A Short, Sincere Apology To The Late, Great John Prine
Songwriter and Musician Otis Gibbs Has The Best YouTube Channel For Music And Music Scholars On The Internet, And Wisely, He Let's The Musicians Tell The Tales
Just finished watching a LONG "storytellers" session via Otis Gibbs about John Prine.
I sat transfixed as two hours flew by in what seemed like two minutes.
I'm sad to say that when he was popular and gaining renown in the '70s, he only entered my musical consciousness peripherally, through friends who played his songs, which sounds pretty quaint in 2023.
Like antique covered wagon quaint with the vibe of “1883”
In hindsight, I can see this was completely appropriate as a form of "transmission".
That was a time (roughly mid-60s through early 70s) when the American folk song could, still, literally be reinterpreted through live storytelling.
Specifically, I mean my friends sang Prine's songs at parties or gatherings.
Call it the last vestiges of oral tradition, something, again, that I don't think exists at all, at least as it once did, in 2023.
How many musicians, for example, radiate within the joy of their craft in simple settings without the adoration and applause of a cheering audience?
I may have heard a John Prine record at parties, but again, I remember hearing ABOUT, and actually hearing Prine's most famous tunes of that time, "Paradise," Illegal Smile," and "Sam Stone" through oral tradition.
"Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas, and cultural material are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry."
ESPECIALLY “Paradise,” with its trance-inducing waltz time cadence.
"Paradise," and the lyrical reference to Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, by the way, was a locale in the state of Kentucky where some of the greatest names in American traditional Folk, Bluegrass, and Rock and Roll lived and grew up.
Besides Prine, Phil and Don Everly, Merle Travis, (who wrote "Sixteen Tons") and Bluegrass legend Bill Monroe.
Being young, during Prine's heyday, essentially knowing nothing about music, (and not exactly intellectually curious) I always thought, mistakenly, that "Paradise" was a joyous sing-along in the vein of "Kumbayuh" a well-known folk song of the 60s especially, and one, for certain, I sat and sang around a campfire growing up.
Even more confusing, Prine often, even late in his performing career, invited his opening acts or special guests to sing along on stage in the chorus yet, "Paradise" was not joyful at all.
Like much of rural Appalachia, Paradise, Kentucky, and its environs succumbed to the ravages of strip mining in the name of "progress".
Basically "Sixteen Tons" despite its upbeat and catchy, snap-your-fingers beat, is at heart a working man’s protest against exploitation.
One of the stories one of Prine's bandmates told here stood out among many interesting tales.
After a late night of drinks at a touring stop at a Motel near Muhlenberg, Prine asked his bandmates and road crew present if they wanted to "Go see Paradise" at 1 A.M.
They all piled into a 1949 red coupe Prine had restored and headed down frozen muddy dirt roads in pitch darkness in the cold of Winter.
That darkness suddenly gave way to bright blaring light and a fenced-in industrial hellscape of the Paradise Fossil Plant.
"TVA’s Paradise Fossil Plant was located in western Kentucky on the Green River near the village of Paradise. The plant had three units and three large natural-draft cooling towers. Paradise was TVA’s only coal-fired plant with cooling towers, which are typically seen at nuclear plants."
Prine and his band mates sat for a minute, outside the fence, in shock, looking at a place where Prine related they used to fish and hunt with presumably happier memories, when suddenly a security truck came rushing up the road, sirens blasting away.
Prine calmly backed the antique coupe away from the gate and slowly approached the security vehicle where he rolled to a halt and rolled down his window.
Leaning out the window, Prine stuck his head out so they could see his face, and said to the security police: "I was just showing some of my freinds from Nashville what used to be here".
Then he rolled up the window and drove on.
That's the real story of "Paradise".
Thanks to Otis Gibbs for letting his guests tell the story, literally again, the oral traditions with little prompting and free flow.
We need John Prine's energy now more than ever.
Please patronize Otis Gibb’s wonderful YouTube Channel.