A little writing about my Grandad and the music of John Prine

The first time I heard John Prine was while working at a used media store in Wichita, KS. Every month we were required to go through the mind numbingly boring task of taking inventory of everything in the store and solving any discrepancies. The one thing that made this job bearable was loading up the CD changer with some good tunes. I find that almost any otherwise mundane chore becomes exponentially better when a dance party is thrown in the mix.

The store manager, Jared, was a laid-back guy who wore plaid button up shirts with the sleeves rolled up revealing a few tattoos and would unironically describe things as “groovy.” He had widely varied taste in music and would excitedly recommend new albums for me to listen to. These inventory nights he’d play at being the DJ and lucky for me I usually enjoyed whatever CD he’d blast over the store’s mounted speakers. One night he played John Prine’s album Sweet Revenge and though I’ve listened to many other Prine albums since, that one still remains my favorite. While we worked and listened he’d give lessons on the artist. He told me about how Prine was a lefty and how old country western and folk music had nothing in common with the conservative radio-friendly pop country that’s popular today. He spoke about how Prine played at the Orpheum Theater here in Wichita and pissed off a bunch of concert goers by espousing his unfavorable views on the Bush administration. These were all nice bonus anecdotes to a man who was making the kind of folksy story-telling music that I thought was absolutely “groovy.”

As nice as that introduction to Prine and his body of work was, and as thankful as I am that Jared decided to play Sweet Revenge that night, there’s one more memory that cuts a bit deeper when it comes to that album. There’s a track called Grandpa was a Carpenter where John Prine tells us all about the kind of old fashioned, hard-working grandpa that might have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. With lines like, “He used to sing me ‘blood on the saddle’ and rock me on his knee. He let me listen to the radio, before we got T.V.,” Prine’s grandpa, in a just a few lines, embodies a warmth that is instantly recognizable to anyone that’s had a good relationship with their own grandpa. Which brings me to my grandad.

Grandad was a boxer and from what I hear a pretty good one. He had a stomach like iron and would let his grandkids swing our skinny arms against it just to have our attacks bounce off his belly as though we were punching a rubber ball. Inevitably one of us would accidentally punch his big metal belt buckle by mistake and hurt our knuckles which would bring the game to its end. I remember the first time he met my wife and when he found out she enjoyed boxing he took her out to the shed by the house where his heavy bag was hanging and showed off for her. He was skilled at book binding and would stamp everyone’s bibles with their name’s in gold. He was a World War 2 veteran and though he didn’t talk much about the war, he sat down with me and told me stories for a report I wrote back in middle school.

John Prine’s song tells a different story than my personal experiences with my grandad but the affection he gives to the subject of that song struck a chord with me. It hit me especially hard somewhere on the Muskogee turnpike in Oklahoma, driving home from Arkansas after his funeral. In the final verses of the song before one last chorus Prine switches things up and writes about his grandma before bringing his story to its conclusion. “Well she called her husband ‘Mister’ and walked real tall with pride. Used to buy me comic books after grandpa died.”

I don’t think I’ve ever cried at a funeral. Maybe it takes a minute for me to process things, but suddenly it all catches up to me and that’s when my heart suddenly sinks and my eyes start to sting as tears begin to pool and all at once those feelings of loss and grief grab ahold of me and wring every emotion out like a wet washcloth. When I listened to John Prine sing those last verses, all I could do was pull over on the side of the turnpike and wait for it to all come out, crying with my head against the steering wheel while the song finished.

These are the memories I revisited when John Prine died earlier this year. Although it has taken me a while to get my thoughts out, it’s been cathartic to write it all out and to spend some time today thinking about music and my grandad who I miss and way certain songs can become inexorably intertwined with events in a persons life.