John Prine always seemed to be there for me.

But his music was there for you, too.

He wrote of angels that fly in from Montgomery, the mystical power of Wisconsin lakes, hobos, clocks and spoons and old people living alone in “Hello In There.”

He wrote “Hello In There” in 1969 based on a memory of delivering newspapers to a senior citizen home. He was only 23 years old. One of his favorite songs was “Far From Me,” about being raised near a junkyard in west suburban Maywood where “a broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.”

John Prine saw those things.

He helped us understand those things.

John died Tuesday night from complications of Covid-19 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He had been in intensive care for 13 days. He was 73 years old.

It’s not surprising to me how John’s career picked up steam over the past quarter-century. As the world became cluttered with ornamentation and pretension his plain-speak registered with generations young and old. How refreshing it was to hear someone tell the truth and speak from the heart.

John was born on Oct. 10, 1946, in Maywood. He grew up in a Maywood house framed by humble walls. His father William Mason “Bill” Prine was a tool and die maker in Chicago’s western suburbs from the 1930s through the early 1970s. The native of Paradise, Ky. had migrated north with his bride Verna to make a better life.

William and Verna raised four boys in Maywood: John, David, Doug, and Billy. They loved country music, Southern cooking and annual visits back to Muhlenberg County, Ky. William loved Hank Williams, Sr. William worked so very hard. He was president of the United Steelworker’s Union local in Maywood for 15 years. After his shift Bill Prine, Sr. would adjourn to the front porch of his frame house on First Avenue in Maywood. He’d enjoy a quart of Old Style.

And then he would watch the world go by.

“There was no interstate when we were growing up,” John told me in 2010. “First Avenue was a major route for semi-trucks and traffic traveling north and south to avoid the city. I’d lay in bed at night and watch the headlights. Growing up on a four-lane highway, it was like a river. There was always something going on. We’d have all our talks with our dad on that porch.”

Bill Prine had a fatal heart attack on that porch in 1971. He was 56 years old. Prine references that hot August day in his 1973 ballad “Mexican Home.”

John’s lyrics were filled with humanity and reason. The ample space in which he wrote offered room for his keen perceptions. His words were accented by gritty vocals that came straight from the dark Peabody coal mines of his grandfather’s Kentucky. He did not sound anything like a Chicago folk singer.

John moved from Chicago to Nashville in 1990. He was wholly embraced by the Nashville community. His kindness and purpose made him a modern-day Johnny Cash. A “Stay Independent” mural portrait of John was recently painted on the side of the new Grimey’s book and record store in East Nashville. The Oh Boy record label that John founded in 1981 with his late manager Al Bunetta is the second oldest artist owned imprint in America.

John never forgot his roots. I last saw John in June of last year. He asked me to emcee a semi-private, intimate gathering at Val’s Halla in Oak Park. The record store opened in 1967 on South Boulevard in Oak Park and it had been struggling. John and his wife Fiona showed up to lend a hand and share a smile. Val’s was part of John’s youth.  He bought every Rolling Stones album, Chuck Berry and some Johnny Horton. Of course, this was when curious John wasn’t riding his bicycle by mobster Tony Accardo’s house in River Forest. As he always did, John uplifted every spirit in the record store that day.

John served in the U.S. Army in 1966 and 1967. He was stationed in West Germany. Upon his return home, he moved back into the same battleship grey house in Maywood his father rented for 30 years. He became a mailman and trudged through the snow and rain to spread the news in Maywood and Westchester–maybe even to the house I live in today. John once said, “I always likened the mail route to a library with no books. I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”

By 1971 John had released his debut self-titled album for Atlantic Records. Mostly recorded at American Sound Studio in Memphis, it unleashed Prine’s gifts to the nation. “John Prine” featured “Hello In There,” “Paradise” (recorded in New York with the late Steve Goodman and Prine’s brother Dave who still lives in Maywood) and “Sam Stone,” about the fatal overdose of a war veteran. In 2016 Bob Dylan said, “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwest  mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All  that stuff about Sam Stone the soldier junky daddy and Donald and  Lydia, where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.”

