John Prine, who for five decades wrote rich, plain-spoken songs that chronicled the struggles and stories of everyday working people and changed the face of modern American roots music, died Tuesday at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was 73. The cause was complications related to COVID-19, his family confirmed to Rolling Stone.
Prine, who left behind an extraordinary body of folk-country classics, was hospitalized last month after the sudden onset of COVID-19 symptoms, and was placed in intensive care for 13 days. Prine’s wife and manager, Fiona, announced on March 17th that she had tested positive for the virus after they had returned from a European tour.
As a songwriter, Prine was admired by Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and others, known for his ability to mine seemingly ordinary experiences — he wrote many of his classics as a mailman in Maywood, Illinois — for revelatory songs that covered the full spectrum of the human experience. There’s “Hello in There,” about the devastating loneliness of an elderly couple; “Sam Stone,” a portrait of a drug-addicted Vietnam soldier suffering from PTSD; and “Paradise,” an ode to his parents’ strip-mined hometown of Paradise, Kentucky, which became an environmental anthem. Prine tackled these subjects with empathy and humor, with an eye for “the in-between spaces,” the moments people don’t talk about, he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan said in 2009. “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”
Read the rest here: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/john-prine-obit-253684/
reminds me of this : ……….Cause of death: ‘cancer’ when it was the dang ‘treatment’ (chemo) that killed the person
died “with” not from corona
From what I’ve observed, John has been sick for several years. Seems these days they can’t seem to allow any death to be unrelated to the stupid hoax virus. Beyond all this, he was one of our best song-writers. I hope the stupid virus doesn’t cover that up.
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However you want to call it, John was an American Icon and is a Legend.
I love his music, wit, endearing manner and honesty.
Go smoke that cigarette that’s nine miles long, John.
RIP sir.