Best-known for ‘Paradise,’ John Prine was the uncommon Everyman

One of the more striking song introductions John Prine cooked up onstage —and through his five-decade performance career, there have been a fistful of them – was a whimsical lead-in to the title tune of his 1991 album, “The Missing Years.” Specifically, the song was titled “Jesus: The Missing Years,” a light-hearted imagining of what might have transpired during an unaccounted 18-year period in the life of Christ.

“That kind of stuck in the back of my mind,” Prine told a Louisville Palace audience during a 1992 concert. “One of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of mankind and nobody knew where he was for 18 years. I snuck away on a fishing trip once with this waitress for a couple of days. By the time we got back, everybody knew where we were.”

That was a revealing reflection in several ways. It placed Prine’s self-effacing profile front and center, highlighted a sense of humor as homespun as it was worldly and approached subject matter that would have simply intimidated lesser writers. The resulting song was amusing but humanizing, a tall tale that reached for unexplored heights but was told with the candor of an everyman poet.

If there is a parallel to Prine’s worldly but unassuming sense of writing, it would be the works of Mark Twain. Their mutual stories possessed sage-like insight to the times we live (and lived) in, yet both writers imparted their sagas like an elder uncle or, at times, a renegade older brother. Maybe that’s why so many of Prine’s peers and successive generations of fans forged such a kinship to his music.

Prine, 73, died Tuesday at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center following complications brought on by the COVID-19 coronavirus.

If there was a definable magic to Prine’s work, it was a remarkable blend of economy, simplicity and accessibility in the narratives to his songs. Much of that was rooted in country inspiration, but the Illinois native who spent so many of his summers in Muhlenberg County as a youth, was not a country artist. His storylines were folk-rooted and his sense of thematic proportion was too askew for any era of country radio to fully accept.

He wasn’t an overtly political artist, either, yet there was a subversive topicality to many of his best songs. Perhaps the most regionally relevant was “Paradise,” his enduring post card from Muhlenberg County with memories based as much in the land’s demolition from strip mining as nostalgia.

Many of his songs may have sounded like politely dismissive observations of everyday life (“Fish and Whistle,” “Grandpa Was a Carpenter” and especially “That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round”) but there a wise and wily moral to all of them. “It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown,” he would sing. “That’s the way that the world goes ‘round.” How topical is that?

Prine’s most persuasive songs, however, were also his most sobering ones – especially the works that framed the human condition as if it were a series of faded photographs.

The gallery begins with an exquisite requiem for the elderly that unfolds in “Hello in There” and the account of a drug-addled soldier who dies alone in “Sam Stone.” Both come from Prine’s career-defining, self-titled 1971 album. Ensuing years brought us a neo-existential view of a lasting tragedy in the title tune to 1978’s “Bruised Orange,” his first comeback album. A stark but somehow hopeful postscript of a divorce within “All the Best” typified the tone of “The Missing Years,” a second comeback success that earned Prine his first Grammy.

Finally, we have the unrelentingly bittersweet “Summer’s End” from 2018’s “The Tree of Forgiveness.” The record triggered a third career renaissance for Prine.

Lexington audiences got to witness nearly all of these songs play out in performance over the years, from Prine’s famed residencies at the long-since-demolished Breeding’s on New Circle Road in the 1980s to a landmark evening at the Singletary Center for the Arts in 2011. At the latter concert, Amanda Shires and an unannounced Jason Isbell, two of the many disciples indebted to Prine’s sense of songcraft, opened the evening.

Despite extended rounds of touring in the wake of the popularity that surrounded “The Tree of Forgiveness,” Prine never made it back to Lexington after the Singletary performance.

We still have the music, though – exquisite everyman sagas delivered with unspoiled but very knowing charm.

Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Prine’s flight from this world was the one he composed himself to close “The Tree of Forgiveness.”

Titled “When I Get to Heaven,” the song unfolds as a rollicking, ultra Twain-ian expectation of the hereafter.

“When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand and thank him for more blessings than one man can stand,” Prine sings. “Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock n’ roll band. Check into a swell hotel. Ain’t the afterlife grand?”

If John Prine resides there, it would have to be.

This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 10:31 PM.