John’s family were avid readers of the Chicago Sun-Times, where I was a feature writer for 30 years. There were a couple of reasons for their devotion. The Sun-Times was the working-class newspaper for union families like the Prines. And in 1970 the late Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote the first review of the mailman from Maywood after seeing him perform at the long-gone Fifth Peg on the near north side.

John had the detailed observational skills of a newspaper writer. He would laugh off those thoughts, always pointing towards his lack of discipline. He had to move into a Nashville hotel room to work on his final album “Tree of Forgiveness.”  “I just wrote what I knew about,” John told me in 1985. “The kind of people I knew were mainly working class. I mean I didn’t even attempt to write a song about being a doctor’s son.”

In 2010 John returned to Maywood for two benefit concerts for the Maywood Fine Arts Association at Proviso East High School. Before that concert John told me how he used to push back on the fame that came his way. “I’d try to get home to Maywood or Melrose Park and just become ‘John Prine the ex-mailman.’ I wanted to stay connected. But it slips away from you. You gain something and you lose something.

“I miss that.”

At the Val’s Halla Q & A I asked John to tell his “Roger Miller” story. Miller’s “Dang Me” was a 1964 crossover hit when John was attending Proviso East. John remembered “this gorgeous girl” at Proviso. “She was so pretty that she only went out with college guys,” he said. “My senior year I’m sitting behind her in art class. She had a voice like Marilyn Monroe, real soft. She turned around and said, ‘Hi Jimmy. I went out with her for four months and never corrected her. I didn’t care what she called me. She said to me one day, ‘You remind me of that guy on the radio.” John asked her who she was talking about and she replied it was Roger Miller because of their shared sense of humor. John concluded, “Because she was  interested in me and I reminded her of him, I became a huge Roger Miller fan.”

The first album. Thanks, John

John was a superb storyteller. He was the mailman with the magical sweepstakes who could even deliver joy to Bill Murray on a blue day.

Among the many awards and accolades John received included his 2003 induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting and he was honored at the Library of Congress by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. Earlier this year he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and he received  Grammys for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2006 (“Fair and Square”)  and 1992 (“The Missing Years”).

John was brave, tough and full of love. In February he canceled dates in the U.K. and Australia to return to Nashville for hip replacement surgery. In early 1998 he was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer on the right side of his neck and underwent surgery to remove the diseased tissue. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013. But he kept on making music and touring. He loved the road that he heard from his family’s front porch.

John always managed to view the world with a wry innocence. Last year he told American Songwriter, “When I get up in the morning I’m 9 years old. I’m not a 72-year-old man until I look in the mirror.” He kept a Christmas tree up year-round in his office. His wife made him move it out of their home.

It was odd yet very rewarding how I bounced in and out of John’s orbit over the years. During our 1973 senior year of high school, my friend Steve Lord and I would take the train to the Ravinia Festival to see the annual summer “folk concert” with John Prine, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc and maybe Bill Quateman. Most of our peers were listening to the Allman Brothers’ “Brothers and Sisters,” but even as a teenager, John’s songs taught me about empathy. Then I became friends with drummer Angelo Varias, the late bassist Tom

Piekaraski and late singer Mike Jordan and the rest of the Famous Potatoes that served as Prine’s back up band in the late 1970s. Then, on the same night of my ill-fated 1985 bachelor party my beloved ex-wife Wendy bumped into John at Orphan’s on Lincoln Avenue. He signed a card wishing us all the best. I got that in the divorce!

There isn’t much that John wouldn’t do for me. He contributed a chapter in my “Camper Book” about a 30-foot Itasca RV that he never drove. When I was doing pirate radio at WGN-AM in Chicago, he came on the air with his brothers Billy and Dave–the first and only time all  three of them were on the same show. They had been planning to record a “brothers” album this spring at Jack Clement’s old studio in Nashville. (John’s brother Doug was a member of the Chicago Police Department for 32 years. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 70.)

John liked to tell me that my stories always had a beginning, middle and an end. And as sad as I am to be writing this right now, I know there is no finite nature end to John’s spirit. Every time I see an old person or come to a summer’s end I will think of John. He made me smile. He made me not feel quite so alone. He showed me where to find a better self. And really, those qualities are everywhere when you stop to see the world’s beauty in the most simple passages.

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