John Prine ties my family together with twine
on the five year anniversary of Prine's death
I wrote this a few years ago, sharing it today to honor one of my favorite artists to ever do it.
John Prine’s self-titled debut album sits on my dad’s dashboard and Spanish Pipedream plays through the stereo of his old hatchback (he’s had some iteration of this car as long as I’ve gotten carsick in the backseat). My dad sings along—a voice that I’ve heard sing songs of his own creation forever, the Almost There song, just to name one.
I picture my dad, decades younger than he is now, walking into my grandma Silvie’s home and singing John Prine. I can hear my grandma’s radio softly playing a soccer game, the announcers shouting in Spanish. I can hear pork—in it’s various forms—sizzling on the stove or the beep of the microwave. The TV is on too, some TLC show, maybe the same soccer game that’s on the radio.
When my grandma was dying in her home in Salem, Virginia last year, an aunt found her wishes written on a ruled piece of notebook paper. Play “God Bless America”, she wrote. Tony, sing that song you always sang. The song? “Please Don’t Bury Me”, from John Prine’s second studio album. My dad dutifully recited the words at her funeral a week later, “Please don’t bury me down in the cold, cold ground.”
I didn’t arrive at my love for John Prine through my grandma, my dad or my mom, at least consciously. I started listening to him after his death in 2020, when I heard Angel from Montgomery playing from our not-long-for-this-world radio station (rip 103.1 wrnr). The song became the soundtrack to a long and lonely summer. I was enamored by the way he finds humor in the mundane or even in the worst things life has to offer. The ease with which he tells a story, the anti-war songs, the songs dripping in loneliness, oh, the collabs.
When I told my mom that Angel from Montgomery became my most listened to song that year (according to Spotify), she laughed and told me she’d sang, “I am an old woman…” to the five of us older kids when we were kids.
There’s something to be said about memory here—how music sticks, even when you don’t know how. Like when a song you love plays on the radio and you sing along but you can’t remember the name. I guess it could all be as simple as two people with similar music tastes raising a daughter with the same loves: the same way they raised me on picking crabs or dancing in the kitchen. But I never knew my parents as a unit and on top of that, I didn’t reach my love for Prine through them. I found him on the winding musical road that I’ve traveled on my own.
I imagine this is kind of what intergenerational love looks like: handing the young all that you can give, only for them to find what they need in their own time. So, as Spanish Pipedream plays on the radio in my dad’s car, I say, “I love this song.” He nods his head, “one of the best.”