John Prine – Page 2 – The Celestial Monochord

Billy The Bum

Child_with_crutches

About 15 years ago, a friend of mine wanted to cite an example of a bad John Prine song, so he chose Billy The Bum, calling it “a shambles of a song.” At the time, it seemed like a good example to me, mostly because the song’s shameless sentimentality made me cringe. But I’ve gone through a lot since then.

Around 1999, after I’d pretty much memorized the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was starving for more blues and hillbilly recordings from the 1920’s. So I sought out recordings by many of the same performers Harry Smith had put in his collection. And there, beyond the Anthology, were many astonishing surprises for which the Anthology had not really prepared me.

Chief among them, initially, was how often these performers had recorded extremely sentimental 19th century “parlor songs,” as I call them. These earnest, stiff numbers told tales full of pathos about drowning sailors, dying orphans, childhood cottages never seen again. Maybe Harry Smith had mostly ignored them because they weren’t “folk songs” in a certain sense — most were relatively new compositions from the late 1800’s, widely sold as sheet music for middle-class homes. In the late 1920’s, white folk musicians made sound recordings of them for the first time, their original copyright status long forgotten.

Initially, I was a little impatient with them — a bit embarrassed, disappointed, and amused by their commercialism and their hokiness. But after listening closely to dozens of them, researching the origins of several of them, and having a few conversion experiences with them (I guess you’d say), I’ve come to love them. There’s Charlie Poole’s “Baltimore Fire”:

It was on a silver falls by a narrow
That I heard a cry I ever will remember
The fire sent and cast its burning embers
On another faded city of our land

Fire! Fire! I heard the cry
On every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity
Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to Heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore, our beautiful city

There’s Buell Kazee’s “If You Love Your Mother”:

In a lonely graveyard many miles away
Lies your own dear mother slumbering ‘neath the clay
Or have you forgotten all her tears and sighs
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

She is waiting for you in that happy home
Turn from sin’s dark pathway to no longer roam
Give your heart to Jesus, upward lift your eyes
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

And then there’s the Carter Family, whose influence now seems to me ubiquitous in John Prine’s music (and who provided the title song for Diamonds in the Rough). The Carters recorded these sentimental parlor songs more often and more movingly than anybody ever has. Their “Engine 143” did make it onto The Anthology:

Georgie’s mother came to him with a bucket on her arm
Saying my darling son be careful how you run
For many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time
And if you run your engine right you’ll get there just on time

Up the road he darted, against the rocks he crushed
Upside down the engine turned and Georgie’s breast did smash
His head was against the firebox door the flames are rolling high
I’m glad I was born for an engineer to die on the C&O road

I’ve come to appreciate these songs as beautifully written and recorded, often, but also as an important part of the roots of American music. In no small part through the influence of the Carter Family, country music is heavily based on them (what do you get when you play a country record backwards?).

Billy The Bum, which I’ve known for over 30 years, is today a completely new song to me. I hear it within a tradition that’s well over a hundred years old and that I’ve taken deeply, if cautiously, into my emotional, intellectual, and maybe spiritual life.

——————

Billy The Bum is another of Diamonds In The Rough’s country waltzes. The first verse again establishes John Prine’s firm flat-picking, accompanied by David Bromberg on a second acoustic guitar. Bromberg plays mostly bass runs, but strums often to help keep the beat. I’d say he plays “oldtime guitar” — an art that’s been essentially lost to the upright bass, on the one hand, and bluegrass guitar on the other.

With the first statement of the chorus, Bromberg begins dubbing over (I assume, unless he’s playing with his toes) the sliding dobro that gives the song much of its countrified twang. Also on each chorus Dave Prine enters, turned down very low in the mix, singing back-up vocals in a strained, high-lonesome wail, like a far-off cry in the wilderness.

