200423 two deaths 2

april 23

  on april 7, the world lost john prine, a great songwriter and performer. i don't presume to eulogize for all. there are many eloquent essays honouring mr. prine, including those from several generations of fellow musicians.

  i would like to tell about what john prine meant in my life. i first heard him 46 or 47 years ago, and others my age will remember sam stone and illegal smile, from his very first album. so began my lifelong love of his music. 

  music was a big part of our life in my family of origin, and as teenagers and adults my brothers and i sang and played music together. as young adults we all went to the cottage together (see "our own paradise" below) and made music and rambled on the shores. one of my brothers was a professional pianist and performer. many years later, another brother (bass, guitar) and i played together in neighbourhood bars. from time to time we would all three get together again, joined by our cousin and her husband who were singer/mandolin and drummer. john prine was a mainstay of our repertoire. his songs were easy to play, and his lyrics were by turns entertaining and profound, but elegantly simple, in their unique twists on normal human experience.

[to skip quotes, please scroll down]

from christmas in prison:

" we had turkey and pistols 

carved out of wood."....

" the searchligh in the big yard swings round with the gun

 and spotlights the snowflakes like the dust in the sun"

mexican home:

"i sat on the porch without my shoes

and i watched the cars roll by

as the headlights raced

to the corner of the kitchen wall."... 

"my father died on the porch outside

on an august afternoon

i sipped bourbon and and cried 

with a friend by the light of the moon"

"the sun's going down

and the moon's just holding its breath"

[end of quotes]

  john prine spoke to our hearts. we had our own paradise, like his, when we were young. from the time i was very little, my mother and father took us two or three times a year to a very special place on the lake huron shore. it was old and unspoiled, the cottages owned by a man who loved it as we did, and hidden and sacred. we stayed in the most hidden cottage of all, across the bay from all the rest, only reached by boat. groceries, clothes and children piled in to our aluminum 10 footer and we puttered across the water with an old 5 horsepower motor. sometimes it was night when we arrived and our stomachs were full of wings as we pulled near the dock in the dark.

  here was the dock where watersnakes slithered off at our approach, and the sand path and the limestone shore, and the boulder of garnets, and the cedars, short and twisted by wind and rain, and the green hunter's cabin in the clearing. the cottage windows were so old they had begun to melt and run, the lighting still coal oil lamps with which my dad and mom were so familiar. each morning dad lit the wood stove and mum cooked breakfast. we swam and boated and fished. my father was mad about fishing. when he wasn't fishing he was full of adventure and know-how. he made us bows from saplings, and arrows, and taught us to shoot; "but empty pop bottles was all we would kill"*. my parents shared their many skills with us, and their interest in the sciences, from electricity to dinosaurs, from the earth to the sky. like prine's paradise ours was lost to progress and change. and so when we listen to or play "paradise", the chords resonate loud. [poetic license]

*john prine, paradise