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Post by Admin on Apr 9, 2020 1:06:04 GMT
Prine’s offbeat odyssey continued with Pink Cadillac, a rockabilly album he made with Sam Phillips and Phillips’ sons Jerry and Knox. By 1982, Prine decided to follow the path of his friend Goodman and start his own label, Oh Boy Records, with Bunetta. Following a Christmas single, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Claus”/”Silver Bells,” Prine’s first LP release was 1984’s Aimless Love. The business model, with fans sending in checks by mail, was a success, and early proof that singer-songwriters could survive without the support of a major label. “He created the job I have,” said songwriter Todd Snider, who released his early albums on Oh Boy. “Especially when he went to his own label, and started doing it with his own family and team. Before him, there was nothing for someone like Jason Isbell to aspire to, besides maybe Springsteen.” In 1989, Sony offered to buy Oh Boy, an offer Prine turned down. Two years later, he scored one of the biggest successes of his career with 1991’s The Missing Years. Produced by Howie Epstein of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, it featured guest appearances by Petty, Springsteen, and Raitt. The title track, “Jesus the Missing Years” is one of Prine’s most ambitious songs, attempting to fill in the 18-year gap (from age 12 to 29) in Jesus Christ’s life unaccounted for in the Bible. It won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Prine was married three times. He married his high school sweetheart, Ann Carole, in 1966, and they stayed together until the late Seventies. He wed songwriter and bassist Rachel Peer, who he met at Jack Clement’s Nashville studio, in 1984. In 1988, Prine was in Ireland when he met Fiona Whelan, a Dublin recording-studio business manager. She soon moved to Nashville and they married in April 1996. By then, she had given birth to their two sons, Jack and Tommy. “It brought me right down to earth,” Prine said. “I was a dreamer. I learned real fast I don’t know anything except songwriting.” Prine also adopted Jody Whelan, Fiona’s son from a previous relationship. Jody and Fiona would eventually become Prine’s co-managers, overseeing the most commercially successful moment in his career. This idyllic chapter of Prine’s life was complicated in 1997 when, during the sessions for In Spite of Ourselves — a successful duets album with women, including Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Patty Loveless — Prine discovered a cancerous growth on his neck. It was stage 4 cancer. “I felt fine,” Prine said later. “It doesn’t hit you until you pull up to the hospital and you see ‘cancer’ in big letters, and you’re the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.” In January 1998, doctors removed a small tumor, taking a portion of the singer’s neck with it, altering his physical appearance. Prine thought he might never sing again. However, after a year and a half, he returned to performing, with a small show in Bristol, Tennessee. “The crowd was with me. Boy, were they with me,” he said. “And I think I shook everybody’s hand afterward. I knew right then and there that I could do it.” The next decade brought Prine another Grammy for 2005’s Fair & Square. That year, Prine joined Ted Kooser, 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, becoming the first artist to read and play at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Prine saw his already formidable influence reach another generation of artists, including Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, and Kacey Musgraves.
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Post by Admin on Apr 9, 2020 5:54:14 GMT
In 2013, Prine was again sidelined briefly, diagnosed with a spot on his left lung. Six months after the cancer was removed, he was back on the road. Following Buntta’s 2015 death, Prine became sole owner and president of Oh Boy Records, which has also been home to recordings by Snider, Dan Reeder, R.B. Morris, and Heather Eatman, among others.
His last studio album, The Tree of Forgiveness, was released in April 2018, just six months after he was named the Americana Music Association’s Artist of the Year. Rolling Stone said the album had “all the qualities that have defined him as one of America’s greatest songwriters.”
Prine attended the Grammys in January, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award. The singer could be seen on television with his family, grinning and wearing sunglasses, as Bonnie Raitt sang “Angel From Montgomery.” Last year, Prine was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Onstage, he summed up why he chose a life as a songwriter: “I gotta say, there’s no better feeling than having a killer song in your pocket, and you’re the only one in the world who’s heard it.”
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2020 1:21:23 GMT
If you were trying to start a music career in the early 1970s — when so many songs were aimed at the rising tide of young people — a producer probably wouldn't advise a young talent to "write a song about old people."But that's what John Prine did.
He was in his twenties then, a mailman during the day, who spent his nights carrying his guitar and a notebook of songs to work Chicago's folk clubs. His family was part of the migration from the Kentucky hill country that came to work in Chicago's factories. John said he always had a guitar over his shoulder the way some kids grew up carrying a baseball bat.
He told me once that as he carried his mailbag through neighborhoods with small, one-story wooden homes he often saw old faces, peering through the blinds of front windows. He realized that those two or three times he stopped by each week, if only with bills and junk mail, might have been just about the only visits the people inside ever got. And then, one day, the mail might begin to pile up and the phone ring with no answer until a friend, neighbor, mailman or police officer noticed and might knock on the door to call out, "Hello! Hello in there!"
"Hello In There" became one of John Prine's best-known songs.
"Old trees just grow stronger," he wrote, "And rivers grow wilder ev'ry day/Old people just grow lonesome/Waiting for someone to say, 'Hello in there, hello.'"
John Prine's voice was as rough as flint but caught fire. He was acclaimed the next Bob Dylan and never quite matched Dylan's fame. But John became revered as a favorite of American folk legends including Dylan, Steve Goodman, Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson and Bonnie Raitt, who called his songs in Rolling Stone "as pure and simple as rain."
After treatment for cancer on his neck in the late 1990s, a doctor told Prine he might never be able to sing again. Prine said to the doctor, "You obviously have never heard me sing."
Prine won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in January after surviving another round of cancer. He was 73 when he died of complications from coronavirus this week. His passing might make you think of the powerful song he sang for some of those who might feel most uneasy and overlooked in these times:
Someday I'll go and call up Rudy We worked together at the factory But what could I say if asks "What's new?" "Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do" So if you're walking down the street sometime And spot some hollow ancient eyes Please don't just pass 'em by and stare As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there, hello."
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2020 2:13:59 GMT
The song marks the legend's final recording before his April death.
With his final song, John Prine has his first No. 1 song on a Billboard chart.
"I Remember Everything" bows at No. 1 on the Rock Digital Song Sales tally dated June 27 with 4,000 downloads sold in the week ending June 18 (following its June 11 release), according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data.
The standalone single exceeds Prine's prior best of No. 2 on Rock Digital Song Sales, achieved with "In Spite of Ourselves" on the chart dated April 18, after the influential singer-songwriter died April 7 at age 73 of complications from COVID-19.
"I Remember Everything," which Prine wrote with Pat McLaughlin, concurrently bows at No. 29 on the streaming-, airplay- and sales-based Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, having also drawn 289,000 U.S. streams. It also enters Country Digital Song Sales at No. 14.
The last song that Prine recorded (done so in his living room) was produced by Dave Cobb.
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