As I understand the lyrics, Billy always fantasized about riding the rails as a hobo, but because his legs had been twisted by polio, he could only hop a train in his imagination:

Billy the Bum lived by the thumb
Sang of the hobo’s delight
He’d prove he could run twice as fast as the sun
By losing his shadow with night

He loved every girl in this curly-headed world
But no one will know, it seems
For two twisted legs and a childhood disease
Left Billy just a bum in his dreams

It’s interesting that even in the 20’s and 30’s — presumably the heyday of hobo culture — films and songs romanticized the lifestyle, seducing many young people into riding the rails. In other words, hobos were already a dream even back when they were still a reality. Billy was only one of millions who dreamed of riding the blinds. There’s a sad irony and richness here — his polio made him a bum in his own eyes, unable to attain his dreams, which included being a real bum on the open road:

He lived all alone in a run-down home
Near the side of the old railroad track
Where the trains used to run carrying freight by the ton
And blow the whistle as Billy waved back

It seems fairly clear to me that John Prine has always believed in Jesus Christ, that he’s a christian. But if this is right, his work presents us with a rare and fearsome portrait of a blazingly angry and disappointed, public-spirited, and wildly playful faith. Prine’s first album is all about spirituality, if you look at it just so, and is big enough to contain everything from “Eat a lotta peaches, try to find Jesus” to “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes — Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

If Prine were an atheist like myself, it would be a different matter. But given Prine’s long and powerful history of working out his thoughts about faith in song, I don’t take lightly his portrait of the song’s townspeople, whose children “seemed to have nothing better to do than to run around his house with their tongues from their mouths.”

Now some folks’ll wait and some folks’ll pray
For Jesus to rise up again
But none of these folks in their holy cloaks
Ever took Billy on as a friend

For pity’s a crime and ain’t worth a dime
To a person who’s really in need
Just treat ’em the same as you would your own name
Next time that your heart starts to bleed

It’s easy enough, if you prefer, to hear easy platitudes and a certain self-righteousness in this indictment. But given Prine’s body of work and the religious themes he’s explored so frankly, I think we’re bound to take this portrait seriously. Trapped among such people by his physical disabilities and his shame, Billy, a real fluorescent light, cried pennies on Sunday morning.

By this point, I’ve come to decide that it’s a defense mechanism, this tendency not to really hear the lyrics of these old-style sentimental songs. If we took them literally, pictured them, read them over, took them at their word, they’d cut too close to the bone. They’d go places we’ve decided, as a culture, we don’t want to go.

It’s no wonder that generation after generation of Americans experience a recurring “Folk Revival” in which young people rediscover acts like the Carter Family. And, regardless of what else might be said about them, it’s no wonder that these Revivals are continually experienced by their participants as a burning away of some vast, heavy haze of sanitized corporate nonsense to reveal something that finally, at long last, matters.

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody * The Torch Singer * Souvenirs * The Late John Garfield Blues * Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum * The Frying Pan * Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You * Take the Star Out of the Window * The Great Compromise * Clocks and Spoons * Rocky Mountain Time * Diamonds in the Rough)

Sour Grapes

Grapesprint
(illustration by Sally Minker)

Two songs ago, on Souvenirs, Steve Goodman’s guitar work was very hard to peel apart from John Prine’s. But Prine’s guitar picking pattern here on Sour Grapes seems very close to that on Souvenirs, but without Goodman’s embroidery. You can use Sour Grapes as a tool to get a better handle on what Prine’s right hand is up to on Souvenirs.

More importantly, Prine’s relatively unadorned, unsupported guitar work here also gives the song a spare regularity, like the lonesome ticking of an old mantel clock. Sour Grapes is mood song — in fact, it’s remarkable how many songs from Diamonds in the Rough can be summed up as “a mood put across in lyric and melody.”

The mood in Sour Grapes seems familiar enough, and that familiarity makes the song seem funny, like a silly little tune. Which I think is perfectly true.

But simply taking the words seriously and literally leads me to ask what else is happening. The speaker of the song has retained some friends solely to prevent other people from thinking he’s mentally ill, for example. Is Prine’s deadpan humor more funny than it is chilling?

