long.
Repeat Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
Well, I started the engine
and I gave it some gas
And Cathy was closing her purse
Well, we hadn't gone far in my beat up old car
And I was prepared for the worst.
"Will you still see me tomorrow?"
"No, I got too much to do."
Well, a question ain't really a question
If you know the answer too.
Repeat Chorus:
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
She asked me to change the station
Said the song just drove her insane
But it weren't just the music playing
It was me that she was trying to blame.
The end is inevitable, but Prine plays out the narrative in expertly chosen everyday details, as his narrator goes through the motions hoping against hope:
Said the song just drove her insane
But it weren't just the music playing
It was me that she was trying to blame.
Well, I started the engine
and I gave it some gas
And Cathy was closing her purse
Well, we hadn't gone far in my beat up old car
And I was prepared for the worst.
And in the final verse the dreaded moment arrives:
and I gave it some gas
And Cathy was closing her purse
Well, we hadn't gone far in my beat up old car
And I was prepared for the worst.
"Will you still see me tomorrow?"
"No, I got too much to do."
Well, a question ain't really a question
If you know the answer too.
That last sentence gets me every time, and has for a half century and counting. There’s deep wisdom here—deeper than we have any right to expect in a pop
song—and poetry too. The last chorus closes things out, returning one last time to the title phrase:
"No, I got too much to do."
Well, a question ain't really a question
If you know the answer too.
And the sky is black and still now
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
“No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams insisted; that old broken bottle, shining just like what it isn’t, describes this narrator’s life and
dreams with painful clarity and concision. Just as Williams was able to, Prine is able to fashion moving poetry out of the most ordinary lives and everyday
language.
On the hill where the angels sing
Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it's far, far from me
© 2021 David Graham
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