Easter 2020

I’m not certain the first time I heard a John Prine song, but I’m pretty sure the first time I listened to a John Prine song was in my father’s car in the parking lot of an evangelical church in the Poconos.  My father started attending there after my mother died.  I wasn’t Christian at the time, but I was curious and wanted to be supportive.  I don’t recall too much about the service aside from taking communion, which as a non-believer I shouldn’t have done, as my father reminded me afterwards.  After the service they had some additional prayer meetings, which I wasn’t quite up for, so I headed out to the car for some solitude.  My dad had a copy of Prine’s double-cd Great Days in the car. While I was waiting, I decided to put it in the cd-player.  The songs and voice were unknown to me, but I was enjoying it well enough.  And then the song “Unwed Fathers” came on and I was floored.  You probably know how it goes, “Unwed fathers / they can’t be bothered / they run like water / from a mountain stream.” I was a young man at the time with a young man’s naïveté.  Unwed fathers?  I’d heard of unwed mothers of course, but never unwed fathers.  It was pure wisdom.  I knew immediately this guy had things to teach me. 

“Unwed Fathers” starts out, “In an Appalachian / Greyhound Station.” I didn’t know it at the time, but John Prine was from nowhere near Appalachia, but I was and had been in a few of those Greyhound stations.  That hit me.  He did it again on “Paradise” – all those coal cars hauling away our mountains.  It seems a little funny, amazing really, how some people are able to capture the sentiments and feelings of a whole group of people in words and music. 

I left Appalachia for the prairie and skyscrapers of Chicago – John Prine’s home turf.  I fell in with the Catholic Workers for a while at the St. Francis house in the Uptown neighborhood.  I bummed around there a lot and often thought of moving in, but never did.  I often showed up on Sundays nights when they had their round table talks.  Once a month they’d do a song circle.  Dave Martin was the ringleader.  He was a great folk-singer, knew all the songs and played all the protests.  There’d always be a few other guitar players around and lots of singers.  I was neither, a poet out of place, but trying my best to join in.  We used the Rise Up Singing songbook, the bible for all such gatherings.  We sang a whole range of things from “The Cat Came Back” to “The Lord of the Dance,” but there were always the regulars we kept returning to – Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, and John Prine’s “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore.”  We got real vociferous on the chorus – “It’s already overcrowded from your dirty little war / and Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason’s for / and your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.”  Those nights were magical.  They made me think things like art and poetry could change the world.  It’s a lesson I haven’t forgotten.

It’s hard to say what my favorite John Prine song or lyric is; I appreciate his humor, but as always I’m more drawn to his ability to capture an entire complex of emotions in a single, mysterious lyric.  The one that often comes to me now is from a cold, desolate winter I spent in Chicago – “At times like these / when the temperatures freeze / I sit alone / just looking at the world through a storm window.”  We were living on the far northside on Greenview Ave. in Rogers Park at the time.  I was desperately trying to complete my dissertation and just kept meeting obstacle after obstacle with my readers.  We were on the second floor of a three-flat with a sun room, though there was little sun at the time, just the bitter Chicago cold.  I remember sitting in that room that winter, looking at the frost crystals on the windows.  I felt a loneliness so deep I just wanted to sit in that silence.  A rock of silence that weighed down my desire to smash those windows with my books and watch them fall with the glass into the snowy street below.  I never did that; I just stayed silent and kept working.

Once I heard John Prine sing live.  He was up at Ravinia on Chicago’s North Shore for my birthday.  Ravinia’s a wonderful place.  We’d take the Metra up there with our blanket and cheap bottle of wine, lay out on the lawn, and listen to the symphony play Rachmaninoff Sonata No. 2.  And we would dream into the trees and the warm summer evening until we believed that anything in the world was possible.  The only time I sat in the bandshell at Ravinia was to listen John Prine.  There was something special hearing him sing in his hometown.  Prine had grown up in Maywood just west of the city, the son of a union man.  He learned guitar and played gigs in Old Town and became a member of the Old Town School of Folk Music, a gem of a place.  There’s not much you need to know about that night at Ravinia other than that I was younger than I am now, it was my birthday, I was with the love of my life, and it was summer.  And Prine sang “Lake Marie.”  There are whispers of the Chicago area throughout Prine’s songs.  None more pronounced or elusive than the beautiful “Lake Marie.”  There is a majesty to that song that comes out from the juxtaposition of beauty and terror, peace and violence, light and dark.  In “Lake Marie,” Prine accomplishes what all the great songwriters accomplish – the unity of the universal and the particular in a single expression.  No one can say what “Lake Marie” is ultimately about.  Is it about the flowering of a love affair and its subsequent death?  Is it about crime and politics?  I suppose one could argue geography is its unifying feature, but the song roams from the Illinois-Wisconsin border to Canada.  The song always hits me deep in the chest with its pathos.  Its expression of loss.  And not a simple loss, but the kind of loss that comes despite a struggle to hold on to something, something of value and hope. 

And that’s where we are tonight after another loss from Covid-19.