I don’t care if the sun don’t shine
But it better, or people will wonder

Even when he writes a tossed-off song, Prine leaves you wondering …

The Late John Garfield Blues

Garfield before HUAC (via Citizen Screen)

John Prine is often misunderstood — I mean the guy mumbles, and so you get the lyrics wrong. Among hard-core fans, these misunderstandings can be a kind of a sport and a badge of honor. The lyrics to “The Late John Garfield Blues” are especially tough to make out, so everybody hears a slightly different song.

I used to hear a song in which “wind-blow scarves and top-down cars all share one western tree” and in which “the men on The El (Chicago’s elevated train) sit perfectly still.” Prine tells a joke in the song, but I never got it — “Two men were standing upon a bridge, one jumped and screamed yoo-hoo!”?

Each listener creates the song’s meaning anew. Everybody has a hand in writing the “The Late John Garfield Blues.”

——————

Only about seven years before “The Late John Garfield Blues” was recorded, Bob Dylan had finally figured out how to mix 20th-century Modernism with popular song.

John Prine learned this trick from Dylan more naturally and vividly than most songwriters, and was one of many whom the press called “The Next Bob Dylan.” (Today, of course, we know the next Bob Dylan always turns out to be Bob Dylan himself, and Prine has now become The First John Prine.)

With “The Late John Garfield Blues,” Prine jumps headlong into Dylan’s Modernism more completely than anywhere else in his first two albums:

The fish don’t bite but once a night
By the cold light of the moon
The horses screamed, the nightmares dreamed
And the dead men all wear shoes
Cuz everybody’s dancing
Those late John Garfield blues

As I see it, Dylan’s main insight was that making sense of a song — what’s happening, who it’s happening to, why it matters — should be a job shared with the listener. A song’s meaning shouldn’t be complete, an inanimate object lying dead inside the song. It should be a process that happens when the song and the listener sit down together and share the same space for a minute or two.

And if it’s partly our job to help make the meaning of a song, then my attitude is that we should try to do it well. Shouldn’t we bring to the job the best of what have to offer?

“The Late John Garfield Blues” certainly needs us to participate, since the lyrics don’t make make sense all by themselves. They have no real characters, very little setting, no train of thought, few hints of an “occasion.”

The lyrics are all mood. In fact, Prine claims that he mostly just wanted to capture a mood — specifically, that of a late Sunday night when there’s nothing on television but an old John Garfield movie. The song is “not so much” about the actor, Prine says, and more about a feeling — the actor is used, if anything, as a vehicle to get to the mood. Even the word “late” refers to the time of day as much as to Garfield’s being dead.

But I hear that very same mood much more clearly at the end of The Torch Singer than here. What I hear instead is John Garfield’s 1952 funeral.

Garfield had been admired by all sorts of people — he was the son of poor Urkranian-Jewish immigrants, a former boxer, a movie heart-throb, and the screen’s first rebel without a cause. When he died at age 39, his funeral was a mob scene the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Rudolph Valentino’s funeral in 1926::

Black faces pressed against the glass
Where the rain has pressed its weight
Wind-blown scarves in top-down cars
All share one western trait

Saddness leaks through tear-stained cheeks
From winos to dime-store Jews
Probly don’t know they gave me
These late John Garfield blues

Garfield was a staunch liberal and became a victim of McCarthy’s blacklist. Unable to find work in Hollywood and obsessed with a sense of betrayal by his own country, Garfield became unhinged, obsessively sifting through his personal papers for evidence of his innocence, and descending into substance abuse and some sort of clinical depression.

Two men were standing upon a bridge
One jumped and screamed “You lose.”
Just left the odd man holding
Those late John Garfield blues

Old man sleeps with his conscience at night
Young kid sleeps with his dreams
While the mentally ill sit perfectly still
And live through lives in between
[some sources say “And live through life’s in-between”]

The recording’s musical arrangement, too, makes me think more about history and the life of John Garfield than Prine would suggest.

The first two stanzas (the first 50 seconds) are again a duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. Prine, as usual, plays acoustic guitar, emphasizing with his bass strings the first beats in the meter of this country waltz and decorating the rest with his high strings.

