John Prine: The Mail Carrier a Film Critic Turned Into a Songwriter

On October 9, 1970, Roger Ebert wandered into a Chicago folk club called the Fifth Peg on a night off from his actual job, reviewing movies for the Chicago Sun-Times. He wrote his first-ever music review that week, about a mail carrier who performed a few nights a month between shifts. The headline was "Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words." Prine later said, "I never had an empty seat after that," while he was still delivering mail and playing three nights a week.

It's one of the cleaner discovery stories in American songwriting, a film critic's only music review in his entire career happening to land on the right performer on the right night. But the review only worked because the songs underneath it were already extraordinary. Prine wrote about a heroin-addicted veteran, a forgotten elderly couple, and a Kentucky hometown erased by a coal company, all before he'd released a single record, and did it with a plainness that made the material land harder, not softer.

A mailman with a guitar in Maywood, Illinois

Prine was born in 1946 in Maywood, a Chicago suburb, and learned guitar at fourteen, later studying at the city's Old Town School of Folk Music. He served in the US Army as a vehicle mechanic in West Germany during the Vietnam War era, without seeing combat, then came home and spent about five years as a US Postal Service mail carrier while he wrote and played at open mics around the city's folk scene, at the Fifth Peg and later the Earl of Old Town. The mail route wasn't incidental to the songwriting. "Hello in There," about an elderly couple slipping into loneliness, reportedly grew partly out of people he met on his route, the kind of material a songwriter finds by paying attention to a job that isn't music at all.

Kristofferson, and a record deal signed the next morning

Fellow Chicago songwriter Steve Goodman spent months pushing Kris Kristofferson to come hear Prine play. Kristofferson eventually caught a late set at the Earl of Old Town after his own show and has said, "By the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else." He had Prine and Goodman perform at his own New York show at the Bitter End not long after, with Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler in the crowd. Wexler signed Prine to Atlantic the next morning. It's a fast turnaround for a career that had, up to that point, been built almost entirely around unpaid open-mic nights and a day job.

A debut album full of songs no one else was writing

His self-titled debut, recorded in Memphis and released in 1971, is one of the strongest first albums in American songwriting, and it's stayed that way in other people's hands as much as his own. "Sam Stone," about a heroin-addicted Vietnam veteran, contains the blunt, unforgettable line "there's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes." "Angel from Montgomery," sung from the perspective of a worn-down older woman, became a signature song for Bonnie Raitt after she recorded it in 1974; she's said it "probably has meant more to my fans and my body of work than any other song." "Paradise" turned his family's ancestral hometown in Kentucky, destroyed by the Peabody Coal Company's strip mining, into a lament plain enough that Prine would introduce it on stage by just explaining, flatly, what the company had done to the town. Johnny Cash later recorded "Sam Stone," asking Prine's permission to soften one line he found too blasphemous for his audience, which Prine allowed; Cash and Tammy Wynette both also recorded "Unwed Fathers," which Prine co-wrote with Bobby Braddock. Bob Dylan, asked in 2009 to name a favorite songwriter, singled out Prine's writing as "pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree." Prine's own response, when told about the quote years later, was characteristically understated: "I take it as a big compliment even if I'm not entirely sure what it means."

Starting his own label before that was normal

In 1981, after leaving Asylum Records, Prine founded Oh Boy Records with his manager Al Bunetta and a friend, Dan Einstein, an independent label built to let him own his own masters at a time when that wasn't the standard path for an artist of his stature. Its first release was a novelty single of Prine singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"; its first full album, Aimless Love, came in 1984. For years the label operated close to what would now be called crowdfunding, with fans mail-ordering records directly. It's still family-run out of Nashville today, one of the longest continuously operating artist-owned labels in the country, and a genuinely early example of a songwriter deciding the business side of the job was worth controlling himself.

Two cancers, a changed voice, and an ending that came too soon

Prine was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer in his neck in 1998, and the surgery and six weeks of radiation that followed permanently deepened and roughened his singing voice, sending him into a year of speech therapy before he could tour and record again. In 2013 he was diagnosed with operable lung cancer and had part of his left lung removed, then worked with a trainer afterward to rebuild the lung capacity touring required. He kept writing and performing through both. In March 2020, both Prine and his wife, Fiona, contracted COVID-19; he was hospitalized on March 26 and intubated two days later. He died on April 7, 2020, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, of complications from COVID-19, at the age of 73.

What's worth taking from his career

Prine was named a 2020 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient shortly before his death, was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, and received the PEN New England Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award in 2016, an honor that's gone to only a handful of songwriters. What runs through his catalogue, from the mail route that fed "Hello in There" to the strip-mined hometown behind "Paradise," is a refusal to reach for a bigger word when a plain one would do the job, and a willingness to let a heavy subject, addiction, grief, environmental ruin, sit in a simple melody without extra decoration. He wrote some of the most quietly devastating songs in American music while still delivering the actual mail, and he never really stopped writing that plainly, right up to the year the writing had to stop instead. If you're working on a song that needs that same kind of plain honesty and a second pair of hands to help finish it, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Chicago Sun-Times: Ebert's Original 1970 Review, Reprinted, NPR: John Prine Obituary, Rolling Stone: John Prine Obituary, Songwriters Hall of Fame: John Prine, Wikipedia: Oh Boy Records, American Songwriter: Bob Dylan on John Prine, Rolling Stone: John Prine's Lung Cancer