John Prine
Best known for
Guitar
Songwriter
John Prine was an American songwriter and singer whose plainspoken country-folk songs — "Paradise," "Angel from Montgomery," "Hello in There," "Sam Stone" — became standards across country, folk, and bluegrass. "Paradise," his elegy for his parents' strip-mined Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, entered the bluegrass canon almost immediately, recorded by the Country Gentlemen within a year of his 1971 debut.
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- Born October 10, 1946 in Maywood, Illinois, to parents from Paradise, Kentucky; learned guitar from his older brother Dave at fourteen.
- Wrote most of his first album's songs — "Sam Stone," "Hello in There," "Paradise," "Angel from Montgomery" — while working as a Chicago-area mailman in the late 1960s.
- Brought to industry attention in 1970 by Steve Goodman and Kris Kristofferson; Atlantic Records signed him and released his self-titled debut in 1971.
- Recorded for Atlantic and then Asylum through the 1970s — "Sweet Revenge" (1973), "Bruised Orange" (1978, produced by Goodman), "Pink Cadillac" (1979) — before founding the independent Oh Boy Records in Nashville in 1981 with manager Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein.
- "The Missing Years" (1991) and "Fair & Square" (2005) each won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album; "The Tree of Forgiveness" (2018), his first record of new originals in thirteen years, debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200.
- Cut "Standard Songs for Average People" with Mac Wiseman in 2007 — a duet album of traditional country and folk material that put him squarely in conversation with the bluegrass world.
- "In Spite of Ourselves" (1999) paired him with Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and other women in country duets; the DeMent title cut became a wedding-reception standard.
- Survived squamous-cell neck cancer in 1998 and lung cancer in 2013; the surgeries left him with the lower, gravelly voice of his last two studio albums.
- Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019; received the Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2020.
- Died April 7, 2020 in Nashville of complications from COVID-19, age 73.
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John PrinePlayed on recordings with John Prine
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John Prine and Mac WisemanPlayed on recording with John Prine and Mac Wiseman