But during these two stanzas, Steve Goodman is just strumming on an electric guitar. His solid, slow, ringing strumming sound like church bells, like funeral bells.

This is an old trick (i.e., this has a long tradition). Bob Dylan uses it in “Queen Jane Approximately,” when nearly the identical guitar sound is used, particularly near the end of the song, to ironically emphasize the song’s marriage motif.

I’ve always felt certain that Dylan (or his band) got the idea from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in which Jefferson brings the song to a complete stop to imitate the sound of a funeral bell with the bass string of his guitar. The song was recorded at Blind Lemon Jefferson’s last recording session and was covered by Dylan on his very first album.

In Prine’s recording, I hear the guitars being used to put the song in conversation with Dylan and Blind Lemon Jefferson, just as its lyrics borrow from that very same lineage in the way they make meaning. The song conjures up a string of old movies, and it conjures up a mood we’ve all felt late at night, and it asks us to make our own sense.

There are quite a lot of roads into and out of this song, and it’s no wonder we recognize it as a point of departure.

Souvenirs

Pawn

many thanks to Elvis The Fish for use of the photo

I was a little embarrassed by Souvenirs in my 20s and much of my 30s — although, as Bob Dylan would say, I’m younger than that now.

Written when John Prine was about 25, Souvenirs is a very sentimental song about nostalgia, or rather, nostalgia as it appeared in the imagination of a young man. The young Prine imagines surveying the refuse left over from a long life of troubles — graveyards, pawnshops, dirty windows, broken toys — and finds an inexhaustible reservoir of tears and reasons to feel he’s been robbed. I used to consider this to be a very improbable speculation.

I hate graveyards and old pawnshops
For they always bring me tears
I can’t forgive the way they robbed me
Of my childhood souvenirs

Memories that can’t be boughten
Can’t be won at carnivals for free
Well it took me years to get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me

Today, I’m reminded of the time when, at the age of 20, I read to one of my professors (who was recently divorced and a recovering alcoholic) a poem by Robert Hass. The poem says, in part:

The child is looking in the mirror.
His head falls to one side, his shoulders slump.
He is practicing sadness.

At this point, the professor interrupted, saying — either to the child in the poem, or to me — “You’ll get plenty of practice in that, kid.” He made me understand these lines of poetry for the first time … he was a good professor, it turns out. In my 40’s, I’ve now begun to suspect that the young Prine somehow got it right after all. As the late Steve Goodman once sang, “Those old folks are wiser and sadder.”

Souvenirs — both the version on Diamonds in the Rough and the one on Great Days — is a guitar duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. It’s hard to think of the song as anything else. And it’s a perfect example of why fans of Prine and Goodman treasure their collaboration so, why it’s the focus of so much nostalgia.

The fit between their guitars is so snug that figuring out who’s playing what is exceedingly difficult — thank god for stereo, which helps separate the two instruments. The core of Prine’s part is his alternating between the bass notes natural to each chord and the higher strings, creating a complex version of his trademark boom-chick meter. The whole song drapes itself around this.

During his recent interview with Ted Kooser (about 27 min, 25 seconds in), Prine said Goodman “used to play the heck out of this song and sing it with me. And he had a way of doing it that always made it sound like I was playing the really good, the really fancy parts. You know, it was always him.” In Souvenirs, Goodman’s part is, it sounds to me, mostly bluesy flatted 3rds and 5ths that he gets using hammer-ons, slides, and bends. In this way, Goodman fills in the comparatively spacious meter Prine has set.

The overall effect is a light, frilly embroidery that would be in danger of becoming “too many notes” — monotonous and hard to follow — were it not for well-chosen moments of relief that restore a sense of anticipation: (1) Prine’s resting heavily on the bass notes between the 1st and 3rd lines of every verse, (2) the simple but interesting intermissions between each verse, and (3) both Prine and Goodman simply strumming during the chorus.

