The genius of John prine

Le génie, c’est l’enfance retrouvée à volonté.

— Charles Baudelaire

Songs, since there have been songs, have performed a particularly important function of transmitting stories in an accessible way. So, there are as many types of songs as there are ways of telling a story. Some choose to linger over the bare instrumentation of a lone guitar, others prefer a full brass band, others yet wish to croon into electrically-amplified microphones which carry their whispers around the room, and some use not words at all, but rely instead on the harmony that different musical instruments create when played together in a certain way. Just as songwriters have preferences, so do listeners. This is the basis of musical genres.

In painting the sweet and fertile intersection of the folk and country genres, specifically in the form in which they emerged and were recorded in the United Sates in the ’70s, we find in our palette, in no particular order, defiance, independence, introspection, spirituality, longing for times (long) gone by, Rousseauian nobility, playfulness, mischief, and others. One color that blends in well with the aforementioned ones is childhood, or, as Baudelaire would have it, “childhood rediscovered at will”. Reigning in childhood, however, is an elusive matter. Using it to create art is even more so. Not many have attempted to use it in their compositions, but among those that have, John Prine seems to have done the best job at it, but has not received enough credit for doing so.

Because of its nature, this “childhood recaptured at will” is almost as elusive for listeners as it is for singers. That is perhaps why it has not been as widely recognized as it should have. Furthermore, in trying to reverse-engineer Prine’s songs and look for it, I realize I run the risk of missing the point. Childhood is not analytical, it does not reflect the light of inquiry well, nor does it bend to the tool of method. Indeed, in dissecting and cataloging parts of songs and lyrics I would be engaging in a process that is antithetical to the one that was used to create those songs and lyrics. Yet, quenchless curiosity prevails and drives me to examples. Before I indulge it, however, I should say that if the end results fail to convince of the genius of John Prine, the fault should be more readily suspected in me than in the source.

Childhood lives in many Prine numbers, but the one in which it takes the absolute forefront is “Grandpa Was a Carpenter” from his excellent 1973 record “Sweet Revenge”. In it, we hear John Prine describing his grandparents just as he might have done if he had been 5 years old:

Grandpa wore his suit to dinner
Nearly every day
No particular reason
He just dressed that way
Brown necktie and a matching vest
And both his wingtip shoes
He built a closet on our back porch
And put a penny in a burned-out fuse.

To be clear, this is not childhood-like because it describes a relationship of a grandchild to its grandparents. Most of us, if asked to do the same, would describe our experience and memories in a perfectly adult way. What we see in Prine’s lyrics, in contrast, is a description of a child’s mind, of which I see two main characteristics in this song. The first is the inability to distinguish the pertinent from the trivial. Whereas an adult may sort their memories in a way that the most important and distinctive may come to the front, to a child they are all simply a succession of events, not one more important than another, since the basis on which importance is judged is not yet available to the child. Thus, we have a description of how the grandpa dressed alongside the fact that he built a closet on the back porch and used to put pennies in burned-out fuses. We see the same indiscriminancy in the last verse:

Now my grandma was a teacher
Went to school in Bowling Green
Traded in a milking cow
For a Singer sewing machine
Well, she called her husband “Mister”
And she walked real tall in pride
And used to buy me comic books
After Grandpa died.

Here, the ostensibly important facts that speak to the grandma’s character are presented in the same breath as the fact that she traded in a milk cow for a sewing machine. In here I also see the second distinctive characteristic of the child’s mind, which is self-centeredness. This is simply intended to mean that the child understands much of the world in relation to itself, and is not intended to carry any of the negative connotations of “selfishness” and “egoism”. As a prime example, the death of the grandpa is mentioned (for the first time and only time in the song) in the way of saying that the child started reading more comic books as a result of it. Then, the second verse:

Well, he used to sing me “Blood on the Saddle”
And rock me on his knee
And let me listen to the radio
Before we got TV
Well, he’d drive to church on Sunday
And he’d take me with him too.

We are back to the grandpa, whose actions now all revert back to the child. To draw a quick parallel from literature, we see this a lot in the children of Faulkner’s novels who, unlike John Prine, has received the just recognition of his genius[^1]. What John Prine in this song has in common with Quentin from The Sound and the Fury and Vardaman from As I Lay Dying is that they all interpret events through those events’ immediate interactions with themselves. Indeed, we actually learn just as much, if not more, about John Prine from this verse than we do about the grandpa. More generally, the quick tempo of the song and the joyfullness in the instrumentation further drive on the feeling of recaptured childhood.

To mention in passing some other Prine songs in which these or other elements of childhood have emerged, we can look at “Illegal Smile” with its descriptions of a childlike joy emerging in a smile that is contrary to everything[^2], “Fish and Whistle”, “Christmas in Prison”, and, in fact, most of his songs from the ’70s to some extent. While he continued to write delightful music well into the 2010s, and I do not doubt that he kept his childhood self close to heart, his ability to whip it into a song form waned as time went on. Nevertheless, I believe it is worth highlighting. It is a part of what makes him such a compelling songwriter. It is also a part that I feel he does not get enough credit for.

[^1] Many other parallels can be drawn, for example with the dadaists of the early 20th century or with some experimental music which shouts nonsense into amplifiers. Those, however, see the recapturing of childhood as the raison d’être of their art, while John Prine has the sensibility to use it as one wellspring of creativity among many others. As such, I think the comparison to Faulkner is the closest one, as he did the same. [^2] This is how John Prine himself explained the song’s contents in an interview. In the meantime, the song had apparently became a pothead anthem of sorts and looking at the lyrics from that lens makes it easy to see why.