Souvenirs, of course, is itself a souvenir of better times. It could just be an uncanny coincidence that this song, so indelibly rendered as an act of friendship and intimacy between Prine and Goodman, happened to be about nostalgia, loss, the robberies committed by graveyards. Then again, Goodman had already known of his leukemia for several years when the song was first recorded. In any case, when Prine performs it today as a solo, it sounds fine, but it’s hard not to hear the song as a bit orphaned, as if it were a souvenir waiting on some pawnshop shelf.

The Torch Singer

In “The Torch Singer,” John Prine provides a view of himself not as we usually think of him, as a songwriter and performer, but as an audience member — that is, now he’s in our shoes. And it’s a grim vision.

Prine has always thought deeply about women’s voices, and has even recorded an entire album of duets between himself and women singers. Here, in 1972, the torch singer’s song leaves him in some kind of exquisite pain and self-loathing:

She sang of the love that left her
And of the woman that she’ll never be
Made me feel like the buck and the quarter
That I paid ’em to listen and see

Maybe Prine’s narrator is the torch singer’s ex — that is, he’s the love that left her — and her song leaves him guilt-ridden. Or maybe she reminds him of other women he’s wronged. Or, most interesting to me, maybe he recognizes himself in her, and in her performer’s servitude to the audience, which now includes him:

I picked through the ashes of the torch singer’s song
And I ordered my money around
For whiskey and fame both taste the same
During the time they go down

Ultimately, what troubles the singer is intense but uncertain, like the unspecified troubles facing the characters in the album’s previous song.

To me, this song has always been vaguely flawed in a way that only makes it more perfect. “The Torch Singer” is a waltz, which is just about the last meter I’d expect a torch song to use. But this isn’t a torch song, it’s about a torch song. It’s not the torch singer’s point of view, but the audience’s — and their perspective requires a tragic country waltz.

The cut starts with a kind of a cappella cry from Prine, “The nightcluuuuuub was burning,” With “burning,” Prine’s guitar and Steve Burgh’s bass come in, thumping down on the first beat of the waltz-time measure (ONE two three). Two beats later, John’s older brother and his strongest early influence, the versatile Dave Prine makes his first appearance of the album, on the dobro. The sliding, whining dobro gives this recording — or just about any recording — a strong country feel.

It’s only after the second line of the lyrics that the arrangement finally declares itself as bluegrass, via David Bromberg’s remarkable mandolin accompaniment. In the spirit of Bill Monroe’s approach to the instrument, Bromberg uses the whole pig, squeal and all. As Robert Cantwell writes:

The shallow, metallic, sometimes toylike sound characteristic of the mandolin … is the problem that Monroe solved by abandoning the effort to produce discrete, pure tones. Monroe’s tones are not discrete: they come at us like meteors trailing the smoke and flames of … tones, overtones, and sheer noise … Its texture arises in part from the undercurrent of noise made by the washboardng of the pick itself on the strings and from the many complex overtones in the mandolin … Whereas the jazz trumpet seems to take the smoke of the cabaret into its throat, the mandolin’s sound, like that of a distant engine, is a noise that seems to resolve itself into a tone.

The song’s storyline, if any, is left to the listener. The point of this recording is to convey a feeling and an atmosphere using John’s almost yelling voice, the country waltztime, the whining dobro and noisy mandolin, and — most of all — John’s hellish lyrics. They bring to mind the atmospherics of Heartbreak Hotel, which I once heard compared to Dante’s Inferno:

The nightclub was burning from the torch singer’s song
And the sweat was flooding her eyes
The catwalk squeaked ‘neath the bartender’s feet
And the smoke was too heavy to rise

The narrator’s entire life seems drawn up into the atmosphere of this nightclub only to be burnt up by the torch song’s grief and humiliation:

I was born down in Kansas ‘neath the October sky
Worked the dayshift from seven to three
And the only relief that I received
Was nearer, my God, to thee
She constantly throws me off timing,
Leaves me standing both naked and bare
Makes me feel like the Sunday funnies
After everything’s gone off the air
Air, everything’s gone off the air

The intervening years have left this song not dated, but poignantly situated in time. Was there really ever a moment in history when the darkness and lonesomeness of nighttime could deepen to the point where even the media of radio and television exhausted themselves, leaving us alone with our own troubled minds?

Everybody

Steve Burgh’s bass starts the album “Diamonds in the Rough” with a rising lead-in, and then its first song, “Everybody” comes to life as a toe-tapping 2-4 country jukebox tune.

David Bromberg, the great Chicago multi-instrumentalist, dances along the top with a clucking, snapping electric guitar accompaniment. His syncopation gives the recording a swing that I’m not sure you hear much in country music anymore. John Prine’s acoustic guitar provides the percussion — Burgh’s booming bassline frees John from his characteristic boom-chuck, allowing him to simply chuck with gusto.

The overall effect is what an African American roommate of mine lovingly called “chicken music.” You’d need a heart of stone to not love it.

The song tells the story of a sailor who happens along Jesus taking a stroll across the water. It turns out Jesus is troubled and lonesome, needs someone to talk to. The singer has troubles of his own, of course, and might have liked to talk about them too, but Jesus won’t shut up about his own problems long enough to do any listening. The singer just chalks it up as his good deed for the day.

In 2005, the lyrics are refreshingly blasphemous (as they probably were when they were written in 1972):

I bumped into the savior
And he said, “Pardon me”
I said “Jesus, you look tired”
He said, “Jesus, so do you”

A few years later, John would repeat the first joke more explicitly, in case we missed it:

Father, forgive us
For what we must do
You forgive us
We’ll forgive you

It’s a good joke — we pardon God. Maybe the Bible spends so much time teaching us to forgive because God knew there was gunna be a hell of a lot to forgive him for. The song doesn’t really tell us what’s troubling Jesus, but in the depths of the Vietnam War, it’s not hard to believe he’s feeling guilty.

This kind of “high concept” for a song wasn’t so unusual in country music in those days — “Everybody” is a novelty song like “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life.” But John Prine’s approach is so sympathetic to the situation of the song that it comes off less as a joke than as a parable. You think about it when you’re done laughing.

Humor is a funny thing. It can release a songwriter or arranger from the rules of the game in ways that mimic — or explain — real artistic innovation. I’m thinking especially of Spike Jones and Frank Zappa, who would be more widely thought of as surrealists if they weren’t so widely thought of as silly. There might be a little of this in “Everybody.” It’s a novelty song, but it has a seriousness, maybe, that invites you to listen closely without listening literally. In this sense, it gently prepares you for the flashes of modernist poetry that you’ll hear in the rest of the album.

John Prine: Fair & Square

John Prine, 2005

"Fair & Square," John Prine’s first album of new songs in a decade, was released today. I’m still absorbing it, but I like it just fine for an initial spin — I’ve hit "repeat" on several songs, which is a good sign.

A few years ago, Rolling Stone printed a story Prine told about running into Bob Dylan in a restaurant in Manhattan, if I remember correctly. They took a walk through the streets of Greenwich Village.

Prine doesn’t say precisely why — what in the conversation inspired it — but for some reason, at some point, Dylan says to Prine something like, "Come here, let me show you something." He leads Prine over to a night club where the ID-checker outside the door is a woman about 25 years old. Dylan says, "Do you know who I am? Who either of us are?" The woman looks at them very intently and answers, "No."

John Prine at The Library of Congress

John Prine

Today, my wife met Ted Kooser, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. That was neat. Even better, he told her out that he recently brought John Prine to The Library of Congress for a discussion and concert.

I highly recommend the webcast of Prine’s appearence, which is riveting — all 90 minutes of it. (You’ll need the free RealPlayer to watch it.) Prine said of his appearence, “You can bet I’m looking forward to it — taking all these people in my songs to the Library of Congress and letting ’em look around a bit.”

Prine’s first album in ten years will be released on April 26. Last time I saw him in concert, he said he releases an album every ten years whether anybody asks him to or not.